A friend of mine grew up in the inner city, a world of asphalt, concrete, steel and the growl of combustion engines.
Outside his apartment a solitary lime tree sprung from the pavement. Every day he’d climb that tree. He says he perched there for what seemed like most of his childhood, watching the world unfurl around him.
Your child needs a place she knows like my friend knew that tree.
She needs to be home in a locality, rooted to earth, snuggled up alongside other life, wrapped up in the myths and songs that have sprung up from a hard-earned love of the land.
This was once common knowledge, that we honor the beings that inhabit our place as we do our child’s closest relatives.
The Maori word whenua, means both afterbirth and land.
The placenta is the firmament of a child’s first home in the womb of the mother.
Birth delivers her into the embrace of place, her new womb and lifelong relative.