How to Joy

Photo by @dtait_photography

If you’re like me, you feel like you’re swimming in an emotional soup, being lifted on crests of golden broth, then borne down again, snagged on some indistinct leafy green. It’s confusing and strange, and it has me on the verge of tears most days. Yesterday my family (me, my husband Dwaine, our two grown sons, and our older son’s partner) were out on the water, taking turns playing with Dwaine’s new toy: a wing foil setup. We walked down from our home and set off from the boathouse at the bottom of our road. Those of us not foiling (or rather boarding—we’re still learning how to get up on the foil) could walk along the harbour and watch, calling out to the rider little encouragements and corrections. The sun was warm on our faces, though the season has turned to autumn and the temperatures are dropping. The light on the water was alive and glittering, and I noticed that the hills rising above the harbour, which is nestled between the mainland and peninsula, give the sky the shape of a giant god’s eye.

Standing there in my wetsuit on the path next to the water, dripping wet but warm from my efforts, I couldn’t help but feel humbled and grateful. It’s hard to believe we made it here sometimes—all of us. Where life feels kind of normal, and we are relatively free to move and enjoy our environs. The feeling I had yesterday can only be described as utter contentment. But there is also a very intense winding of my inner coils. A spring-like dis-ease that is nearly imperceptible except that it manifests itself in my body. The simultaneity of these conflicting sensations may be the most disconcerting part.

I have of late returned to an old habit of tension where I bite on the sides of my tongue. It’s kind of disgusting really and totally neurotic. It’s obsessive and subconscious, and even as I notice I’m doing it and attempt to relax my jaw and take a deep breath, it begins again. I cast about, looking for the source of this anxiety, but it’s buried so deeply that I can’t at first discern it. On the surface of my own life, there is calm. Peacefulness even. A happy recognition that at least in this moment, all is well. So what is causing me to feel like I might actually implode?

On Sunday I had a Zoom meet-up with three of my dearest friends in the world. We are spread across the globe in New Zealand, Vermont, Scotland, and Hawaii. These women, I have decided, must be a part of my soul family, because the way we support each other is like that—epic and total in each of our lives. We span over 30 years in age, and ethnically, we nearly cover the gamut. Our shared experience of working in a little school in the Swiss Alps many years ago links us; there we began a meditation circle…the four of us met every Tuesday evening for an hour, sometimes two. It was a delicious time of learning and growing into our spiritual selves, and we have nurtured those selves and each other for these many years since. Again after that Zoom meeting, I felt awash in gratitude and unafraid about what comes next, even though there are many unknowns. So why can’t I just be in that? Exist in the space where it feels like love wraps around me and where the decisions I have made buoy me up, along with my whānau?

Dwaine says I should cut out the social media. It is there that I am apprised daily of each new case where an unarmed African American man/woman/child is shot and killed by a police officer in the U.S. It is there where the reality-check I used to share with my U.S. History students is playing out with alarming accuracy. I used to teach in a wealthy prep school in the High Rockies, a little pocket of American privilege where whiteness is the norm and teachers are appreciated but treated like beloved house servants more than anything else. There I would teach about how America has never been “great” if you were a woman or a minority, and certainly not if you were poor. And I would teach about the bubbling morass of racial tension that is brewing beyond the lovely vistas of the “American dream” narrative. I remember saying, before Trump was elected, that I couldn’t imagine what it might be that could tip the scales, but that I believed civil war was not out of the question. The students looked at me like I was crazy. Wild brown lady teaching liberal craziness to the wrong crowd. And then it began…

Of course it didn’t begin with Trump. It was always there. What I mean is the unraveling. That’s what began. The unraveling of the tight corset that was containing America’s nasty rolls of elitist, classist, racist, xenophobic sentiment. That it was predictable is of no comfort. My mom and dad live there. My brother and his beautiful family. Dwaine’s family and so many of our friends. The metaphor for us emigrating can’t be jumping a sinking ship, because I can’t have that ship sinking and quite frankly, neither can the rest of the world. For all its contradictions, the U.S. is a kind of rock upon which we depend. Economically. Politically. Even socially. The world can handle a hiccup. One ridiculous president in a long line of contradictory and questionable but at least sensible-sounding ones. But America unraveling? Its seams coming undone and letting spill its unruly corpus of lies and corruption and, quite frankly, hate? We don’t know what to do with that.

