There were still trees as we would recognise them today ~ with their deep breathing, an innate exuberance, and hosting of other lifeforms, such as cicadas, birds, and other insects. Clouds still drifted above the trees, and as they are wont to do, Tūī continued to swoop into a spindly crown and startle a Ngaro Huruhuru to zoom off in the otherdirection.

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If we had dwelt in life as a mosaic of purely physical perceptive experiences ~ in which trees, clouds, Tūī, and Ngaro Huruhuru were only biological expressions of differentiated matter; it came to be that we could no longer inhabit that apparatus.

One by one, people themselves lit up like fireflies and birthed a sensibility that all sentient beings were ALIVE (not just alive). This sensibility was not organised, there were no leaders or followers, no special vestments were worn or no supplications to ragged icons made, because the sensibility did not seek power over any other sentient being.

People fire-flied (came into the realisation)that the field of all life was infused with a resonance that tended all beings. Concomitantly, people started attuning to not only their minds, dispensed with any power-over stratagems, and came to reside in a deep inner knowing that went by different informal names, such as gut instinct and warm heart. As a result, people began listening to the knowing of these resonant body centres for correspondences with all other sentient beings who never forgot that a body implies a galaxy; that all life coalesces as a physical being and an immanence of oneness.

At the time of writing (2026), the apprehension of the wholeness of life and our collective indwelling breath could seem distant, quaint, or without politics. This, because our forgetting of this oneness has been thousands of years in the making and the propagating. Such that words like love and sacred cause a culturally aspirant person to flinch. Other fortunate, though often persecuted peoples knew the significance of, and maintained the sacred grove to hold the forest and all life together and knew innately that the rock is sacred. To dismiss this remembrance as irrational has been a means of asserting power over myriad lifeforms and promulgating human social strata.

Here, the Cicadas      bristle the small hairs of my inner ear and so I am filled with their inflections of wing joy in the kahikatea and all the other tall breathing ones.

As the people became metaphysical fireflies, they too could experience summer wing joy on the branches, leaves, and trunks of the trees, and feel the deep-time rumbling of the ocean ~ our original home.

As firefly people grew in remembrance of life’s oneness, they became unable to leave any being without habitat or home. It was a matter of feeling-perceiving with the small pinches of galactic firefly light. And so, the remembrance came in waves, ceaselessly like the ocean.

As the people became once more full of light, they knew that this precious honeycomb could not be whittled away from them again. They could march in the streets, but they could also listen-in deep to the well of knowing inside. And connect there, because that’s where the emanations arise and rekindle collective oneness ~ breathing with the bristling cicada trees, the deep-time ocean, the honeybees who exist for themselves and pollinate the food we eat, and the ngaro huruhuru who keep the forests alive and breathing.

With firefly light, the people could not leave a single sentient being bereft of sanctuary. In all aspects of life therefore, provisions were made for the peaceable coexistence of all immanent beings.

Robyn Maree Pickens

Waitangi Day 2026

Karamea