Kia ora everyone, 大家好.
At this time of year, just before sunrise, the Pleiades rise from that direction. Matariki, the star cluster, and the signal that the Māori New Year has begun. I was there yesterday morning in the dark, standing at a pre-dawn ceremony at a site where a new māra kai is being planted, a food garden being grown by people who found each other through kai sovereignty work, who believe communities should know where their food comes from and have a hand in growing it.
We gathered around fire. We sang waiata (song). We named those we have lost since last Matariki, honouring them, recognising their presence.
My 姑姐 (pronounced: gū-zē). Aunt Stella. She passed in February, unexpectedly.
In Cantonese, my native language, we have specific terms for your position in the greater family. For a paternal younger aunt, we say gū-zē, 姑姐. We don’t address our elders by their names. We address them by their place in the family. It holds the relationship in language the way a net holds water.
I wrote about aunt Stella in a previous newsletter. But I want to say more here, because this is the right time, and because I don’t think we share our grief enough. Not those of us who have left our ancestral villages. Not those of us navigating lives between cultures, between languages, between worlds. We carry our grief quietly and alone in ways our ancestors never had to, because I’d imagine many of our ancestors still had the village. We’ve lost our traditional ways of holding praise, grief, and joy together. So much has moved into the brain, into what we do and accomplish, rather than from the internal world.
Sharing from that place is part of the kaupapa (purpose, principle) of Letters at Dawn. Always an open invitation to go inward. What’s really here? What are we not sharing, not feeling, not giving ourselves access to? Seeds planted that could sprout later, or not at all. All I can do is share my grief and my joys, my truths, with no expectation but certainly the hope that it may move somebody, because it is certainly moving something within me.
姑姐 was my grandmother’s daughter, and my dad’s younger sister. Just over forty years ago, she and my late uncle Clarence had a conversation with my parents, just before or around the time I was born, and essentially invited my mom and dad to consider immigrating from 香港 (Hong Kong) to Los Angeles, where they were already living. My parents applied. Some nine years later, it was approved. That is why the lives of my immediate family, and certainly mine, changed so dramatically. Why I carry the accent that I do, the privileges that I have, the education I have been given. My whole life is downstream of her willingness to imagine a different future for her family and act on it.
She was also one of the most faithful readers of everything I have ever made.
For years, across every edition of this newsletter and its predecessor, aunt Stella responded. Simple, beautiful acknowledgments. “Nice to hear what you are up to,” “Good to hear you are healthy,” and “Lovely to see that you are doing well.” Aside from my mother, no one ranked higher in readership engagement. She witnessed my life and work from across the ocean, across decades, with consistent and quiet care.
I think about what it means to witness someone like that. To show up, again and again, and simply say: I see you. (I am here. Keep going.)
That is what she gave me. And I am still learning how to carry it forward. 🤲🏽
A few weeks ago, I presented something I’ve been mulling over in recent months - the most important story we tell.
The session, Tending the Story: From Witness to Weaver, was part of Te Puna Ako, a learning circle inside Hapori, a growing community of systems changemakers across Aotearoa (and beyond). And it was one of the more vulnerable things I have done in public. The ideas are drawn from years, decades of living, circling, witnessing, and slowly, slowly, beginning to weave.
I talked about the camera as both gift and hiding place. About a near-death fall in the Himalayas at thirty, a prayer said in Cantonese to whatever was listening, and the promise I made on those rocks to show up more fully. To learn. To serve. To not waste the life I had been handed back. This story was the cornerstone of the first Letters at Dawn, and it arrived again here, finding new ground.
I talked about the stories we tell ourselves quietly, moment to moment, and how those stories become the world we build outside. The difference between I have to do this and I get to do this. The men in my circle, slowly undoing what they were told they had to be. The gorse on the Banks Peninsula hillsides and what Hugh Wilson at Hinewai Reserve (amazing short doco by Happen Films about him and his work) spent thirty-five years proving: that you don’t fight what you don’t yet understand. You create the conditions for something better to grow in its shade.
The question & answer time at the end was a delight.
Kate shared that some of the stories we need to work with aren’t adult stories at all. They are toddler stories, laid down before we had language, running underneath everything. She asked: have you ever tried arguing with a two-year-old using logic? The room laughed and felt it at the same time.
Tania committed out loud to changing her relationship to ageing. To seeing grey hairs and wrinkles as the rings of a tree, not as decline.
