Matariki: Horizons, Invitations, and Wayfinding | By Paul Fromont
BY PAUL FROMONT, MATARIKI 2025
Me mātau ki te whetū, I mua it te kōkiri of te haere
Before you set forth on a journey, be sure you know the stars.
The human heart is searching for something larger, something greater than its own pettiness.[1]
Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown... A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect... Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.[2]
This piece of writing is the culmination of personal reflections that were begun over the course of Matariki 2023 when I acutely felt the absence of my friend and fellow wayfinder Mike Riddell[3], who would often say to me, quoting New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, that ‘we Pākehā have to bow the head and learn from our elder brother [Māori]. Then the water may begin to flow in our dry watercourses.’[4]
Each time he said it, I was aware of just how little my life intersected with te ao Māori, te Tiriti of Waitangi[5], and marae. I nourish the desire[6] that this will change. I long to discover how to walk upright[7] within a Māori world, to become a better Pākehā, a better human being.
Moana Jackson has written that ‘... the Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one’, a tradition that is ‘forged in journey’s across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea, while longing to know what lay beyond that distant point where the earth met the sky. It has always been a daring, as well as imaginative tradition propelled by both a longing to explore and a confidence that has come from stories told in this land.’[8]
Sunrise, Matapouri Beach - Picture by Paul Fromont, 2024.
And so, I decided to approach the Matariki Advisory Committee’s principles[9] from the perspective of navigation[10]. I’d read Jeff Evan’s book Polynesian Navigation and the Discovery of New Zealand, and watched the 2022 documentary film Whetū Mārama: Bright Star, which tells the story of Sir Hekenukumai Ngaiwi Puhipi and his significance for Māori in recovering the traditional arts of Māori navigation.
More commonly known as Sir Hector Busby or Hec Busby (Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kahu), he built 26 traditional waka, and the double-hulled Te Aurere, which has sailed over 30,000 nautical miles in the Pacific, using the traditional practices and seafaring knowledge.
I was inspired by the ways these wayfinders gave themselves over to ‘the lonely vagaries of wind and weather’[11], by their courage, and their willingness to extend themselves into the unknown, out beyond their comfort zones and their fears.
Also, much on my mind every Matariki, is Louis Teumere Atger[12]. In his own way he was a wayfinder too, my Tahitian-born grandfather who at the age of sixteen, left his parents and all but one sibling, as he followed that sibling out beyond the horizon to Aotearoa-New Zealand, his future, at the point, unseen and uncharted.
Horizons
The greatest challenge is to begin; there is something deep in us, that conspires with what wants to remain within safe boundaries and stay the same.[13]
There is always something beyond the horizon.[14]
God is the far horizon of your yearning.[15]
Shit happens. And in the midst of the shit, God.[16]
I can readily imagine those early Polynesian wayfinders seeing horizons as the line between life and death, the fine line separating the past from the present, the known from the unknown.
John O’Donohue called horizons: ‘the shorelines of new worlds.’ Similarly, ‘Te Ruki Kawiti, whose signature sits atop the te Tiriti of Waitangi, warned his people’, Alistair Reese writes, ‘that the covenant[17] would soon be broken, but he also urged that they not be the ones to break it’. Instead he exhorted them to ‘look to the horizons of the sea [the transformation of the future].’[18] Hope looks into the distance, watching for the first sign of the shorelines of new worlds. Hope responds to invitations to work for better futures for us all.
Kukutauwhao Island – Looking out to the Poor Knights Islands and the horizon beyond them. Picture by Paul Fromont, 2024.
Fr. John Main OSB, writes that having been rooted and grounded in Christ our lives and their horizons continue to expand as we learn to live into the infinity of God. ‘We find ourselves within His mystery and we lose ourselves within it.’[19]
When I think of horizons I remind myself that wonder is an edge state. I think too of my life, and indeed, of all life, lived as it is between the already and the not yet. I think of my deepest desires, desires that Fr. John O’Connor encourages, are ‘planted in us by God to direct us to the purpose of our human existence.’[20]
In my life, the horizons to which I look, my expectations of myself, my hopes for the future, my deepest desires, all consistently seem bigger than my ability to live into, or at the very least, toward.
