Elevation: Time Scales

Download the free app, walk up Matairangi, Mount Victoria (or down, or both) and take in Ruby Solly’s new composition, which responds in real time to your elevation.

Music by Ruby Solly; Coding by Robin Marshall; Artwork by Isobel Joy Te Aho-White; Audio mastered by Zak Argabrite; Produced by Andrew Laking. Platform by PQMD.

We say that life is a journey, but could a journey also be a life? Is it our own life? Or one of the lives that belongs in the vast ocean of our whakapapa? Or is it the opportunity to step into the footfalls of those who first settled in this space, whose mauri imbues every path, stone, and tree upon this mountain? It is the journey of all of these and more, in a space without time where all of these realities overlap and interconnect in a fluid spiral. Prepare yourself for the culmination of many journeys as we each take our own path from Papatūānuku to Ranginui to feel the intensity of their love for each other, and as we descend back down to our earthly mother to hear her heartbeat and discover the hidden voice of her unborn child, Rūaumoko.

As we develop across the course of our life span, we go from being pressed to our mothers and guardians in a safe nesting embrace, to a time of great learning and wananga with the world around us as we develop from gaining knowledge to sharing it with others. The more we share the more we interweave ourselves with those around us and the more we too are allowed to learn from the teachings of our people and our world. Flurries of birds echo our language as we echo theirs. Listen closely for familiar tunes from the lungs of our tuakana as they fly. As we ascend, sound icicles begin to trickle from the heavens, preparing us for the final stage of this journey that encompasses so many haerenga from across our lives and times. Like Whātaitai, a taniwha whose soul changed to that of a great bird upon this mountain, we too may weep at what we have lost and what we have gained through the loosing within this journey and the many others contained within its steps.

When we reach the top of the mountain, or when we decide to at first descend to this place from the distant stars where the souls of newborns begin to swim, we hear sound icicles dripping from the pūmotomoto; both the taonga pūoro, and the gateway between layers of the heavens; Rangiātea. Earthly needs for sustenance fall away as more sounds of our highest skies come to embrace us as our journey takes us from our physical form to become one with the world once again as we had in another beginning before our heart’s first beats.

May you use this journey as a rongoā; as a medicine. If you feel as if your physical body has deserted you, journey down the mountain to integrate yourself within your environment before syncing your heart and breathe with Papatūānuku. If you wish to cleanse yourself in the winds that sweep these peaks and to remind yourself of your place within all of our interlinking stories across time, then begin from the sea and seek the sky.

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