On the cusp of the September equinox, 185 members of the Coralus community gathered to mark its tenth anniversary at Saunders Farm on Algonquin territory. It was a turning point, a moment suspended between what had been built and what was asking to emerge. The first day felt like roots finding each other in rich soil; full of hospitality, reconnection, shared inquiry, and joyful synchronicities. The second day moved like water down a wild river: plans shifted, new ideas surfaced, and the gathering followed what wanted to happen rather than what had been planned.
Late into the second afternoon, we were drawn, almost summoned, to the spiral apple orchard for our closing ceremony. Walking toward it, it felt less like choosing a place and more like being chosen by it. Its sacred geometry invited us to step out of linear time into ceremonial time.
None of us knew that three Indigenous women, two Māori, one First Nations, were about to collapse colonial time into a portal.
Listening for the Call
Awhina, from Aotearoa (New Zealand), settled first in the orchard’s center with a large weaving she had been crafting throughout the gathering, pulling the threads of participants’ stories into one panel. The rest of us walked in silence toward the orchard.
Stacey, also from Aotearoa, carried her own thread and a white flag symbolizing the Voice of Wisdom. Beside her walked Shining Spirit woman (Angela Ashawasegai), an Ojibwe member of Henvey Inlet First Nation (and Owner & CEO of Indigenous Wellness Coaching from Turtle Island [North America]). As they approached, something aligned in the field. Unplanned, but intuitively Stacey whispered to Angela, “Would you like to walk with me?” The answer was yes. And in that yes, worlds began folding into each other.
“We started walking side by side in silence toward the centre,” Stacey recalls. “There were tohu, signs or clues you could say, on both sides; our cadence, the way we moved indicated the ancient process was aligning. Then we got into the call.”
The karanga is a ceremonial practice held by Māori women. A chanted conversation that opens the unseen realms.
“It’s not a power act,” Stacey says. “It’s a powerful act of service and acknowledgement of interconnection. If the representative of the host does not initiate the call, the rest of the sequence can’t happen.” Without the feminine voice opening the doorway, nothing else unfolds: not the men’s speaking, not the ancestors’ entry, not the arrival of future generations.
When the Trees Answered Back
Awhina chanted first, calling out to the guests on behalf of the current stewards of the land, the Saunders family, and the Indigenous caretakers whose presence remains in soil and memory. Awhina called, “Come forth. Bring your ancestors with you.“
Stacey answered the call on behalf of all of us—visitors, nations, community, and those who came before. “My role in responding was to bring us into spirited conversation with past, present, and future; I’m paying respects not only to the current Saunders family stewards of this land, but generations right back to the bedrock and those still to emerge.”
Back and forth they called, weaving worlds, collapsing past, present, and future into one singing moment. The air changed. A presence arrived, palpable as weather. Time became spacious, thick, alive. Turkey vultures circled overhead, an ancient symbol for whatever we are willing to face and let go, they will carry toward transformation.
Something extraordinary happened in Stacey’s body, becoming a vessel. “Others shared with me afterwards that my voice resonated so deeply it sounded like the trees were echoing it back.”
The land itself was answering—trees amplifying and releasing the call, the whole orchard participating as witness. For the sister walking with Stacey, the ceremony opened a profound reconnection that could only be expressed through the hongi—the pressing of noses, the act of connection and exchange of breath with Awhina and Stacey.
Rematriation as embodied return.
A Seam Between Worlds
A karanga came alive – thousands of miles from ancestral lands – in the orchard at Saunders Farm.
Stacey says: “Many are overly concerned with collapsing old systems but there’s an enormous amount of creating the new happening already—breathing new systems of consciousness into a new world. Let’s focus on that, the rest will take care of itself.”
What happened in the orchard revealed that land recognized a Māori ceremony. Something opened – a seam between worlds where different cosmologies could meet. It reminded us that we are not the first to navigate times of change or collapse. Wisdom lives in bodies, in practices, in ancestors and elementals and they are ready to participate.
“Because so many don’t have deep relationship with our relatives in the natural world, we’re making really stupid self-centred choices and we’re harming each other and our relatives,” Stacey said. “It’s the disconnect. Our lack of understanding of connectedness.”
Māori teach a different perspective of navigation:
“We don’t strive to go out there, we strive to come back home to ourselves, we pull the island to us.”
The karanga demonstrated that transformation isn’t solely a human endeavor. Those who were there say something stayed with them long after leaving the orchard – an interior rearrangement. In the weeks that followed, many described subtle but persistent shifts: dreams, clarity, unexpected ease, unexpected grief. As if the ceremony had installed a listening chamber inside them.
What the Orchard Revealed
For Coralus, the orchard revealed a rare relational, energetic, and cosmological coherence – a community able to hold ceremonial time, stay steady as different worlds touched, and listen as the land spoke back. It showed that this group can hold complexity, spirit, and emergence without collapsing into control, and that Coralus is becoming a place where lineage can land safely and transformation happens through relationship rather than performance.
Receiving a karanga marked a shift into a deeper mode of operating. The orchard became a mirror for how Coralus itself is transforming through capacity: the capacity to listen, cohere, and move with forces larger than itself. Coralus is learning to act as a living field capable of sensing beyond strategy, following emergence, and allowing land and place to guide direction.
Many long-arc shifts have already been underway at Coralus – dissolving the loan model, blending ventures and activators into “transformers,” moving toward distributed governance, and opening new flows of resources. Coralus is evolving from an organization into an organism – into embodying its name: coral + us.
This matters now because, as Coralus enters its next decade in a volatile climate, tools like planning, optimization, institutional logic won’t be enough. What’s required are the capacities revealed in the orchard: coherence, humility, attunement, and the ability to sense what wants to happen rather than impose what should and to respond collectively to the future that is calling it. To pull the island towards us….
An Invitation Echoes Back
The karanga at Saunders Farm sparked an invitation: to travel to Māori land in 2026 to experience the full ceremony – the complete welcome held by Indigenous women who carry practices unchanged for millennia. Come willing to get hands in soil, to pick up the tea towel. What Stacey calls “the living apprenticeship in real life.”
“The first meal is prepared for you. The next one, you’re making it. Your aroha (love) gets added and becomes part of it.”
The ceremony has actually already begun. It began in an apple orchard across the seas. It began with intention, and a call that echoed through trees.
The question now is simple and enormous:
The karanga has been sounded. How will we answer the call?
OFFERED TO US BY
Stacey Mareroa-Roberts & Vanessa Reid
with ancestors, land, and the many beings in the orchard.
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