There is no compromise, because I’m the undiluted essence of myself. I am insignificant. I am hunger and love and joy. I am the pack, and the pack is me. 

(—Ali Hazelwood, Mate)

Aunty Ayo isn't really my aunt. She's my mum's friend, but I'm African, so she's Aunty Ayo. She's a botanist and her house is stunning in a way I didn't have words for as a child. I just knew I loved being there.

I'd sit on her porch with magazines I was too young to be reading, Ebony, Cosmopolitan and Vogue, surrounded by verdant plants that seemed to breathe with me. There was this smell, a mixture of bougainvillea, lemongrass, mint and hibiscus, that I've never found anywhere else. It made me feel suspended, like nothing else mattered. Just that porch, those plants, that smell, that feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

I didn't know it then, but maybe that was my first lesson in what spiritual ecology actually means. Not something you think about, but something you feel in your body. A kind of rightness that happens when you're held by non-human beings and smells and stillness.

I'm not going to lie and say the earth speaks to me in grand mystical ways. Maybe spiritual ecology to me, for now, isn't about mystical experiences. Maybe it's simpler. It's about paying attention to what already moves me, to the moments when I feel most alive and myself.

As a kid, I remember dancing outside in the rain, arms stretched wide, spinning until I was dizzy. Singing, laughing and completely drenched. No one had to teach me that joy. It just was. During the pandemic I'd take walks around 4am when the world was still quiet. The wind would blow through my hair and for that magic hour, everything felt right. I felt held by something I couldn't name. The same feeling I had on Aunty Ayo's porch.

I've been thinking about this more because of the work I'm building. The Revel Project is trying to help young people heal so they can show up for the planet. But the more I sit with it, the more I realise the relationship goes both ways. Maybe we can't heal without the planet either.

The crazy part? I’m writing this at 2:49am because I was reading Ali Hazelwood's Mate. A werewolf romance of all things! There was this line that stopped me: "I am the pack, and the pack is me."  I’ve recently been exploring indigenous frameworks of relationality like ubuntu, mana, iwa pele, whanaungatanga, but I keep coming back to kaitiakitanga. I've written about it before as guardianship, not ownership. But that werewolf line made it click differently. Not theoretical anymore but felt. If ubuntu says "I am because we are" then who is the "we"?

That question has been following me. And it's made me start paying attention differently. Not just to people but to everything around me. What are the other beings in my life teaching me?

Bees are teaching me about collective work. Each bee matters to the hive. No bee works alone, yet each has their role. When I watch them move between flowers I think about community. How we're strongest when we work together, how individual effort compounds into something larger than ourselves. The Revel Project is trying to embody this. We heal together, not alone.

Nature has its own, loving way of making sense to a wolf. Everything is body, immersive, physical. Easy. Sun drenched, rain soaked. A stride toward something meaningful.

(—Ali Hazelwood, Mate)

A werewolf book apparently understands something that I'm still learning. The wolf doesn't lose itself in the pack, it becomes more itself. Ego dissolves and there's no contradiction between individual and collective. They're the same thing.

Trees are long-suffering and patient in a way I can only imagine. They respond to seasons, knowing when to reach upward and when to draw inward. They give without keeping score. When I'm anxious about building something new, about whether any of this matters, I remember that staying rooted doesn’t mean I’m stuck. I am lying in wait, readying to bloom.

Waves at the beach make me feel tiny and somehow that's exactly what I need. I grew up heavily religious and I've been deconstructing a lot of that. But some of the clearest moments I've felt there's something bigger than me weren't in church. They were standing at the beach, watching the waves. The waves return again and again, patient and relentless. They remind me that I don't have to do everything at once. I just have to keep returning, keep trying.

I have to stop thinking about interconnection and start feeling it. I am not separate from the wind or the bees or the rain or my neighbour's cat or the Earth. I am nature, remembering.

Yesterday my mum brought in fresh spinach from her garden. She made her special efo riro, the kind that warms you from the inside. The rain had done its work. The soil had done its work. And when I ate it I wasn't separate from any of it.

What if when we talk about healing community we're not just talking about healing relationships between humans? What if community regeneration means regenerating our relationship with everything?

Kaitiakitanga makes more sense to me now. You can't be a guardian of something you see as separate from yourself. But if the bees are part of your community, if the trees are your teachers, if the wind is what holds you when you feel lost, if the plants on someone's porch can give you your first taste of peace, then of course you protect them. Not out of obligation but out of love.

The Revel Project is about creating spaces where young people remember they belong. To each other yes, but also to something larger.

I’m sorry this is not some grand mystical awakening but a quiet returning to what I knew as a child. That rain is for dancing in, the wind can hold you, that you're part of everything and everything is part of you.