Midwinter twinkling: Wayfinding love through radical empathy, sky‐sharing, and futuring

This commentary further explores the revolutionary possibilities of love using a therapeutic wayfinding analysis of New Zealand's new Matariki public holiday and the author's hamefarin/homecoming in mid-2022. Wayfinding underwrites our personal and disciplinary journeywork of futuring and reinforces the importance of rest, repair, awakening, and articulating our "next normal." In the winter, the stars seemed to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of exalted simplicity. (Burroughs, 2021, p. 3) Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? (Mary Oliver, 1992, Poem 133: The Summer Day) June 2022 was a landmark winter for Aotearoa New Zealand and for me. While the New Zealand borders would not fully open to all travellers until the end of July, in early June my multispecies household relocated from Perth, Western Australia, to Palmerston North so I could take up my new academic position at Massey University. Within three weeks of my homecoming (a hamefarin in Shetland tradition), 51% of New Zealanders participated in the first celebration of Matariki,1 the Māori new year (Jensen, 2024). Matariki—also known as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters within the constellation of Taurus—is a distinctive star cluster recognised and commemorated in many cultures across, for example, the Pacific, Australia, Greece, and China (Andrews, 2004; see here and here). The Matariki public holiday will fall variably each year on a Friday in June or July and holds a triple crown as a historical moment in the deep, slow, and unsettling work of decolonising and regeneration. It is the first new public holiday in Aotearoa New Zealand since the 1974 recognition of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) between Māori Rangatira and the British Crown. Second, it is the first holiday here recognising Te Ao Māori (Māori worldview) and the differential timings and nature of iwi celebrating the fall and rise of Matariki across the motu (country). Third, it was reported as a global first in recognising an Indigenous holiday (Jensen, 2024). Indeed, "Matariki is more than just a public holiday. Our celebration of [it] … will be informed by key values such as unity, sharing, feasting, coming together, and environmental awareness" (Acting Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Peeni Henare on Radio New Zealand, 2021). Since it will be Matariki when this commentary falls due, it feels fitting to remember, celebrate, and look ahead in this forum with our journal audience. As I finalise this work, I ponder the wayfinding opportunities in rhythmical relations and infrastructures of care and celebration spanning from microbiomes to outer space. My commentary advances such revolutionary possibilities of love as wayfinding—for myself and communities in which I am placed or have interests—in unsettling times. Returning home was unsettling in terms of moving countries and the ongoing work of becoming Tangata Tiriti, a non-Māori honouring the treaty—Te Tiriti o Waitangi—that gave my lineage the right to belong here. My motivation is to contribute to the deep, slow, and unsettling work of decolonising and regenerating among grassroot and geography communities (Mouat, 2023). Others, too numerous to mention, walk before and beside me across the spectrum and scale of this unsettling work. My approach is autoethnographic, akin to the "therapeutic wayfinding" powerfully showcased in Geographical Research by Alexander Burton (2021, p. 217). Therein, Burton provides a thick autoethnography with key insights into COVID as an "opportunity to recognise injustices by recognising how bodies are politicised, medicalised, and spatialised." For Burton, autoethnographic writing is significant as "an interpretive, emotional, and embodied negotiation of meanings and practices" (p. 217). We share common ground in articulating keen insights related to what might be called the therapeutic work needing to be done for ourselves, especially nurturing our disciplinary selves, at the intersection of society and geography as a broad discipline. That need and such work are crucial because, as Iain Hay (2024) has noted, geography is in a parlous state. Where this commentary deviates from thick autoethnography is in my reflexive analysis that, with gentle urgency, marks and maps geographic constellations for wayfinding. This format is not suitable for a full reflexive analysis of geography such as that undertaken by Doolan and Gillespie (2022) in relation to geographical research in our sibling journal, Australian Geographer. Rather, I am inspired by poets and storytellers, including Mary Oliver, who awakens oneness and healing, Maria Popova (2019), whose Figuring and Marginalian is an evocative quest for meaning in an imperfect world, and Isabelle Stengers's (2017, p. 1) advocacy for a "public intelligence of the sciences" based on slow, symbiotic, and honest science. Hence, my approach invites reflection on the sheer improbability of our fleetingly biological existence as borrowed stardust. In turn, that existence compels us to find meaning in the temporary and changing dynamics of ethical wayfinding in relationships and hamefarin, especially given stark contrasts with the deep slow workings of dark matter and our galaxy. Such stellar and symbiotic finetuning cleaves space to advance much-needed governance innovations (Swyngedouw, 2005) and regenerative ethics at the edge of human species extinction during a fifth industrial