I don’t know what to do with that. It’s not like I thought it would truly right itself…not in my lifetime. I mean, I left after all. And how can I even consider just shutting it out? Turning a blind eye? What do I owe my self? And what do I owe the world? I always come back to the fact that I am, in every legitimate sense of the word, serving my community. The one in which I live now and which has embraced me with kindness. Here in New Zealand, I give myself every day to youth who have been abandoned by almost everyone; I teach them, though they don’t and can’t begin to see the value of what I am offering them. They are not shy about expressing this either. But you all know about this.

My resolve is to just keep doing the best that I can because it is all I have and therefore enough. I haven’t abandoned that belief. But it doesn’t always convince the emotional body. I can feel even in my physical body that not all of my layers are talking to each other. While I can assess and make sense of things on an intellectual level, there are still my emotional self, my physical body, to convince. And I write this one anticipating the closure, a crescendo that might be reached as has happened in so many of my blog posts. They just arrive, and I feel a sense of relief as, I know, my readers do. Yes, it is all worthwhile. There is meaning here, even if I have to create it myself. We’re going to be okay.

As I sift through it all, there is, first and foremost, the leaving. The simple fact that I have left America for good. Not that I’ll never go back there, but I will never live there again. And for that I must turn to James Baldwin, whose discourse often offers up the answers to my questions. Here is what he says on the subject: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it… If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.”

Yes, that’s a truth that calms the swishing a bit; I throw an arm up over the top of a floating crust of bread and consider. I have chosen to live apart from my roots. That is a very straightforward fact. I’m able to draw in a stuttering breath. Even to say it has a calming effect. I do love America. It is where my roots are. Leaving doesn’t negate that, nor does it mean I won’t continue to struggle with the ways America disappoints me. Okay. Okay. I can be here, where my heart and my children have chosen to be, and I can love the place and people that grew me. These are not mutually exclusive sentiments.

I can keep writing and I can keep living. There is guilt, yes. But there was also guilt when I was living in California. Or Colorado or Vermont. And that guilt was even more absurd, because it grew out of something that was completely arbitrary: the fact that I was not and never would be a black man or woman. Straight up. I typically never feared the cops. I didn’t anticipate, upon being pulled over, being abused or even murdered. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. But whether or not my sense of safety was reflective of the reality, it did exist. And I functioned according to it. And yes, that is privilege. I suppose it is impossible to escape the guilt completely.

E.M. Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I quote him often because the question is so resonant, and I will sometimes add, “Indeed, and how do I know what I feel until I see what I say?” Admittedly, I am hoping for an answer as I type. I know what my feeling looks like: my face screwed up as I bite on the side of my tongue (very unattractive), tears, deer-in-headlights stillness. What I don’t know is how to define it. I suspect it has to do with the leaving. And with the uncertainty of my older son’s situation (loving a California girl who is currently on a 6-month visa to New Zealand). The way Covid seems to have forever altered the global landscape and our pathways along it. How as each problem is confronted a new one arises. People who refuse to take the vaccine (how can I be sure they’re wrong?), difficulties and delays in rolling out vaccinations, heightened racial tensions and greater socio-economic disparities. Yeah, as I type these things, my heart in my chest contracts. There it is again. I can’t deny it.

