Becoming a walking restorer
A Blog by Louise Marra · April, 2026
I want to talk about love.
Not the sanitized version. Not romance. But mauri aroha — the life force of love. The generative force of the universe. We won’t change the world without it.
Love has been largely exiled from organisations, from systems, from the way we define change. But love — life force love — has the power to fold back into itself, that which seems unlovable.
This has become central to my own practice.
I often ask myself: Can I be the love for this? For whatever is arising — especially the parts that feel difficult, uncomfortable, or unwanted. It is a potent mantra, give it a go.
And when I can’t — and sometimes I can’t — I ask: Can someone else hold that love for me? Can you be the love for what is arising in me, as right now I cant do that alone. We need each other in this way.
What if our changemaking and leadership worked like this too?
What if we allowed what appears to be “in the way” to become the evolving way —an invitation to expand our collective capacity to love, to transform, to respond differently?
And we can’t experience mauri aroha if we don’t have a love for justice and a kinship relationship with the more than human world. We are not really catching the current of love if we cannot include the injustices of the past and present, the earth and other beings. We share this planet.
Sometimes love is soft and tender and sometimes it is fierce. A clear, grounded no can be an expression of love — a boundary that makes space for something new. We need this fierce and vital mauri.
But when that “no” is fueled by hatred, it simply feeds the very patterns we’re trying to change. It feeds the swirling disowned hatred that fuels the world we say we don’t want anymore.
So the question becomes: How do we interrupt that cycle? How do we meet polarisation without being consumed by it?
One practice I return to
— imperfectly — is this: I bring the full spectrum of a polarised issue into my awareness. I feel it. Sit with it. Let it move through me, in connection with the Earth.
And then I respond. Not from reactivity, but from something deeper.
The response is always different and often in all ways.
This, for me, is the path of becoming a walking restorer — rather than a repeater of the very patterns I grieve.
These patterns of horror also now require us bringing together spiritual work and leadership, systems change and justice work. They must come together, just as our bodies and spirt, and earth and our bodies are together. This is why awakening and leadership, changemaking and activism are two sides of the same coin. They are partners, they can’t happen separately anymore. We can’t bypass a suffering world with spiritual loftiness and we can’t create our changemaking from anything less than the transformational powers of love and spirit. Wairua.
If we keep what feels unlovable unloved, then we will continue to have a world filled with hatred and not love. It is time to invoke this transformational power of love.
Midwifing a new world.
These are extraordinary times. The ground is shifting beneath us. It’s easy to feel uncertain, even untethered.
And yet — within this instability lies immense possibility.
A transformative force lives within each of us.
We are not just witnesses to change — we are participants in it. Alchemists of it.
That force, to me, is mauri aroha.
So perhaps the invitation is this:
Let the world in. Let it change you. Let your old patterns be undone.
Trust your inner knowing — your intuition, your creativity, your embodied wisdom, your earth and ancestral connections you are fostering. These are your navigational tools now.
And remember — you are not alone.
We are part of a vast, interconnected unfolding. Our paths weaving together into something larger than any one of us.
Together, we are midwifing a new world — one rooted in connection, in care, in the
remembering of what it means to belong.
