One Saturday each month | December 2025 - May 2026
Next session:
April 11th 2026 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
* note: April’s date shifted for Easter, due to the holiday weekend
Meshes of the Afternoon is a relaxed monthly community gathering (Dec 2025 - May 2026) at the Alice Krebs Lodge on Te Raekaihau.
A small, intergenerational gathering, inspired by the longstanding Lifting the Creek efforts in Haewai. The Meshes meetings listen for threads of connection, repair and possibility in Te Raekaihau and the Valley, connecting art and poetry with ecological action and community-held communication technologies.
The series leads toward a dawn listening weekend in May 2026 as part of the creative event, Reveil, when communities across the world listen together at dawn as part of a planetary creative technology experiment.
* * *
The theme of our April session is Wai Māori/freshwater
April’s session connects a theme of fresh water and river networks with different streams of communication and translation. As always, please bring a poem, a short passage, something in progress along the theme of water, streams, catchments, braided rivers, wetlands and water sheds, or simply come to listen and be in company on the headland.
The April session will also focus on preparations for Reveil, a project about planetary radio, listening in place and streaming the sounds of the dawn chorus that is coming up on the first weekend of May: https://soundtent.org/reveil.html
In May 2026, we are adding to Reveil’s invitation to rise before dawn and listen, another invitation to share tiny textual poems across the network. A mesh network is an off-grid messaging system that uses radio for text messages to travel from device to device when there’s no phone coverage or internet connectivity. If you have a mesh device please feel welcome to bring it along, but don't be deterred by not knowing about the mesh. We hope to encourage learning about the mesh and options for community-held resilient communication networks with May's experiment, but the sessions remain light informal meetings focused on sharing eco-writing and listening.
Sessions are informal, open, free of charge. Feel free to bring snacks to share.
DETAILS
Date:
April 11th, 2026
Time:
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Phone +64 27 512 3338
VENUE
Alice Krebs Lodge, Te Raekaihau Reserve
113 View Rd. 6023
Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington
Open street map:
geo:-41.339795,174.788244?z=19
DETAILS
Date:
April 11th, 2026
Time:
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Phone +64 27 512 3338
Date:
April 11th, 2026
Time:
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Phone +64 27 512 3338
VENUE
Alice Krebs Lodge, Te Raekaihau Reserve
113 View Rd. 6023
Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington
Open street map:
geo:-41.339795,174.788244?z=19
Alice Krebs Lodge, Te Raekaihau Reserve
113 View Rd. 6023
Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington
Open street map:
geo:-41.339795,174.788244?z=19
Note on finding the Lodge
The headland is covered in winding paths that lead around to the Alice Krebs Lodge, a special place. If you have never been to the Lodge before, we will meet you and start walking up at 3.50 at the very top of View Road, by the post box.
Looking ahead
These sessions run on one Saturday each month at the Alice Krebs Lodge on Te Raekaihau, depending on Lodge’s availability. Apologies for the complexity: the Lodge is used as a space of refuge, so the meetings are necessarily flexible and responsive to the needs in community.
Currently scheduled Saturday 2026 dates:
Jan 10, Feb 21, March 14, April 11, May 2 weekend
These meet-ups invite creative responses to place: poetry, stories, and environmental writing, with space for diverse creative practices. Past sessions have included music, image-making, co-design and community-technology experiments. Each meeting responds to those who come along and what they bring with them.
Please feel welcome to visit the Lodge in your own creative mode. Bring a poem, a short written passage, an artwork, a creative technology experiment, by you or a creator you appreciate, or simply some living questions around supporting water networks, resilience, and renewal in connection to place and living in Te Whanganui a Tara.
Anyone interested in making and learning in company in relation to the diverse ecologies, whakapapa connections, and the histories held by the headland and coastline welcome to attend. There are rich stories of Te Raekaihau and the creek that used to run through Haewai/Houghton Valley, and many creatures and guardians who have called this coastline home.
Reveil, 2nd/3rd May 2026
The Reveil 24+1 hour broadcast involves getting up early to listen to the dawn, and live streaming the dawn chorus with others around the planet. The weekend is timed with International Dawn Chorus day, which has been celebrated on the first Sunday of May since 1984.
Building on Haewai’s participation in Reveil 2025, Reveil 2026 grows participation connecting audio streaming with shared poetry across mesthastic networks in Aotearoa and Vanuatu: Meshes of the Ata Hāpara
A reminder that the Haewai Community Bookshare is growing here.
The Meshes Saturday sessions can serve as a time for people to make their book swaps in person.
Inventaire is an open source book-sharing platform that turns personal book collections into an interconnected local distributed library. The Bookshare group welcomes anyone in the vicinity to share books (and remember who borrowed what!)
Joining is fairly simple: create an account on Inventaire, and you can add your own books by searching for them, or using your webcam to scan a book's barcode, or entering the ISBN number. Then join the Haewai Community Bookshare Group. We can help if you are having trouble.
The Haewai community book share includes a selection on environmental themes, and more wide-ranging topics. Each book added enriches the collective pool, and keeps stories, poems, and knowledge circulating, rather than gathering dust on the bookshelf.
The Inventaire project is underpinned by Wikidata and has a strong ethical foundation. The platform has a firm commitment to never sell personal data. More info: wiki.inventaire.io