Fear too has consistently manifest itself in my life as denials of the summons to live what Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis[21] describes as the ‘largeness of our calling’, a calling lived with integrity amidst the uncertainties, vulnerabilities, troubling questions, fears, and conflicts of our lives.
I look up from typing, and out the window, out beyond the Tutukākā Harbour, toward the horizon. I feel the questions and contradictions of my own life. I reflect on what I’m grateful for. I think about my growing edges. I listen. I feel for what seems most alive in me at this point in my life. I think about the invitations to risk-taking and trust, and set those alongside the particular fears I need to invite God into.
Photo taken from Kukutauwhao Island, Tutukaka - By Paul Fromont, 2024.
There is both attraction and resistance when I look to the horizon. There is also the recognition that there will be ‘no growth if [I] do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different’,[22] no growth unless I learn to deeply trust God.
For those first Pacifica wayfinders the horizon represented a death of sorts, sometimes it was literal death that it represented. When they set out on the vast ocean, they set out into the complete unknown. For them there was no certainty that they would ever return to the life they knew, let alone survive. Their journeying was a practice of what the ancient desert monks called memento mori. Their mortality and finiteness was ever before them.
I think of my own mortality too, as I contemplate the horizon, as I reflect on the possible meanings and purposes of my own life. I come, in the words of Douglas E. Christie, ‘to feel the fragility and the preciousness of existence’. I look at the horizon and I often find myself mentally flailing about, pulling back, fear-full, but also knowing that I want to better learn to live and grow ‘continuously against a horizon of ultimacy.’[23]
When you look to the horizon, what do you see?
What comes to mind?
What are you grateful for?
What fears arise?
What experiences of God do you feel able to confidently navigate from?
Where is the aliveness in your life?
The insistent invitation, the desires, the longings?
Which fears that might be hiding something deeper, more invitational, and more life-giving?
In what direction might Jesus be walking, inviting you to trust, to follow him, to take the first step[24], out beyond the place you currently find yourself?[25]
The Journey (We Call Our Life)
Now we have our brief moment here,
We came yesterday, are here today, will be gone tomorrow.
Let that brief moment be spent in communion
with the whole of life
so that we will not have lived in vain.[26]
Matariki reminds me that through baptism I am inescapably in Christ[27] and Christ is in me[28]. This, more than anything else, is my standing place, it’s my tūrangawaewae. I have a Jesus-shaped identity, which is to say that I identify as “Christian”[29], a follower of Jesus of Nazareth.
In our contemporary worlds where so many people, and so much has been proven untrustworthy, Jesus remains my means of orientating and directing a journey that is uniquely my own, even as it is also a journey with, for, and alongside others.
In calling disciples, the invitation that Jesus envisages is plain and simple, an invitation to be on a journey, learning to live a fully human life after his example.[30] It is not an invitation to fill our lives with more and more so-called religious activities and behaviour; learning from Jesus, following Jesus, is both more challenging and more befitting those who are called to image Love.[31]
It is not uncommon for people to believe that being Christian represents a departure from the world, or that being a Christian is to be over and against the world. However, the Christian life – being in Christ – ‘is not to deny, oppose or compete with the life of the world, but is an invitation to participate in the realisation of life’s fulness and gift. [It’s] about responding to God’s invitations to be a part of the transformation of all life’[32], including our own lives.
God is with me in all of life, including my suffering, flaws, and difficulties.
Wayfinding: Te wa, the journey of life.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.[33]
The one journey that ultimately matters is the journey into the place of stillness deep within oneself.[34]
I try to recall
the currents, compass
errors and storms that took me
off course, asking
whether, and for how long
one’s initial bearing lasts.[35]
The moment of change is the only poem.[36]
Australian theologian Heather Thomson, writes that ‘inner work [accompanies] the outer work of ... action. [Disciplined], self-reflective, transformative practices such as contemplation, meditation, spiritual direction and retreats, enabling healing from past hurts and deeper listening and attentiveness.’ These practices enable us to let go (usually unconsciously) of our innate ‘desires for power and control, driven by unhealed wounds and their resultant fears, anxieties and habitual reactions...’[37]
Looking North, Dusk - Photo by Paul Fromont, 2024.