revolution. The philosophical labours that I propose above involve grappling with disorienting diffractions of rethinking "history and praxis beyond the confines of subjectivity or teleology for the love of the world that lies between us" (Mouat, 2023, p. 309). Such possibilities of love get us past grief and hopelessness into still-possible flourishing futures. Back then, I proposed three pragmatic considerations: first, following Warne (2020, p. 74), "undoing the colonisation of the mind" in our place-making; second, being mindful of the imperative to build a research repertoire in which aroha and love are developed by unpacking relations to benevolence, rationality, and imperialism; and third, learning, doing, and learning again in ways based on an ethics of alterity (Davis, 2002, p. 146). Here, I splice a fourth consideration for radical empathy in the mapping of our discipline, disciplinary selves, and our wild and precious life in kindred relationships and rhythms. I have championed the revolutionary possibilities of love. Now, Matariki and hamefarin have prompted me further: to trace love from ever-changing celestial rhythms of care and repair to the hands-on work geographers do at home and afar and in the face of loss and emotions in our Anthropocentric realities (Matilde et al., 2023; McManus et al., 2014; Westoby et al., 2022). Midwinter Matariki invites this geographer to reckon, rest, and repair my disciplinary self, especially in terms of geographic and community service, leadership, and agendas. It also encourages me to honour my university's planning programme kaupapa (guiding principle): Te Tiriti-led Planning for Flourishing Futures. Wayfinding includes grappling for insights about what is our "next normal." Yet, geography and geographers struggle with futuring and concurrently repairing entrenched and enduring harms of capitalism, colonialism, and enlightened binary thinking. Thus, like hamefarin, wayfinding requires a "radical empathy" attuned to context, compassion, and self-representation that enables insights from, across, and beyond feminist forms of unsettling (Nencel, 2014, p. 81). Pursuing a solastaglic and decolonising hamefarin expands the frontiers of our collective anthropocentric impact to tackle "the deeper problems and sticking points associated with the not-yet" (Adam, 2024, p. 192). Such expansion enables us to reorient to home and love in our plural terrains, realms, and communities. So, I recognise love as an emancipatory (re)membering and rekinning, a vital reorienting to the self in relation to (more-than-)human kin and kind. That reorienting recollection means (un)settling our migration stories and being open to regenerative prospects through the "forms and scenes of our attachment" to the world that better articulate still-possible flourishing futures (Anderson, 2022). Furthermore, tracing love with radical empathy can be understood as dusting for fingerprints as our (in)organic signatures. That involves genealogical, theoretical, pedagogical, and practical labours. Tracing fingerprints makes visible our embodied connections, conceptual and material intimacies, and messy forensic identifications and aspirations as geographers. Being a geographer within a diverse international disciplinary cluster with radical empathy involves radically engaging with vulnerability, breakthrough learning, and wayfinding strategies to deepen growth, connections, and encounters (Jordan & Schwartz, 2018). For example, tracing love as performative and public wayfinding is signalled when we share recognisable patterns with radical empathy: constellations and fingerprints. Witness Figure 1, which shows an impromptu performance of one child's love for family in an airport lounge—a constrained collective place of wayfinding, waiting, mobilising, and imagining the not-yet. The child's heart display reminds us that small gestures and timings matter: That the impermanence, spontaneity, and transsubjective gestures and encounters of love are essential to the work that we need to do. Such work requires risk, reciprocity, repetition, and reinforcement in everyday and collective ways that might be missed, misunderstood, or overwhelmed by bigger movements into dynamic constellations and unknown futures. While it's a Māori tradition, it's also being celebrated by non-Māori, and I think that's because of what Matariki represents—remembering our loved ones, celebrating who we are, having a feast together, and looking forward to a bright and prosperous future. … I'm so proud of how it has eventuated and how we've been able to do something that I think is having a really important impact on us as a nation. (in Jensen, 2024, 28 June) This midwinter reckoning of still-possible worlds and pathways for revitalisation, reconciliation, repair, and unity has wider and evolving impact. For some, organising community Matariki celebrations with 60 km of coastal bonfires felt like "inventing Christmas" (Hyde, 2023, 15 July). Yet, there is also a fragile reckoning in our unicameral capitalist society in Aotearoa New Zealand. While future dates for Matariki have been mapped for 30 years ahead (Radio New Zealand, 2021), perceptions of risk to the holiday have arisen from "commercial creep" (Radio New Zealand, 2024, 26 June) and the rapacious vicissitudes of our first formal three-way coalition government in 20232 raising legitimate public concern that holiday would be reversed. To date, the holidays are flagged to remain despite two forces. One encompasses the extensive, unprecedented, and ongoing coalition