Liv, who is younger, said she finds it quietly sad when the people she looks up to fear their own ageing. They were talking across generations and something real was moving between them.
Zac, one of the brothers in our men’s circle, had been on the phone before the session trying to write a strategic plan for his guiding company. It wasn’t flowing. He stepped into our session and said the timing was serendipitous. A few weeks earlier, for his birthday, he turned the celebration into a tree planting. Over a thousand trees on his whenua (land). That is what I mean when I say shared story changes things.
And Tay asked the question I enjoyed most: what is the link between an internal systems change and a collective one?
I gave a short answer about ripples and chain reactions and patience. The truer answer is simply this. You start with what you can, which is here, in this tinana (body). The rest follows. Slowly. But it does follow.
My gū-zē 姑姐 knew that. She planted a seed in a conversation forty years ago and the ripples are still going, through me, through this letter, through you reading it now.
Matariki is the Māori New Year, marked not by a fixed date on a calendar but by the rising of the Pleiades in the winter sky. It is a time to honour those who have passed since the last rising, to celebrate the present with those you love, and to look toward the future with clear eyes and a full heart.
I am tauiwi. Not Māori. I did not grow up with this tradition, and I don’t claim it as mine. What I do claim is the responsibility of learning it properly, of listening to mana whenua and tangata whenua, the people who hold the authority and knowledge of this place, and of showing up as a genuine ally to the living traditions they are revitalising. That means using te reo when I can. Learning the names of the native birds, plants, and trees in the bush around me. Finding my way into kaupapa Māori settings and sitting with the tikanga (customs, protocols) and kawa (etiquette, rituals) they carry. Being present and humble in those rooms.
Some friends have noticed this and said so. I receive it in one ear and let it out the other, not from dismissiveness but because this was never about receiving praise. It is about doing what feels right as someone who has chosen to call this place home while being a relatively newcomer to this land. Te ao Māori carries a depth of understanding about our place in the world, about ourselves and each other, about the relationship between people and land, that the world I grew up in had largely forgotten or never held. I am not trying to take that. I am trying to learn from it, and to honour the whakapapa (genealogy, heritage) of this whenua (land) by taking it seriously.
Matariki, for me, is one of the clearest invitations into that learning. A genuine pause, held inside a tradition that knows how to hold grief, joy, and hope at the same time, in the same breath.
It is a time of composting, as a dear friend and colleague Erica put it so well. Returning what no longer serves to the earth so that what needs to grow next has room and nutrients to do so. The slow and necessary process. Just like in my presentation - the gorse dies in the understorey as the native bush and trees tower over it. The soil becomes richer. Nothing is wasted. Everything takes longer than we would like - patience!
I am also composting some friendships this season. The quiet driftings, the ones that have withered slowly or ended more explicitly in the past year. I grieve them too. And Matariki gives me permission to feel what is there before letting it go into the soil.
For those of you reading from the northern hemisphere, in your longest light and your summer warmth, I want to extend the same invitation across the equator. The season is different. The need to pause, to look within, to ask what stories you are still carrying from a version of yourself that no longer exists, that need is not seasonal. It is always available.
The Gregorian calendar, widely used as it is, is not the only one. Matariki is one pathway. The lunar calendar, seasonal and agricultural rhythms, indigenous timekeeping, the body’s own signals. There are many ways to mark time, many invitations to rest and reflect and begin again. The one that calls to you is the right one. Do not lose sight of that.
I am about to activate hermit mode.
From the publication of this letter on Matariki weekend until the end of July - no outside mahi (work). Uninstall apps. Rest, reflect, slow movement, nature time, and personal creations like this that have been waiting patiently in the background for months, years even.
I will be in there thinking of 姑姐. Feeling the weight as well as the gift of being witnessed across decades by people who have been there for me. 🤜🏽🔥🤛🏼
If something in this letter landed for you, I would genuinely love to know.
Paid subscribers have access to the enhanced, expanded Te Puna Ako recording in the inner circle, higher resolution, multiple camera angles, and some additional reflections. I will get to every comment and question after my quiet time. 😊
For all readers, the public version is on YouTube.
From this Matariki weekend, from the dawn, rising stars, and the names said into the ether and fire:
What story are you tending?
If you’re new: 歡迎。Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome.
If you’ve been here from the beginning: it’s so beautiful and an honour to be witnessed by you.
多謝你。Tēnā koe. Thank you for being. 🙏🏽
-Kai J. Lee 李曉敦
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