The Jesus stories, theology, prayer, the company of others, the richness of good conversation, being in the world (but not defined by it[38]), and contemplative spirituality[39] are how I find my way. They’re the resources I take with me, they’re the ocean currents, the stars, the sun, the birds by which I find my way toward the fulfilment of God’s loving intentions for my life.
During Matariki I considered the broad lessons of Polynesian wayfinders[40]. I reflected on the importance of living into an expanding vision of what it means to be a human being. I also thought of lessons learnt from wayfinders like my grandfather and my wife. I appreciatively recalled Fr. Neil Darragh[41], John Bluck[42], Glenn Colquhoun,[43] Dame Anne Salmond, and Annabel “Ani” Mikaere (Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāti Porou) who encourages me, as a Pākehā, to take a “leap of faith”[44], an invitation equally at home in the context of my continuing to leap and unfurl myself into the grace[45] of a Jesus-shaped journey of becoming freer, more deeply human, and more alive, even as I age toward death.
Cistercian monk Fr. Matthew Kelty, writes that “contact with elemental forces has a way of reducing life to fundamental questions. The sea, the mountains, the desert, the wilderness, have all been from ancient times the testing place of the spirit.”[46]
And so, I end this reflection having come full circle. Matariki, while multifaceted in meaning and significance, will always be for me an invitation to navigation and discernment, will be God’s invitation to me to reflect on who I am, where I am, where I belong, and in which direction am I being drawn and invited. As I age I want to be becoming more Jesus-orientated as a human-being, one who woven into and held in the unfolding of God’s continuing work of creation[47] and tikkun olam[48].
[1] Henri Nouwen, in Michael Ford, Wounded Prophet, p. 26.
[2] John O’Donohue.
[3] Mike, a wayfinder, died in March 2022. He has these words on his headstone: ‘There are rumours of God, and I mean to follow the trail.’ So do I!
[4] I’m thinking here of James K. Baxter’s poem ‘The Māori Jesus’, and his ‘Song to the Holy Spirit’.
[5] Here I was thinking of anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond’s article ‘Injustice is Like a Whale’ first published in Newsroom, 23rd of August 2022, and republished with permission in independent Catholic magazine Tui Motu InterIslands, Issue 275, October 2022, which is where I read it. In that article, she wrote, citing Pa Henare Tate, that ‘Te Tiriti was not implemented’. Encouragingly she reminded me that ‘the intent of the Te Tiriti’ is to ‘uphold the tapu and mana of all parties – the Rangatira, the hapū and tāngata māori with their tikanga, and the incoming settlers.’ She concludes, ‘Rather than seeing the Treaty as a “bridge” across a chasm of misunderstanding, in the spirit of “pernicious polarization”, perhaps Te Tiriti can be visualized as a meeting place where different groups of New Zealanders come together in a spirit of tika (justice), pono (truth), and aroha to share ideas, resolve injustices and seek peace with one another. Instead of working towards separation maybe we can try to “live together differently”, respecting the tapu and mana of others.’
[6] Jim Manney, ‘when we find out what we really want, we find out what God wants too, because God has planted his desires in our hearts’.
[7] Thanks to New Zealand GP and poet Glenn Colquhoun.
[8] Moana Jackson, ‘The Art of Having Faith in Ourselves”, his foreword to Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (2022), p. 1.
[9] Remembrance, celebrating the present, and looking to the future.
[10] Matariki, and more especially the star Puanga (Rigel), were associated with ocean-going navigation.
[11] Peter Bland, a line from his poem “Elegy”.
[12] Born in 1906 at Pīra'e on the island of Tahiti.
[13] John O’Donohue.
[14] Jose Andreas, Chefs Table television series.
[15] David Whyte on The One You Feed podcast, episode 810. 07.05.2025.
[16] Mike Riddell, Sacred Journey (Oxford: SPCK, 2010), p. 30 (or p.22 in the Bucket Press edition). See also his chapters titled “Beyond the Horizon” and “Facing the Unknown”.
