(re)store

She sits guard at the entrance to the underneath

As kids we are allowed to move through the system of rua - pits, caves, storehouses, our own underground playground!

Our childhood curiosity doesn’t speak of the ancient wisdom but we feel it in our dirt stained knees and hands.

We duck in and out, moving from below to above with ease

Nan, just sits at one of the entrances, kete in hand, long grass all around her, quiet but not silent.

These were our storehouses, our aisles for food and medicine held in the cool embrace of the kōpū of our whenua

The smooth walls formed by ancestors hands and tools with a wisdom that permeates the darkness 

Light streams in from the entrance ways and even as kids we know what that light means, that light reveals the cracks of a world of rules and responsibilities that aren’t formed by this land 

We return. Our underground playground feels much smaller and through my mother eyes feels more dangerous, cliffs, uneven terrain, overgrown entrance ways

Cautionary words are uttered, ‘watch your feet’, ‘don’t go to close’, ‘watch your sister’, they don’t listen

They’ve been here before even though they have not set their feet on these pathways

They have touched the floors and walls in this network of caves

I sit at the entrance to one of the rua pits as the kids quickly fall into the intergenerational memory, play and joy, their laughter echoing against the earthen walls

The grass is high around me, it’s itchy

And then I see …

What Nan must have seen as

She sat voice stilled but spirit searching 

The farms, the dam, the quarry, the power lines. The extraction of things to make other things. The draining of lifeblood and chipping away of flesh and bone. For what? For who?

No wonder she was quiet, the noise outside was deafening.

The kids pop out all smiles and earth browned palms of hands and soles of feet and ask when we can come back.

I visit often in my dreams, feeling myself drop down into the rua pits received by the dark embrace of our mother’s womb. I lean into, and learn from, the cool and gentle folds of her walls; seek hibernation. Her darkness is potent. It transforms. From earth, dirt brown to kōkōwai red. Reddened. She cycles through the ripples within, storing them, holding them in the membrane of her walls. She is where I (re)store my sweetness. 

The light punctuates through the entrance/exit the precipice between within and without. And not far away I hear the sounds of extraction and exploitation rattling the walls of our storehouse, it keeps going, when will they stop? When is enough enough? How many more things do they need? 

The sounds get louder, closer, reaching into the cave, trying to wrench out the pieces of me that it can get its hands on, trying to turn me into things that others want. The Crusher starts up. Whole pieces of me are fed into the top, compressed into thousands of smaller pieces, it's hard to recognise myself. 

She gathers me up and keeps me in her embrace, places me piece by piece into the storage pit, and sits at the entrance. 

I hear the kids crying.

It's son crying. It’s a nightmare.

Eyes open, it’s dark, 3am kind of darkness

I roll over and kiss my son’s forehead, his ringlet curls tickle my mouth and I taste the sweetness of his pale skin. 

You too, my son, will play in the underground network of wisdom and intelligence that our ancestors built, I will make sure of it. 

Nā Naomi Simmonds

Inspired by a photo of my Nanny Daisy and my cousins and one of our many visits to the extensive rua network on one of our pā sites Piraunui in Te Wāotū.