Sometimes I’ll come in to a kind of hyper-awareness when I’m sitting in my house. One moment, I just see stuff; the lino benches, a stack of cups, bookshelf, pictures hanging on the wall.  In hyper-awareness there will be a moment when the perspective suddenly switches. Like when you look at a word for too long and it just starts to look ~wrong~?. When I enter that hyper-awareness I am suddenly so horribly aware of how disconnected I am from all of the resources around me and how little I know about them. What kinds of fibres were woven into the covers on my couch? How was this table made? Where was the wood for that table grown? Who made the tiny rubber stops at the bottom of the chair legs?

Everywhere around me, signs of work and people and processes that are entirely unknown to me. Even in our kai. I was shocked the first time I saw how a pineapple is grown, the first time I saw an asparagus plant. Between you and me, I’ve spent so many hours watching those “How It’s Made” videos where you go in to the factories where they make oreos and M&Ms. So fascinated by all the work that is rendered invisible to us at the end of the chain, so horrified by how little I know.

The nature of capitalism is to divorce us from the fruits of our labour, and in turn to be divorced from the processes of labour that make all the things we need in our life. I realised then the value of knowing, of seeing that work. And as always, I came back to the idea of connection and storytelling. It seems to me to be the universal answer to every problem.

This work that we do with whenua, has been a kind of mahi and connection that has by it’s nature resisted that level of disconnection that I have with so many of the objects in my whare. The value of whakapapa and origin seems obvious to us as Māori, and something we echo within this realm of Kauae Raro. Place is so critically important, process is important. Dirt is not just a thing to be used but a living force, a sacred story. It’s a symbol of long-held histories, it’s political, it’s connective, and dirt can tell a story. When we do this work that we do with whenua, a teaspoon of dirt starts to have meaning. Or as someone said on the Kauae Raro instagram the other day, a teaspoon of dirt can feel like the whole world.

There’s that level of spiritual connection and sacredness which can guide and uplift us, but connection to our taiao and harvesting practices serves us on other layers too. I think of our tūpuna and their trading practices. How certain iwi and hapū would trade certain kinds of things. My own tūpuna in Tūhoe would often bring kererū to kaupapa in other rohe. From the coast they might bring kaimoana. From the north, kūmara and warm climate kai. From the south, maybe pounamu. And across all rohe, there was the trading of kōkōwai too. These resources were traded in relationship with other peoples around the motu. They became symbols of the peoples, and in the act of trade, stories were shared.

In the summer I was up north in the beautiful lands of Ngāti Kuri. We were being showed round by some of the haukāinga when one of the boys got his ute stuck in the mud. As he jumped out to look at the mud and see how to get the truck out, he stubbed his toe on a piece of kauri gum sticking out of the earth. I’d never seen kauri gum except as highly polished taonga, or a tiny bag of shards for painting. Seeing it in the environment where it had once come out of a tree was breathtaking. How unassuming it was, sticking out of soft pink earth. All of us who were manuhiri were allowed to take a piece if we wanted. I’ve got my piece in a jar on my shelf now, labelled Kāpia – Ngāti Kuri. It makes me think of the relationships and hono between the kaupapa that took me up there, and the mana of that whenua. It also makes me feel accountable to that whenua and those people. I want to make something with the gum that I can give back to the people. A further layering of a relationship and whakapapa.

The jar lives on my shelf next to other jars that tell similar stories. Ngaio gold, Tangi te keo orange, yellow and white clays gifted by friends, the petrified matai gifted by my aunty. In some cases, I’ve been gifted whenua from places that I whakapapa to. I’ve also always gifted whenua to friends, if I’ve gathered in their rohe. My jars a labelled with what colour they are, what whenua they came from, and who collected them, if it wasn’t me.

In a house full of objects whose stories I don’t know, it is the objects whose stories I do know that ground me again. The pūtōrino made for me by Isaac, with tōtara, kiekie, and tōroa feathers. The half-finished tapestry I have hung across a photo frame loom, wool gifted from a friend’s whānau farm, hand-spun by my nan, dyed by me with whenua I collected. At the moment I’m finding so much joy in telling the story of the kai that I’m eating. Whether it’s food we’ve grown in our māra, produced by local kai makers, things I’ve gathered from the ngahere. It’s a privilege for sure, and a joyous one.

Sometimes we don’t know the whole story, but we can know part of it, and that too can cement our connections to the world around it.

Of course whānau, I also recognise that the nature of the capitalist hellscape that is all around us is that the grind is hard, and that for most people, growing your own kai, making your own stuff, or having access to makers of stuff is a privilege. Putting kai on the table is honourable work, whether or not you know it’s story.

Again though, I think that’s why I love whenua so much. Why I’m still that person bringing pockets of stones and shells home from the beach. It’s a method of connection that we can all have if we do it respectfully. A portal for us all towards connection, identity, and story. Like the waewae of Mātangirau tira haka at Te Matatini this week, the grey clay clinging to their calves a reminder of the destruction their whānau are dealing with back home in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle. Whenua is always a message. It’s the thing I love most about this mahi that we do.