[17] Alistair Reese convincingly argues that Te Tiriti’ should be understood through the theological lense of covenant. See his excellent little book He Tatau Pounamu: The Treaty of Waitangi: A Covenant of Reconciliation (Auckland: Karuwhā Trust and Venn Foundation, 2024).
[18] Ibid., p. 79.
[19] John Main, Word Made Flesh.
[20] See his book Food for Faith (2023, CopyPress: Nelson), pp. 100-103.
[21] See his book, A Life of Meaning (2023). Hollis provides rich and wise insights into the human condition and the deep needs of the soul. Since I first encountered him in 1998 (The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife), he has provided the impulse for me to live a more self-reflective, examined, and thoughtful life.
[22] John O’Donohue.
[23] Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 76.
[24] Here I’m also thinking of the opening stanza of David Whyte’s poem “Start Close In”:
Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Collected in River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007 (Langley, Washington: Many Rivers Press, 2007), pp. 362-63.
[25] Here I’m thinking of Matthew 14:22-32, the story of Jesus calling Peter to get out of the boat and walk across the sea to him. Also worth thinking about at this point is the practice of spiritual direction which can be very beneficial in helping discern the invitations of horizons, the content of your journey, and wayfinding more generally. Highly recommended is NZ Anglican Priest Sue Pickering’s book Spiritual Direction: An Introduction, while Spiritual Growth Ministries (SGM) offer great resources too, including help finding a spiritual director. David Whyte has a poem, “The TrueLove” that might provide you with a different standpoint and means of reflecting on this Jesus-story. The poem can be found online, and is collected in David Whyte, River Flow: New and Selected Poems 1984-2007 (Langley, Washington: Many Rivers Press, 2007), pp.198-200.
[26] Fr. Matthew Kelty, OCSO, An Elemental Life: Mystery and Mercy in the Work of Father Matthew Kelty by Louis A. Ruprecht (2018).
[27] Galatians 3:26-28.
[28] Colossians 1:27.
[29] However burdened this description is by contemporary cultural-historical baggage, or however personally nuanced or qualified it is for me.
[30] St. Irenaeus ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive.’
[31] 1 John 4: 7-21.
[32] Sarah Bachelard.
[33] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude.
[34] Gordon Cosby, in his foreword to Elizabeth O’Connor Search for Silence.
[35] From “Dead Reckoning”, a poem by NZ poet Michael Jackson, collected in his collection of poems titled Dead Reckoning (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006), p. 50.
[36] Adrienne Rich, from her poem “Images For Godard”.
[37] Heather Thomson, No Sense of Entitlement (2023).
[38] John 17: 14-15 (MSG).
[39] Living spiritually is ‘living with Jesus at the center’ – Henri Nouwen.
[40] During my most recent visit to Te Rerenga Wairua (Cape Reinga), in January 2024, I looked out to the horizon, struck again by the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, and the scale of their achievement.
[41] His essay, “A Pakeha Spirituality”.
[42] Long, White & Cloudy: In Search of a Kiwi Spirituality.
[43] His experiences at Te Tii, which I finally managed to visit in early December 2023 on the Purerua Peninsula, 15 minutes northeast of Kerikeri. See his collection of poems The Art of Walking Upright, and his essay ‘Jumping Ship’.
[44] ‘[T]here is nowhere else in the world that one can be Pākehā. [And] whether the term remains forever linked to the shameful role of the oppressor or whether it can become a positive source of identity and pride is up to Pākehā themselves.’ ‘All that is required of them’, Mikaere writes ‘is a leap of faith.’
[45] Adapted from John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us, p. 14.
[46] Fr. Matthew Kelty, OCSO, “The Psalms as Prayer” from Sermons in a Monastery: Chapter Talks.
[47] ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and...’ (Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible). I’ve long read his use of the word ‘began’ as suggesting God’s ongoing work of creation, God’s ongoing activity of creating, forming, shaping, and sustaining. God began, and God continues. Here, I also think of the work of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John F. Haught, and Ilia Delio OSF.
[48] A rich Hebrew phrase that at a minimum speaks of healing and repair.
