A KÃNUKA ROCKING CHAIR - Ted Lyddon Hatten

A kānuka rocking chair 

It’s a small chair, 

not suitable for human bodies, or tiny houses.

Scaled more for stories,

or the lucid dreams of a dormouse,

it’s a sturdy chair carved from a piece of firewood,

kānuka (Kunzea ericoides), a type of evergreen, native to NZ. 

The wood is dense and satisfying to carve.

It’s a self-sowing tree, so it spreads easily, 

and is used often at barbecues and bonfires, 

because it burns long, slow, and hot.

Māori once made digging sticks out of kānuka - 

piercing the soil to plant and to pry up.

Europeans used kānuka as spokes for wagon wheels, 

because the wood was strong and abundant. 

Kānuka trees are often contorted by heavy winds. 

They are tolerant of severe conditions, 

capable of growing in the absence of soil, 

often between rocks and hard places. 

My hope for the Order is that our conversations 

would take after a kānuka rocking chair - 

contorted by an ancient wind, 

sturdy, tolerant, and irrepressible,

self-sowing and easily spread.

I harbor the hope that we might practice a level of listening that lures 

un-lost stories from the folds of the concentric circles of grace, 

where delicate stories burn long, slow, and hot - well into the night,

radiating from a shared axis like spokes of a big wheel turnin’.

May the large stories that fall from a small kānuka rocking chair land softly, 

like a cork,

evergreen arrows piercing the planet,

leaving only the dreams of a dormouse undisturbed. 

Ted Lyddon Hatten is an artist, theologian, and educator in Des Moines, Iowa, who works in ephemeral installation art, dry painting, and beeswax. He is an initiating member of the Order of the Rocking Chair. www.tedlyddonhatten.com