And I also can’t watch any more body-cam footage of people dying. There’s got to be a middle ground between hiding your head in the sand and over-exposing yourself to content that does nothing but send your heart skittering off its pace. Sit down and write, Kim. Sending your words and your truth into the world can be done from anywhere. And keep teaching those whom love has abandoned. Those kids need you. This is the injunction I breathe into my own living. But it can be tailored to just about anyone’s life. Keep making beautiful cakes that light up people’s special occasions and make them smile. Keep taking soil samples for study in the lab, so that we can better understand the impact of our practices on the earth and its water. Keep designing buildings for people to live in and in which they may conduct their businesses. Keep selling your vegetables at the farmers market, so that the people of your town can be nourished by the food you grow. Keep doing stand-up, so that the people will see the humour in what breaks them. So that we can all laugh and stay alive through the hurting.

What I’ve found is that one of the most important things to guard in this life is joy. It will not remove the grief. Of course it won’t. But there is always someone grieving while another is celebrating. There is always someone thanking god for a small miracle, while another is lamenting a loss. Thank goodness. That is what life is like. Like in Bruegel’s painting of The Fall of Icarus, which has already been written about more beautifully than I will ever write anything, by W.H. Auden himself (in his poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts”). Auden said, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” In Bruegel’s painting, a scene is presented—a farmer plodding along, plowing his field behind a horse; a tall ship on the sea, sails full of air; a village shimmering in the distance. And there, almost ‘out of frame”: a pair of white legs disappearing into the ocean, the last glimpse of Icarus, having tumbled from the sky with his homemade wings aflame.

I can’t live all of the stories at once. And I certainly can’t suffer for them all. That would be the end of me (and my tongue). I am not a lawmaker, but I can push for change in my writing. Perhaps the lawmakers will heed the call of the artists and historians to shift policy. I can also contribute to the collective joy that must exist in the world if we are all to stay afloat on this chaotic bisque. If my actions are contributing to the general joy and not detracting from it, then I’m going to call it good. That is my best, and I give it willingly. What is your best? It’s not a challenge. I’m certainly in no position to challenge anyone. It’s an invitation…to realise what you can do (instead of fighting, fleeing, or freezing, as is our wont in situations this frightening). In the meantime, I’m leaving social media for a bit. I will still post the links to my blogposts, because I know that’s where most of my readers come from. But no more scrolling. My heart is too heavy. My inner springs wound up too tight.

May we find the ways to create and spread joy. May we know joy in our own lives. And may we protect the joy of others with our love, our conviction, and most of all, our actions.

Wing foiling. This isn’t one of us (haha), but here it is in case you were wondering. : )

More Than a Narrative

Buck Nin, Banner Protest, 1977, Acrylic on board, 1335 x 1221mm.

Recently an article was published in the local newspaper. Just an essay in the Opinion section written by, from what I can gather, a kind of local celebrity among the reading crowd. I had never picked up a physical copy of that paper before, just happened to see it on the newsstand as I was checking out with my groceries. I don’t know what possessed me to toss the paper onto the pile of fresh produce and ground coffee there on the conveyor belt, but I did.

Later that evening, I perused the paper. Again, just curious, I guess. It had been so long since I held a newspaper in hand, so habituated have I become to getting my news online. When I got to the Opinion section, I sort of couldn’t believe my eyes. The article was headlined like this: “‘Colonisation’ Narrative Dangerous for New Zealand”…with the word colonisation in single quotation marks, just like that. I felt that it was likely this writer, a Dr. Philip Temple, felt like his opinion would be received well in this community, and perhaps it was. I also decided that someone should respond. To their credit, the Otago Daily Times ran my essay a day after I submitted it. All opinions matter, right? Here’s what I said:

Kia ora koutou katoa. I must start with an admission: I am not Māori, nor even a New Zealand Pakeha. I am the partner of a Ngati Porou/Scottish man and am mostly just grateful that I have been received in Aotearoa during such a turbulent time for the world. Of mixed ancestry myself, I too carry the blood of the colonised, along with that of the coloniser. Though it may sound harsh to say it like that, there is no avoiding the truth of it. And honestly, language does matter.

