Three sentences. Three exiles. And why “just get over it” is not a garden — it’s a weed strategy. Poison ivy doesn’t announce itself. It sits quietly along the fence line, climbs where no one is looking, and waits for the right conditions. Then it releases. The strangulation isn’t sudden — it was always there. What changes is that the conditions are finally right for it to show what it’s been doing the whole time. Colonisation operates the same way. Most of the time it doesn’t look like...

I chose the metaphor of Poison Ivy for a specific reason: There is a plant called poison ivy. Once it gets into your system, the urushiol oil it carries can take up to three days to produce a reaction. By the time the itch arrives — the rash, the inflammation, the unbearable urge to scratch — you have no memory of the contact. You were not paying attention when it happened. You may not even have been near the plant. It spread to you on the hands of someone who did not know they were carrying...

We revisit the alignment of TPO and Te Maramataka - The Temporal Spine There is a question I get asked when people first encounter Te Poutama Ora: why ninety days? It’s a fair question. Most wellness programmes are structured around weeks — six weeks, eight weeks, twelve. Clean numbers. Neat calendar blocks. The kind of timeframes that fit neatly into a semester or a quarter. Te Ara Iwa doesn’t work like that. The reason why tells you almost everything you need to know about what makes this...