government reforms unravelling our progressive social contract (notably equitable well-being and Te Tiriti obligations). The other resurfaces an Association of Consumers and Taxpayers party agenda to remove "the January 2 public holiday to 'absorb the cost of Matariki'" (Daniels, 2024, 28 June). Notably, Matariki is a dawn ceremony where the stars rising before the sun are read as portents. At Matariki at 5 AM on 28 June 2024, a New Zealand Herald article reported on the Workplace Relations Minister announcing a forthcoming exposure draft on far-reaching workplace relations and holidays reforms—relunctantly reassuring the public that in "this coalition Government, there are no plans to take back public holidays" (Daniels, 2024, 28 June). What will become of our world is something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world able to open itself up to its own uncertainty as such. In 2024, the sciences and public still "side-step the assumed non-factual nature of the not-yet. Now we find ourselves needing to revisit past approaches, explore current challenges, and trouble habits of mind [to open] ways to take futurity and futuring seriously" (Adam, 2024, p. 191). Consequently, in our imperative to foreground the deficits of our futuring capacities in the messy realities of our pluralist present, we must engage in radical empathy and other revolutionary possibilities of love as if our continued existence depended upon it, because it does. To this end, Matariki speaks to existing support for interventions that galvanise an inclusive politics of radical empathy for revitalising our relations and communities and repairing harm in our classrooms, communities, and emerging agendas. We must witness strategic and tactical interventions across the spectrum from mildly subversive acts such as DIY urbanism to globally distributed creative protests like crochet coral reefs (Mouat & Buksh, 2024) and decolonising/Indigenising agendas such as Matariki especially where "the exercise of privilege made this inclusive politics possible" (Boswell et al., 2024, p. 1). With colonization there's been a lot of disruption. But what they couldn't disrupt was the sky. You can't mine the sky; you can't move people from the sky. Charmaine Green (Mann, 2016) Unfortunately, mining the sky is now in our public imagination and political ambitions—popularised via movies such as Avatar—whereupon geographers and others need to attend to the functional governance frameworks for the ongoing peaceful use of outer space (Mouat et al., 2021). Sleep and space are the next frontiers for extractive capitalism and Western academic science as we look beyond our broken planet to colonise outer space and to displace the dark with the capitalist day (Crary, 2013). Instead, in collaboration with Country and cultures, we might better appreciate darkness/dark matter and recognise that our heavens are an already-populated sacred space with complex and intergenerational celestial and more-than-human relations (Country et al., 2022, p. 1). Furthermore, sky-sharing reminds us that we have work at home and across our planet that are more meaningful than car-naming conventions and more urgent than single-mindedly chasing scientific and extractive dividends from space exploration, mining, and tourism. The Matariki star cluster gets significant attention as to the number, naming, and focus on which stars take "star billing," if you will. These strikingly similar, enriching, and enchanting stories exhort us to engage with our environments and each other. Made up of hundreds of stars within the Taurus constellation, Matariki is also a reminder that geography is like a constellation; a digital collage of hundreds of images rendered in a single visage and that pixelating effects are akin to clustering like-minded folk that could, if abused, also censure or obscure our ordinary and everyday work. Avoiding such outcomes means having difficult conversations about the work we do and represent, and it means enabling geographers to do their transformative work in radical empathetic and loving ways. In the final analysis, Matariki marks a rising recognition of Te Ao Māori (worldview); the unification of Western and Māori astronomy, science, and society; and the insufficiencies of permanently fixing calendars and our understanding of the universe. We should be alert to the fact that expert cosmologists gathered at London Royal Society are using scientific endeavours to update the long-held fixed understanding of the universe (Donovan, 2024). Most likely, they are proceeding without doing the necessary radical work of wayfaring, sky-sharing, empathy, and futuring as revolutionary possibilities of love. To therapeutically wayfind into the not-yet will require stamina, collaboration, challenging and rewarding work, rest and repair, and sharing kai (food) in ways that braid and honour our respective tikanga (protocols) as we reflect and plan with each of our wild and precious lives. This is the "exalted simplicity" made possible at this time of rising Matariki twinkling in the winter sky that readies us for our eternal vigilance and care. Open access publishing facilitated by Massey University, as part of the Wiley - Massey University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians. There is no funding received or other acknowledgement for this commentary. There are no conflicts of interest to be disclosed. There is no requirement for ethical approvals as there is no human participation in this commentary. Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.