  Colonisation is a fact. And it doesn’t only refer to the moment of contact between a colonising entity and the indigenous population. There is no “sweet spot” in that process, because it is an ongoing phenomenon. The “colonisation narrative” refers to a much larger sort of matrix that undeniably permeates the entire structure of society and is derived from a history of colonising acts...ones that typically attempt to mute, if not eradicate, the indigenous population because it seems to threaten the expansion of the colonising population’s objectives. It refers to continuously introduced legislation with euphemistic names like the Māori Representation Act (1867), the Māori Affairs Act (1953) and the Treaty of Waitangi (Removal of Conflict of Interest) Amendment Bill (2007).  All of this legislation has effectively diminished Māori autonomy and freedom to own and manage their land the way they choose, as well as limited the Māori voice in New Zealand government. In the space of time between 1840 and 1975, Māori-owned land was reduced from 66,400,000 acres to a mere 3,000,000.

  People don’t know about these things. It’s not their fault. The current effort of the Ministry of Education to revamp the national History curriculum in public schools is a reflection of their acknowledgement that denying such truths of one’s history is (at best) undesirable. It represents an effort to make reparation for the ways that such omissions have, not necessarily intentionally, imposed and reinforced barriers to Māori progress. The call for decolonisation then is not, as this dismissive article says, “a lazy way of throwing rocks at Pakeha or ‘Western’ culture” but rather an emphatic plea for the recognition of the inequity that exists as a result of a history of colonising acts.

  The fact is that colonisation itself is dangerous, not the perpetuation of its narrative. Colonisation violates all parties, the members of the colonising culture included. Kudos to the New Zealand Ministry of Education for taking a step in the direction of addressing these omissions with a revised History curriculum. Again, the effort itself supports the argument that colonisation is an issue that exists and must be examined. Not reacted to in a violent way (as in the perhaps misguided efforts of the single Māori activist group that in their desperation burned down the Rangiatea Church at Otaki 26 years ago) but addressed in a way that offers a corrective experience in shaping not just the view of the Māori people but of their relationship to the tauiwi. The word tauiwi is used to distinguish the group of New Zealand tangata who do not come from and have never identified with a Māori tribe. I do believe one would be hard pressed to find anyone of European descent who identifies with their own tribe, so far removed are they from the period of their tribal existence. But if one did, I do believe every Māori I know would be interested and happy to acknowledge that tribe. Tribal affiliation is at the heart of whanaungatanga. I have seen this in the interest and respect paid to me and my own First Nations affiliation.

  To appeal to the readers of the ODT with the fact that “Pakeha have whakapapa too” is almost akin to responding to the rally cry that “Black Lives Matter” with the statement that “All Lives Matter.” They do. It’s true. But all lives are not under fire. All lives are not being violated and brutalised by the police force in the United States. Black lives are. The statement that “Black Lives Matter” does not preclude the “mattering” of other lives. And to say that Māori lives, Māori concerns, must be honoured (say when we look at the statistics around the disproportionate number of Māori and Pacific Islander inmates in New Zealand prisons or the shockingly disproportionate number of Māori and Pacific Islander people living in poverty and losing their youth to suicide) is not to suggest that Pakeha lives and concerns shouldn’t. It just means that Māori concerns should not be ignored and swept into the shadow of the concerns of the overculture, as they have been too often and for too long.

  I must agree with Dr. Temple when he states that “We need to celebrate all our whakapapa, all of the values and cultures that form this special nation.” Nothing could be truer. But this in no way negates the importance of acknowledging that colonisation has played, and continues to play, a huge role in shaping this nation, as it has so many nations around the globe. “Kaua e rangiruatia te ha o te hoe e kore to tatou waka e u ki uta.” Indeed, “Do not lift the paddle out of unison or our waka will never reach the shore.” We just need to make sure that everyone’s got a paddle.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ARTICLE AS IT APPEARS IN THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES.

