Re-WEaving.
A new beginning with those who shaped me, and a reckoning with the illusion I helped build.
HI! Yes, you.
It’s me—finally—the one who could never quite build on the relationship that sparked at the conference.
The one who wanted to schedule a more spacious Zoom to keep pulling on the thread of understanding we found together.
The one who created and designed alongside you a while back, in that project, in that country, with that local community.
The one who carried you in my memory and heart since the last day of the DSIL Course, with every intention to weave you into my life and chosen family.
The one who considers you one of her close friends, but has not been able to reach out, yet.
This series is for you.
Among the hundreds of people I met each year, you said yes to being seen in a world that demands we stay small, polished, quiet, and ashamed. The insights and questions you offered—gifts carved through your unique story—became threads of how I understand the world. You were a reminder that I belong to it.
Even now, something in your courage mirrored something I forgot in mine—until a few months ago when I started to write.
This is about where I have been, instead of building with you. I’ve been living through the most recent and always rich composting cycle of life. 🌱
In nature (excluding our species, duh), nothing is wasted. Composting reminds me that what breaks down often becomes the foundation of new life. The parts of me I tried to shed before—grief, confusion, exhaustion—weren’t obstacles to overcome. They were raw material. The real work was welcoming them to sit in the same room long enough to transition to soil. And I did. And it took 5 years.
I've been exploring, designing, failing which means learning, opening, and falling down dark roads- in that order. There were strings of weeks when worsening autoimmune symptoms from a body that keeps the score- kept me unable to move or eat and brought in the endless mental game of it: constant self-doubt and worry. There were times when I questioned everything I thought I knew about my work and who I was. In many of those moments, I felt the realities of real aloneness more than any other part of my life. And, I also trusted a deep knowing that it was necessary and had been for a long time.
Then, I rose- as we do. I rose by trusting my body and speaking to it differently—with an honoring of what's needed to heal instead of blaming it for everything that had come before. The physical pain helped me stay still and be with all the raw material without the escape tactics cutting that time short. I rose by re-framing what "sick" meant and it is still the only teacher I have found that made it effortless to follow through on the rest I always promised. I rose by integrating my past instead of trying to rip it from my bones. I rose by birthing a little human—thirty hours of natural labor at home followed by the hardest transfer to the hospital you could imagine -over a mountain- where Atlas Rae arrived, wide-eyed and calm. It was the most real and alive experience of my life and I love all the peaks and valleys of that story.
Now, out the other side, I am not just trusting that every inch of my life story is important to what is next. I know it is.
The culture of Pakeha here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, provided the weight needed to make things die. “They are the English of the English in so many ways,” said a friend indigenous to here when I first arrived.
In 2019 I moved here with intention. The first white, English-speaking country I’d lived in for a decade—to begin an experiment:
What could social impact look like with my focus solely on local change - instead of global change? Would proximity and slowing down the travel deepen relationships and help me know myself better? Would it open new depths of work, connection, wisdom, and expansion?
This was also at the time when I was questioning some of the work I was doing in local communities who had to get a translator- and it became so obviously inappropriate how much time that took up- time taken away from the people who had the better ideas, way more wisdom, and deeper relationships.
I always loved the constant contrasts of travel. Contrast has been the theme of my life. It has always served me in bettering understanding myself which leaves so much room for seeing the world of another. It is the key component in the leadership journey I have guided hundreds through- taking them to learn far from where they live. So New Zealand made sense even alongside an intuitive nervousness that was always ever-so-lightly present. I remember on the plane flying into Wellington thinking about how I was going to manage the anxiety that would meet me with suddenly understanding every word others were saying everywhere I went. Add some more time and add so many more starker contrasts than I could have imagined! I never lived in a mostly white place ever in my life. That’s the make-up of the top of the south where I live now. “Kiwi culture” revealed the parts of me I hadn’t yet faced. It’s been crucial in helping me finally understand the richness of the soil that shaped my early years as a kid growing up with families who didn’t look like me. Now I have a more whole view of that time as well.
