WORMS

MARCH 2024 by SARAH HOPKINSON

This writing began after our second wānanga Pākehā as a response to our collective wonderings on the role and potential of darkness in The Tīpuna Project. You can see some of the other contributions here.

In the pitch dark, worms writhe and wriggle. They eat the rotting organic materials that are in the soil, releasing it as soluble nutrition for plant growth. They leave drilospheres wherever they roam -  tunnels that are lined with tiny amounts of matter that have gone through them and out the other end. 

Drilospheres are worm-width underground tunnel systems, tiny fertile tracks that run behind the worms. Without earthworms and these tunnels, plants can’t access nutrition and humans have to rely on fertilisers. Much like the bee, the earthworm is a keystone species for all life on earth. 

We started worm farming seven years ago, and now tend hundreds of thousands  of red wigglers. They’re a different species to the earthworm, but the process is the same. They live in a pitch dark environment,  feeding off waste from our plates.  When the worms eat the rotting food, the associated microbes (bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa)  also go through the worm's digestion. The resulting worm castings are so nutritionally rich and microbially alive that there is no other way to either manufacture it, or replicate it. 

In European folklore, worms are symbols of both death and renewal. The Tīpuna Project feels strongly of both. We are in the decomposition and we are in the spiral. 

Darkness is a place of  incredible fecundity. A place for rotten ideas and decomposing structures to be rearranged. In the dark, life can transform what was finished into something anew. Here in the Tīpuna Project, we have a chance to digest hospiced ideas of separation and supremacy and create nutrient tunnels, oriented to life, for understanding ourselves as Pākehā. 

The ‘I’ is truly lost in decomposition.  The worms, and their work, quickly erode any illusion that we are singular, individual, corporeal entities. This ‘I’,  that is identified as Sarah-body, rose from, and will eventually return to the earth -  a flow of entropy and syntropy that destroys boundaries of my people’s individuation.   I am you, and you are me and together we must writhe. 

In this darkness, of what we seek to do in this project, I feel truly lost. But it is a lost-ness of fitting proportion. The framework for understanding our reach both back to our ancestors and into ourselves, doesn’t exist and can not be seen. There is no linear form, and so there is no knowing. We are in the sludge, twisting, turning, without sight of what is ahead. Perhaps that is how it has always been. We create routes for travel through practice, through practice, through practice. 

There is inherent discomfort using the analogy of red wiggler worms for what it is to do this work as Pākehā. I wonder whether the work we are tending to in the Tīpuna Project is more important than just worms. I am gentle with these feelings though. Hello there, I say, recognising the brine I have been pickled in,  the centuries and centuries of white supremacy and human centrality.
Perhaps humans are more important than other living kin, my dis-ease whispers.
Your ideas are quite separate from a pile of food scraps in the dark! my hubris scoffs. 
The grumbling, manly mutters coming from somewhere, wander off as I keep on going. 

Here in this project, we attempt to digest the unresolved, the suppressed and the unspoken from our shared settler colonial violences.  In the tilled, deplete soil of what it is to be Pākehā, the drilosphere of this project  is undoubtedly infinitesimal.  But these subterranean tunnels, both underground and fugitive, might structure and sustain diverse new growth for understanding ourselves in relation to place in ways that are as yet unimagined. In ways that can’t be manufactured, or replicated.

Sometimes, when I imagine us as worms, the scale feels out. Like I am too big for that skin.
And then I zoom out. 

Notice the size of us today, in relation to all that was, and all that will be. 

Notice the size of us today, in relation to all of the universe. 

Notice that there is more life in a teaspoon of living soil, than all people on this earth. 

And then Pākehā humans as worms, creating drilospheres? 

That feels just about right.