Risk It

Photo credit: @ttaitphoto

This song came up the other day as my iTunes was cycling through my library of music. It does this when I don’t tell it what I want to listen to in the car, or even connect my phone, which is a complete mystery to me, but on a warm, sunny Friday, there it was: Nahko and Medicine for the People singing out this song from several years ago. Out of nowhere, it gave me this wild gush of energy that felt like it was maybe three parts gratitude and one part hope. It made me feel like my actual cells were blooming, sending stardust into the air, and then pulsing with an incredible energy while it all sprinkled down onto my shoulders, my lap, the interior of my VW wagon.

I first heard “Risk It” in Vermont, where our family (me, my husband, and our two sons) were living at the time…I was teaching yoga at the inaugural Stratton Mountain Wanderlust Festival (just two little classes I got to teach as a local instructor, but they were accompanied by my dear musician friends Veena and Devesh Chandra, and they were magic). Nahko and Medicine for the People were playing in the evening, maybe Saturday of the long weekend event. I had never heard their music before, but I was eager to take advantage of the full weekend pass that was my “payment” for teaching at the festival, and my friend Marissa was keen to check them out.

It was an amazing evening, full of joy and dancing, and imbibing—of beer, yes, but also of a vibe of love and inclusivity that has never been truer. And at the end of the concert, when the entire set list had been played, and then some, this: I remember Little Bear (Nahko), the lead singer of this fabulous band, holding up his cell phone to capture the crowd’s wild approbation on video. I remember seeing the elated and grateful expressions on the faces of the members of the band as they exchanged glances and held hands together, lifted them over their heads, as our applause filled the air and rained down on the half circle arrangement of their glistening bodies on the stage.

That night I felt that I (and the other few hundred people in attendance) were sharing a moment with this beautiful group of humans…a moment in which they had somehow arrived. Who is to say what constitutes arrival or even how it looks when it happens, but this—this was most definitely an arrival. Of course they weren’t aware of me sharing in it, but I was part of the collective voice that affirmed their vision as artists and the undeniable truth of the power of their musical offering. They saw us moved—as a whole—by their music and especially, at least for me, their lyrics. They sang of beauty and gratitude, of personal power and cultural connection. They sang of healing and of forgiveness, and they sang of fighting—for what one considers to be of value and worthy of sacrifice.

After that night, I listened to their album Dark as Night endlessly. It made me feel so good—whole somehow. And it was soon after that our family heeded our own “call of the wild” and moved to Colorado. I listened to that album, and later On the Verge, driving up and down the I-70 corridor between Vail and Eagle, for ages. In 2015 Nahko and Medicine for the People appeared in the Vail Valley’s Hot Summer Nights free concert series, and my family and I saw them there again. My children witnessed their mother dancing and singing with total abandon in the otherwise fairly tame Vail crowd (this wasn’t the first time), and we all enjoyed their music together. There was something holy in their gift to their audience, to their listeners. And there was beauty in all of it.

The move from Vermont to Colorado was not our last. Our entire life together, my partner Dwaine and I, has been a long, slow migration toward New Zealand, I realise, because we have landed here with a sense, for the first time, that we have actually arrived. I have wanted this feeling for a long time, and I have looked for it, but this is the first time I have ever felt it. I have even tried the word on in different places: Home. But that word is an oversimplification, and perhaps even an injustice to the turtle shell of our marriage and family nest that we carry with us wherever we live on the globe, because it’s more than that. Or at least different. What I do know is this: we have arrived.

We’re not finished traveling. Of course we’re not. The world is temporarily closed off to itself, but our extended family are spread all over North America, and we will go there again to be with them. I have no doubt about that. And they will travel here to be with us, too. But having arrived in this whenua, this beautiful land, and begun to give back to it, to share our selves with the people and their place, Aotearoa, there is a kind of peace that is indescribable. And a jubilation that is captured perfectly in this song…”Risk It.” Moving from Vermont to Colorado was a risk. And it proved to be our most challenging move in a financial sense. There were moments that first year in Eagle County I wondered if we’d done the right thing. But then it was clear—we were exactly where we needed to be. For so many reasons.

