Madeline Mason of Neighbourhood on Kinship

Written By Anna Birchall

Madeline Mason embraces her multiplicities wholeheartedly. A final year medical student, leader of community building non-profit, Neighbourhood NZ, an artist, a writer, a philosopher, fitness instructor, pot-luck queen, forest fairy, ocean nymph to name just a handful her glorious expressions.

One of many things I admire about Madeline is her ability to synthesise and share what she is led to discover by her immense curiosity. The latest of these expressions is her most special one yet, Kinship—an afternoon of connection to the self, community and the earth through 5 workshops and a dinner all set in within Kelmarna’s 4-acre garden surrounds.

Madeline is someone who makes me feel so optimistic for a future of interconnected, wholistic wellness because she’s building it in the present, uplifting and inspiring others as she goes.

What is Kinship?

Kinship truly does feel like a physical construction / embodiment of my soul. My passions and dreams are ever-changing but for the past year my focus has been centred around wellness through collectivism, presence, connecting more consciously to the earth and celebrating food as a social and cross-cultural vessel – Kinship is all of these things. I used to volunteer at Kelmarna Gardens a few years ago when I first moved to Auckland. I couldn’t believe its existence, sitting humbly in the heart of such a gentrified area yet generously offering its colourful sheds and abundant garden beds for everyone to share in. It wasn’t until this year when they lost crucial funding and risked closing that I was drawn back to the farm. 

I deeply believe one of the best ways to champion advocacy or push for social change is to allow people access to value something – whether that’s through experience, education or emotional connection – I felt that if I could emulate how special Kelmarna is through a physical event, then maybe more people would be willing to fight for its future. How can we truly care for things before we know how they feel? Kinship is our second fundraiser at the farm and the mission stays the same.

What inspired the seeds of Kinship to be planted and watered?

I’ve just come back from almost two months in America researching food systems access and inequities in undoubtedly the most divided developed nation in the world. Kinship embodies many of the learnings and the wisdom I learnt along the way in response to seeing how things have gone so wrong and what we lost in our shift from approaching the land, our whenua, as capitalists rather than conservationists. 

Whilst a lot of my learnings are recent, many of these themes have been alive for years, beating around my bloodstream. I come from a family of avid gardeners, celebrators of food and parents that ritualised our dining table as a portal of deeper understanding. I say that Kinship is a weaving of art, ecology, science and spirit because it truly is this meeting place of cultural ideas, philosophy, old rituals and deep knowing presented in a creative and communal way. The earth is the studio, the dining table is the gallery and the chairs are the artist residency. I invite you to take a seat.

How can people get involved and support?

Come along! It would be the biggest blessing to cook and care for you in this space. Kinship is an offering of deep healing and understanding, a sharing of stories and of self – to take part is to become part of the artwork.

If you are unable to make it, any donations through our ticket portal, or simply telling a friend who may resonate / need it also helps. It takes a lot of love and intention to create something like this and my only wish is that it reaches anyone who needs it.

What is your highest vision for the future of health?

This could be a very long answer. To put it as simply as possible, when I close my eyes I see a utopia of humans who are intune with their intuition, connected with sources of wellbeing and nourishment, where we create time and space for reflection and ritual and a place where we do things together. 

Often people only visualise health as symbols of white hospital buildings, a red cross and a trolley of bandages and IV lines. I’d love for us to visualise health as our post-yoga coffee with a longtime friend, sharing food across a feast-laden table, children and birdsong filling the garden, stimulating conversation and connectedness.

How can we effectively treat illness if we have become so dissociated from what wellness looks and feels like? To know health is to have something to fight for. Something to protect.

In what ways does nature play a role in keeping you well?

I used to transactionally take from the earth when I needed it. I never let the value of reciprocity truly get under my skin until I went back to the states recently. I saw how much we were abusing the earth and how many of their main waterways are now filled with forever chemicals, the extent of their soil that contains neurotoxins from a generation of intensive fertiliser and how fresh food is inaccessible in so many cities because our demand for fast food suffocated the art of slow growing.

