Spinning is another stick

October 13th 2025

I'm at Adaption Futures in Ōtautahi

Yesterday we sat in the engineering building for the Indigenous Workshop, listening to perspectives of things that are happening, that are not happening, our fears and struggles. We couldn't recycle the food containers. My body hurt from sitting, and so I lay down. A whānau member followed suit, saying that he'd been wanting to lie down for ages. (I am a consciously embodied resourcer of systems evolution).

On arrival to the conference this morning, a Kāi Tahu wāhine expressed her frustration at the format of yesterday's session. Where was the real opportunity to connect? Where were the practices that are supporting us to feel the patterns we need to be re-learning? Another whānau member was talking about how her patterns of thinking were of concern to her, that she was aware she was becoming stuck.

"My knee is sore" I said, "and I know that I need to change something in my environment". My environment includes my thinking, my physical environment, the people, the schedules, the practices. But... changing because we know we need to change, is not so helpful if we just jump into a new pattern based on arbitrary, or assumed ideas of what patterns we need to change to.

If we feel into our larger bodies, our larger living systems that we are in relationship with, and what they are not only needing, but also what they have the potential to activate in the world, then maybe I might have some directions to start to orient my practices towards. In this way, I am not trying to fix my habits, but I am in an evolving relationship of service to my world. Through this relationship of potentials, I am supporting healthy patterns of energy flows at micro and macro levels.

If we are able to, can we listen to what kind of dance serves each level of the system? We have to listen to the yes, and the no. We have to find the middle space. The third, emergent being that is the future.

After I reflected my thinking to her around the relationship to habits and potentials for change through a nested system model, I threw her a ball. She caught it and Mum said, look you caught it. I mentioned that I could see she was ready. This is a wānanga model of learning and evolving.

Tākaro Poi, The Margaret Mahy playground is down the road from our Air BnB, and so I found myself there breathing through the invitation to play before arriving for the first day of the wider conferencing. The slope was feeling my calves. It also brought up questions of how can I be here playing whilst the islands are being flooded, our species dying??

An oversized spinning top beside the sandpit collaborated to find patterns of walking that resulted in my realisation that the pace of our movement changes depending both on the unique structures of our environment as well as our desire to get 'somewhere', or to do 'something'. Walking to the right was easy and relatively slow. Walking to the left, I found that I was moving in spurts until I made my steps small and fast. I cannot assume that one practice of movement will translate to another part of the same structure. The discovery itself, of how the structure does want to move however was joyful.

Spinning seems to be a thing – a stick. A rākau to resource my consciousness through tapping into my dna, my ancestral body, my anatomy as relational to, and as ecology and physics.

Remembering another spinning - at home with a large rākau - on the slope beside the drive, looking out to the Waipareira, I feel the way in which spinning in relation to large structures enables an illumination of my potential to support or redirect momentum, whilst working with processes of feeling through and with micro and macro systems. I was spinning the large stick on the grass, and then the stick was spinning me. I could redirect the pathway of both of us when I directed my gaze beyond the stick to the horizon, at the same time as anchoring myself from the ground, finding my center, and moving everything with a centre-ground-horizon relationship.

What happens when the stick is a spinning bowl and you are on it? How do we still find a centre - ground relationship? The playground has a tilted bowl to test myself. Remembering my eldest daughter, and her skills at navigating such objects, I feel how she gazes beyond and keeps moving. I try it and find a flow of moving without moving. My centre becomes a floating point above the bowl, a modified hamster. When I let the ground anchor me, and connect to the horizon, my centre shifts in a wave, a circle, I spiral and fall. The bowl and my back catches me and I feel a familiar relationship of care between body and moving ground that is practiced and joyful. There is a dance that is emergent, and yet I yearn for more capability and capacity to be in the potential of this dynamic, spiralling relationship.

I try strengthening my legs on the rocks by jumping between, but my knee says no. The slope says yes, so I stay there.