Then, in the blink of an eye that was four years, it was time to leave. I felt it fiercely. And I was ready to go. Trump was elected president, and for me that was a last straw. I applied for a visa to move to New Zealand. It turned out our timing was not right, and I actually had the whole, laboriously collected set of documents returned to me. One critical piece had expired waiting for the next, and the whole thing was invalidated. That was in 2018. I was confused and discouraged and didn’t have the heart to resubmit it. I have been on the planet long enough to know that when something is right, all the doors leading to it swing open. There is ease in the rightness. This was not how I was feeling about the path to New Zealand that year.

I had a rising sense that we would be arriving in New Zealand as refugees somehow. Dwaine is used to some pretty out-there ideas from me, but this was almost too far fetched. He didn’t deny what I was saying, but he certainly couldn’t say he agreed or saw it too. When things are ‘normal,’ it’s hard to imagine them otherwise. But I could see that his job was wearing on him…too much time spent in the underbelly of our little county, too much energy spent trying to lift a very heavy darkness. And I myself was jaded, having spent too many years, it felt, doing what was easy—serving the children of the privileged, who were happy to recognise me and my gifts. Over 120 people had lined up to apply for that job. There was work, I knew, that was less attractive to the many and which utilised my unique gifts. Specifically, I wanted to work with underrepresented populations. People society forgets or discards—kids who have been given a raw deal. If you can do that sort of work, I have always thought, you should.

At the same time that these feelings began to grow in me, I began exploring what seemed like a new ability but which I quickly learned was something I’d had some spiritual understanding of for most of my life. This exploration was of what it means to serve as a medium. Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy. Sometimes I still feel that. But then someone else who is hurting asks me to help them connect with a loved one who has passed, and I can’t say no to them. In fact it’s a commitment I’ve made to myself and to the Universe. When asked, I will say yes. There were two years in Vail that I got to just practice—thank you to the many friends who trusted me to practice opening what in those days felt very much like a bad telephone connection—you know who you are! They were two years that overlapped with our exit from the place that had served its purpose in my evolution as an individual and in our family’s journey.

After a short burst of energy around moving to Hawai’i, which also did not manifest, we ended up back in Santa Cruz, my childhood hometown and the home of my parents and my brother with his sweet family. I took my first true alternative education position and was tested and tried in ways I’d never imagined. I was also more deeply rewarded than I’d ever been for any work I’d ever done. Personally, I felt it as a lovely pause, where I got to host “family dinners” for my mom and dad and my brother’s family. Where I could stop by my parents’ house and enjoy chatting over a glass of wine on their back patio on a Friday evening after work. Where we got to attend nephews’ baseball games and my sister-in-law’s chorale group performances. Where time seemed to stand still for a bit.

While I never felt like moving to Santa Cruz was forever, even I was surprised when the time for our exit from there arrived with such haste. The political climate was rising, beginning to burn us with its inequity and its inanity, and then Covid fell upon us all like a predator. Two months into Covid in California, with our younger son at university in New Zealand and our older one on his way back there to train on snow, we did the unthinkable. We planned and executed an overseas move in the middle of a global pandemic. It was crazy, for sure. Selling or giving away all of our stuff on Facebook (there was no way to have a garage sale or to even drop things off at a donation station). We had to coordinate the selling of three vehicles and the surrender of our rental home with our international flight. There could be no interim accommodation (hotels weren’t open, and we were too afraid to stay in one anyway). The list of crazy details goes on and on and paints a picture that is an awful lot like fleeing. Refugees indeed.