Now I see the fragility and precious nature of our earth, I find just as much joy and purpose in giving to it, as I do taking from it. That for every ocean swim and forest frolic I am gifted, I take a moment to consider how I can gift something back. I’ve created new adventures for bees through my wildflower garden, I sprouted life from my old food via composting and I am learning to ride a bike in the city and not look like a dork doing it. This sense of purpose and perception of – it’s not only what I get but what I give – is such a potent medicine for me.

You have been at medical school for the past 5(?) years, and you talk about disentangling yourself from modern medicine. What has been your journey through exploring broader aspects of wellness and how has your perspective evolved through following this curiosity?

I’ve spent the last 5 years learning incredible (and somewhat insane) quantities of knowledge and clever advancements in the field of science and health. I am so grateful for my opportunity to walk in this field, but, as a friend put it the other day, the very fact that all of this learning has come from a textbook is emblematic of the fact that it is somewhat fixed and static. Our world has changed profoundly, even in my own short lifetime, and I truly believe we need to look both backwards, inwards and across to access new ways of knowing how to keep ourselves well in modern times.

For myself, beyond an acute / emergency context, I truly believe that the best tools to keep us well are embodied by our connection to the earth, each other, ourselves, our food and all the intangible and sometimes indescribable “knowings” within us. It spans far broader and far deeper than wellness packaged within a hospital, a gym or a supermarket. It’s cellular. Sometimes it’s beyond physicality. It’s simply, yet complexly multidimensional. 

This has made it increasingly hard to remain inside the hospital. It feels wrong and weird to be practicing a fixed form of medicine that hasn’t been critically analyzed or expanded on for decades. I used to feel overwhelmed by this but recently, I am beginning to feel excited by it. I am used to being pushed and pressed onwards by role models in my life but I cannot find any inside the hospital. So I can feel that this is my time to embody the change that I am desperately hoping to find in someone else. We are smarter than ever and yet in so many ways we are sicker than ever. I think my purpose is to show that there is another way of knowing.Another way of being.  Another way of healing.

What does healing mean to you?

I love to say, “healing is an art form.”. Because, fuck (!), it really is.

Healing is thinking all of the unthought thoughts. It is standing still and allowing the scary things to catch up with you, only to soften and befriend them once they are beside you. It’s excavating what is in your gut, because you feel something strongly there, beyond simply listening to your head. It is learning to be comfortable in chaos, in states of instability and it is viewing breaking open as an opportunity for rebirth. It is talking about how you are hurting not as hindsight, but in the moment. It is brave and brutal and I truly think our capacity for healing is the most loudly brilliant ability we possess as humans.

What are three simple practices people can do to embody wholeness/healing? 

Ooh I love this question!

  • Learning to make decisions with your heart and gut, beyond just your head. 

  • Re-associating with cycles, rhythms and seasons. Nature is not constant, nor are we.

  • Loving yourself. Hard. Actually interrogating the idea and very possibility that you can be best friends with yourself because life is so marvellous when you arrive there. What is the purpose of life if not to know yourself as deeply as possible? All good things emanate from that space. Authenticity has so many layers, you may have only met the most superficial one – be curious to burrow deeper.

What is a current thread of inquiry you’re following? What are you learning?

A current inquiry that I am gnawing at is the idea that time has breadth, rather than being only linear. I read a beautiful book about ritual recently and it talks about how rituals “furnish time”. I adore that. Time can be so fast and liquified but it can also be so broad and giving if we actively explore presence through re-association, ritual and returning to slower means of existence. To ritualise time is to set up a sunny seat by the window with the only purpose being to look out the window and think. A moment can be so much more if we take time to bask in it.

What is a piece of wisdom guiding you at the moment?

I read something recently that this era of rapid social change is starving us of time to reflect. So I am currently meditating on the idea that reflection is an act of resistance. Reflection drives personal change and precious curiosity. In a society that is so externally focused, reflection is the quiet inward flame of rebellion and returning home.

Make a wish.

I wish that everyone can return to, or discover,  the privilege of self-interrogation and self-actualisation. I’d love to coexist on this earth with all conscious beings. We all deserve it. The earth deserves it, too.

What books that have changed your life?

In absolutely no particular order (!!!):

Any podcast shows or particular episodes you’ve been moved by and recommend?

Join the Orbit

Instagram: @neighbourhoodnz — @madelinemaria___


Anna Birchall
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In conversation with Jessica Hunt of Kenkō Studios