The spirit of taiao (interconnected world of nature) ) drew me here too. It spoke to me every day whispering gentle challenges or fierce clarity. I discovered an unconscious pattern of moving to the maunga(mountains) at a time when I needed to be covered in support, and relocating a skip away from the moana (ocean)—touched by her waves—when I needed to surrender and surf. The hau—the wind and breath of this place—taught me how to breathe without trying. All of it nudged me back to remembering my scale in something much larger than myself which is vital in change work. The mauri here—the life force—is generous and pulsing. It is what you almost feel when you look at pictures of Aotearoa and why this place is seen with awe. It has been my pou (a pillar) and the truth is, I am still here because of it.
Note: my understanding is that many concepts in Te Reo Māori are much more layered and relational than English and often have more than a singular meaning. I am learning and grateful for all the permission it adds to my life.
Instead of discovering rich relational soil here I was dropped on the unbreakable tightrope that holds those two together. Somehow I was swallowed up by the systems I have always been able to separate myself from, scream truth at with a megaphone, and build whole lives without needing to conform. I became a white-washed version of myself. Diluted. Small. Insidiously internalising all of it; a familiar shift I recognised in my friends who lived here but were not from here and had stayed for at least a decade.
All while the Western world continued to force its insidious toxic impacts globally- unraveling people, places, and the planet in the same old horrifying movie.
I couldn’t unsee the convergence. My personal breaking down and the global descent felt inseparable because- they are. With my body learning to live more easefully again while whole regions became unliveable. What does it mean to heal in a time of disaster? I know the answer to that is everything- but the details are fuzzy. I can feel a pulsing of hope showing up in my blood…
If true regeneration can happen for ME, it can happen for WE.
Inextricably connected.
In all the time that I sat with that raw material (with more being added from my experiences here), I saw clearly how some of WE—especially those of us protected by the global whiteness and resource wealth—continue to normalize this… illusion. Subtle ways, common phrases, and a whole lot of not communicating at all with someone across the table from you because of something that happened 2- or 20- years ago. I am shocked at how easy it is to stay in the illusion. Just by simply saying the same lines over and over that enables us to stay numb.
Numbness sums it up though! That is the exact word I’ve felt most living in the resource-privileged and hueless town here —disguised as calm, as neutrality, as “the way things are.” Especially this place where I live on the top of the South Island- where I learned recently learned about the specific backdrop to the illusion that promotes this out-of-touch understanding of the "wheel of control": one that ensures they can keep gardening and working on “their own healing” ( ironically, that comes from the harm caused by the very same illusion) and opting out of being heartbroken with the rest of us. The ones who know down deep in our bones the interconnection of every person on this planet. Interconnectedness isn’t something you think your way into—it’s something you honor, something you live out, especially when it’s vital to how you get through all the shit the world throws at you when you don’t have as much resource privilege. I’m still finding words for the many richnesses I lived with when I was outside of resource wealth just a handful of years ago. But I can tell you that this place is missing so many innate mindsets and embodied behaviors that are vital for what I know has to be present for an authentic community to be possible. I also have a strong sense it is not on purpose either.
At this moment, I understand it as the cost of being born into generations who built systems on extraction and taking. When you do that - or continue to benefit from it- surely you lose the ability to feel what’s truly shared. You lose the ability to know a deeper connection beyond self or a close few who keep it chill and that is confirmed by this verypervasive sense of isolation here I feel in people through the communication. If I ever dare to bring it up or speak directlypeople always say, "That's just Kiwis."And, with no little laugh at the end just straight up knowing and accepting.
Maybe some parts of this writing will resonate with parts of your life. I guess that you have experienced these things tooin slightly different contexts. Perhaps you too, will see more clearly just how the control that exists in our BIG systems has become (or always been(?) tightly tangled throughout our daily lives, relationships, behaviors, and literal bloodlines of hue-less people. Perhaps it will help you finally name your most confusing and hardest stories too.
Get honest with me y’all. Can you feel it now?