In short, two cancelled flights later and after a delay that put us in a hotel for four days in a different departure city anyway—we boarded a plane for New Zealand. It was surreal and absurd to watch the explosions of colour along the darkening skyline of Los Angeles as our airplane lifted off. The irony was not lost on us that the Fourth of July fireworks, prohibited because of the pandemic, went on long after they were no longer visible from our chiclet-shaped windows. Finally we dropped our masked heads back onto the headrests of our seats and closed our eyes. The three of us were on our way across the sea to our baby bird.

Managed isolation and the transition itself is a story for another day, but suffice it to say, we finally landed on solid ground. Every door opened to us, too, the way doors do when you are moving with the flow of the Universe instead of against it—from finding a good vehicle to landing a home and jobs with lightning speed. We were received with love by our New Zealand family and by our new community. And all of it was a risk. A huge risk we took to follow our hearts and souls. To be near our baby. To be far from the strife we saw enveloping American politics and society. To be in a place that has called to us since we were so, so young—the place where I heard for the first time that I was a healer. Auntie Sylvia said those words to me in Nelson when I was only 24 years old (I remember wondering then if I should have gone to medical school!).

Today I answered the call from one friend to help another and did a mediumship reading by Zoom. The distance between us was over 8,000 miles, and we had never met before today. I didn’t know a single thing about this person, except that we had this lovely friend in common and that she had a deceased loved one she longed to hear from. As always I had no idea what to expect as we opened ourselves to hearing from Spirit, but also as always, the result was an incredible gift to me and to the woman. For me it was an affirmation—that this gift needs to keep being offered, because it is so natural. So real and easy, really, because it is aligns with what I can only understand now as my purpose: to help people heal.

And it was a gift to her, because I could see on her face, feel in her affect, that she had, in the space of about 40 minutes, received all the confirmation she needed to know that her love still exists and still sees her. Is still accessible to her. Oh! What an important gift to be able to give someone! Grief is not something that I can dissipate. It’s real and it’s important and it’s a legitimate response to losing the physical form of the people we love. But I can apply a salve so soothing and so healing just by opening my heart and mind—listening to the messages given to me to share with loved ones who are still here on Earth and who long for such reassurance.

So as I listened to the chorus of that song in my car on Friday, it was all I could do to contain the joy (and also the tears) that rose in my heart like waves. Nahko sang: “I never thought I needed medicine / but I was spiritually dying, I needed some healing / so I opened my mouth and took a dose of the music / then I sat and prayed for guidance, now, teach me to use it / I pray for guidance now, teach me to use it.” The medicine was more than the music, of course. For Little Bear it must have been literal. The music is his medicine. It’s also his gift to wield among the people—the way he helps them heal themselves. For me it is metaphoric. The music is the expression of this thing that I knew I needed to do—this distance I needed to travel. It is also the expression of this thing that I know I need to keep doing—keep saying yes to. I need to keep listening to the souls of the departed. I still marvel that I can say that without fear. I never would have believed it.

When I heard this song those many years ago, it was like the little sailing canoe I boarded for the long, slow journey here to New Zealand. It represented the fearlessness I would need to embody in order to keep going. And today it shows me the truth of our migration. Of my bravery. I keep going—offering my gifts in the healing of others, whether that’s through teaching them or through providing a reading for them, helping them hear from their loved ones who have made their crossing—and I keep giving. Aotearoa has opened her heart to me; she is the whenua of my husband’s ancestors and she is the piko (the navel) of my spiritual life. I know this now.

And there is another line in this song that is important to me. It is for all of the people I have had to say goodbye to along the way. All those who keep going too, living far from where I am today. In Vermont and California, in Europe and Asia, in Hawai’i and Colorado, in Alaska and even the British Isles. We’re scattered like so many seeds. But we are together in that we share the planet, this air, this beautiful moon. Nahko says, “Well if I could give to my people, yeah / well a piece of my peace would be with you always.” He says it again: “If I could give to my people, yeah / well a piece of my peace would be with you always.” Yes and please. May it be so.