In 2026, we are working with the Reveil’s convergence with the full moon to add lunar observation to our shared listening. The activity is designed as a way to sense the Moon directly and to include more communities across the Pacific, using simple, low-bandwidth ways of sharing short messages and poems for the moon as she lingers in the sky at dawn.

           Across the weekend, we are inviting participants to write poetic fragments - an image, a short poem, or a haiku-type verse. These messages are shared across the network and make up a collective poem that combines local experiences.

 The experiment in listening will take place across the network from 1st to 4th May.

           Each year, during the first weekend in May, communities around the world wake with the dawn to take part in Reveil, streaming live sounds of dawn across a twenty-five-hour broadcast that follows daybreak around the Earth. This shared act of attention to the morning chorus has become a form of planetary listening that is broadcast across multiple radio stations around the planet. Listening to the full broadcast of streams from multiple sites reveals a vastly varied and creaturely chorus of activity: worlds of sound, birds, weather, machines and all the unique textures of particular environments that resonate quite differently.

Why the Moon?
Whilst the Northern Hemisphere is moving into spring, the South is shifting to winter; yet we see the same Moon from everywhere on Earth. In the Pacific and the Americas, the Moon is visible after dawn across the May weekend, lingering even as the sky brightens.

           The 2026 dawn listening takes place just after the full Moon, at a time of renewed momentum in lunar exploration. NASA’s successful Artemis II mission galvanised public attention and imagination, but also prompted questions about why communities whose cultural, ecological, and spiritual lives are deeply connected to the moon were not included in shaping these lunar futures.

           For many, the Moon and the dark skies are part of the integral lived experience of being alive, structuring seasonal rhythms, ceremony, activities and relationships with place. Today, these skies are increasingly crowded with satellites and industrial activity. In Aotearoa, on the Māhia Peninsula, early morning Rocket Lab launches reverberate around the coast, disturbing the peace of dawn, and industry denies and minimise the disruption that surrounding communities are forced to put up with.

          In the Reveil weekend, we pay attention to the dawning of the day, listening is a form of witnessing; getting to know the land and gathering power for activism for the land and the skies. To listen together is to be with what is, to register the changes, to make impacts known and to affirm that those impacts are palpable.

To Participate

           Over the summer months ahead, as communities slow down with the heat, drop-in workshops in Haewai, Aotearoa weave together environmental listening, moon observation, storytelling, and poetry. These gatherings connect environmental sensing, art, poetry and resilient communication technologies with a shared care for place and resilience.

           In Haewai, the community works creatively with poetry and mesh networks, exploring ways to share environmental observations across a disaster-ready Long Range (LoRa) radio network, while deepening local connection with the environment and climate.