In the lack of intimacy in one of your closest relationships where you are still not free to share everything that you are, feel, or dream? The conflicts you avoid so you don't lose another friend from tension being present. To avoid conflict to not break the community fragility that the slack channels are riddled with? In the instinct to manage others in your community instead of being changed by them? How quickly do we default to the person with the most power to make the decision and pick up the age-old trick of trying to blame time or a false sense of urgency- even in your group collaborative working group? Here, even clocks seem to have more power than people with power.
This is the control culture we witness happening in Palestine, Sudan and the Congo- and it is woven into us. Woven into how we make decisions (which is power). The foundation of how we avoid discomfort (also power). I read through how we dismiss that power because we are not personally impacted by it in negative or atrocious ways.
You got it. Even the dismissal is power. That dismissal stuff is all over this place and it. Is. Powerful. AF.
This place taught me more about control culture and its behaviors where the birthplace of this illusion surely must come. I can finally see! And it is fought for in the nicest communities. You should meet these people they are really nice. You’d have drinks before dinner with them because they are cool, nice, and kind. You’d like them. I love lots of them.
It’s such a waste of time to talk to white people about whiteness- in my experience. The ego cannot get past the “white” let alone the “ness” that is not a part of many other places with many other colors. We can’t see it because we have chosen to create homes in places that look and think like you. Subdivision if you will. Who shares a similar history perhaps? So, let’s drop the whiteness. Because you have been 1,000% impacted by control culture since you started any time of social school. You feel the life-sucking pull of in your work and life. That's what you will read about through this series. How much it is hurting white people. How it keeps us from growing, which means failing and learning, which is the only we can survive as mammals.
Angry feels easier with the insights I have- but insists on jumping to a familiar grief in my chest. To realize just how subtle and subconscious the fight to maintain this illusion is, especially in the most progressive communities that say they are doing something about it.
To be subconsciously acting from any place speaks to who we are. It’s intergenerational and it’s embodied.
Damnnnn.
Oh and do I wish(!) I could pretend I was separate from it. That I had just observed and called it in every time I could feel it but, let's be real. I stayed. I conformed and coupled under the intense individualism here without even realizing it. I gaslighted myself to make it more comfortable. I joined the illusion of belonging. I benefited. I built it. I am a part of it.
Luckily for me, another shattering crash came- the third one in New Zealand to be precise. Two years ago, the co-housing community I was building a literal home alongside threw me out—overnight. After making a decision about something I could not control linked to the poverty where I am from. So, I wasn't moving into the home I built anymore while all the closer relationships I had poured into over others in the last two years- simply vanished. I found out Atlas was on the way and not one of the mothers who previously called me into sisterhood showed up. So I moved to a new place- anunfurnished consequence of a life of not collecting a thing. I got a good mattress to help my growing body and slept on the floor in the biggest room, under to moon you could see in the biggest windows -until the energy came back to build again, slowly.
All this and much more made one thing painfully clear:
The brutal descent we keep watching isn’t just because of corrupt leaders or political systems that we have outgrown.
It’s the illusion we keep feeding and telling others. The one we kick anyone out of when they may show an undeniable crack that would call in accountability.
It’s because of well-branded co-housing projects I helped fund and build.
Because of “woke” spaces that say the right things but will give up NO power.
Because of the rooms of people I facilitated and strategies I agreed to.
Because of the silence, I started keeping.
Because of people like me who promised to be in the right relationship with our resource- privilege.
Because of me.
This isn’t about blame. It’s about being brave enough to see the systems that shaped us—and the ones we helped shape.
And choosing differently.
In how we live.
In what we normalize—and what we no longer will.
In how we design. Design only works if we can name what is there.
So, talk soon- for real this time. Not to figure it all out. But to feel it through with you.
Death is a part of compost and compost is a part of new life.
It's time to burn the illusions we’ve come to believe are reality.
Through the smoke, the future we dream of is one movement away— From maintaining to resisting.
Not just in the systems, but in how it shows up so illusively in progressive communities.
In you.
In me.