They say the darkest part of the night is just before the dawn, but for a while there, I wasn't sure the sun was ever coming back up.

I’m going to be straight with you: this is the scariest and most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. I’m opening up about a mental health crisis that took me right to the edge—scarily close to a final exit. I'm talking about a state of total "decoherence," where the weave of my world didn't just fray; it felt like it had completely disintegrated. In our Māori worldview, we might call this a heavy season in Te Kore—the Great Void. But as Reverend Māori Marsden taught us, Te Kore isn't just "nothingness"; it is the realm of raw potentiality.

Growing up with a Pākehā mum who held onto a very specific, strongly colonised religious view, my scientific mind was always at war. I want to be clear—I love my mum deeply. She did the absolute best with what she’d been given, and she always did it with a pure heart. 

To me, spirituality looked like fairy tales—nice stories for Sunday mornings, but nothing that stood up to the rigour of 'real' data or the 'hard' world of business and physics. I experienced a strain of neoliberalism and imperial theology that had weaponised the spirit, turning it into a tool for control or relegating it to a building you visit once a week.

I was sitting in a DAPAANZ workshop in late 2023, surrounded by addiction practitioners, listening to stories that defied the standard script. We’ve been told for a century that certain chemicals are like a "hook" that once it grabs you, it never lets go. But the data doesn't back that up. Why does one person use a substance recreationally and walk away, while another loses everything to it? Is it just bad luck in the genetic lottery, or is something deeper happening in the fabric of our community?

I was “passengering” to Mt Manaia with my bro and sis the other day listening to Unity Pacific’s “Thou We Are”, and it hit me how much of our story in Te Tai Tokerau is tied to a land thousands of miles away. Most people see the red, gold, and green flags at Waitangi and think it’s just about the music. But if you look deeper, those colours are signals of a shared "Quantum Entanglement" with a global struggle for sovereignty.

The connection isn't accidental. Back in the 19th century, our prophets like Te Kooti and Ratana saw something in the scriptures that the missionaries didn't want them to see. They looked at the story of Israel and didn't see a lost people needing British "salvation"—they saw themselves. They claimed that identity of a "Chosen People" with a direct covenant to Io, bypassing the spiritual authority of "Babylon" or the British Empire.

There’s a heavy feeling hanging over our towns lately, a kind of quiet isolation that shouldn't exist in a place as connected as the North. We’re surrounded by whānau, yet the "loneliness epidemic" is hitting us hard. It’s because we’ve been sold a lie—a "Bad Explanation" that says you are a solo agent, a "self-made man" responsible only for yourself. We’ve been conditioned to think of ourselves as separate "billiard balls" clicking against each other but never truly merging. This is the Newtonian error, the architecture of Babylon, and it’s making us sick.

Kia ora e te whānau. Pull up a chair and let’s have a real talk for a moment. 🌿 We often think of our faith or our deepest beliefs as a direct, unedited download from the heavens—a fixed rock that has never changed. But if we look at the whakapapa of history, we start to see the fingerprints of men where we expected the hand of the Divine.

The truth is, much of what we call "standard doctrine" in Te Tai Tokerau was forged in the fires of political survival. In the language of physicist David Deutsch, many of these "rules" are "Bad Explanations"—ideas that are easy to vary because they served a specific person’s power rather than the universal truth of the Woven Universe.

Ever felt like you’re standing in that grey space between the dark and the dawn, not quite sure where the path is leading? That’s Te Whaiao—the shimmering transition where potential starts to take form. In the tradition of the Whare Wānanga, this is the bridge between Te Pō, the realm of becoming, and Te Ao Mārama, the world of light.

This Christmas, as the Pōhutukawa blossoms paint our Tai Tokerau coastline red, I’ve been reflecting on the ancient "Word" (Logos) from scripture. It’s wild how these frequencies vibrate at the exact same level as quantum physics. In science, we talk about Entanglement—the fact that once two particles connect, they are forever linked across the universe. In our Māori world, we call this Whanaungatanga. Whether it’s the breath of the Creator or the quantum field, the message is the same: you are never truly solo.

Stop chasing a "bottom line" that doesn't exist; your bank account is literally breathing the same air as the mangroves in the Hokianga, and science finally has the receipts to prove it.

Tēnā koutou, e te iwi. Pull up a chair here on the porch. I’ve been sitting with two books lately—one is David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, and the other is a 19th-century Te Reo Māori translation of the Gospels. At first glance, you’d think they’re worlds apart. One talks about quantum multiverses and the reach of explanations, while the other talks about the Logos—Te Kupu—the Word that brought life. But when you look closer, especially through a Ngāpuhi lens, they are telling the exact same story: nothing exists in isolation.