Last week, I was in Byron Bay, on Bundjalung Country, walking on a coastal trail with Delta Kay, an Arakwal Bundjalung custodian and cultural educator renowned for her storytelling and deep-rooted connection to the land.
As we wandered through the rainforest, Delta spoke of Dreaming stories, of the ancestral beings embedded in rock and creek, of how the land holds memory in waves and trees. She described how spirits — whether ancestral or those recently passed — are understood to return through the rhythms of the land and life as part of an ongoing flow.
This perspective isn’t “reincarnation” in the standard sense, but it shares an intuitive logic — that life, death, and renewal are interwoven. Conception is not an isolated event but a continuation of ancestral presence. The land doesn’t start or stop with any one of us; it lives on, and life on Country is continuous.
As Delta shared these stories, I felt these concepts resonated deeply within me. If our aim is to create something intergenerational — be it a business, a community, an investment, or a cultural legacy — we must embrace that the world persists without us. Our task isn’t to conquer or consume, but to situate ourselves within a longer cycle, to act as caretakers rather than owners.
I’m not asking you to believe in this tradition, but to consider it as an instructive worldview.
Long-term thinkers need to cultivate humility and stewardship — to build with the next century, not just the next quarter, in mind. To move away from the myth of limitless extraction, and toward a model of continuity, shaped by our respect for what precedes and will endure beyond us.
