Te kōhanga kōauau

There is a version of loving something so much that you keep it at arm's length, taking it out to admire and then putting it carefully away again. That is not what Hine-raukatauri did. She loved her kōauau (small flute) — the small hand-held flute breathed across rather than blown into end-on — so completely that she did not want to be separate from it at all, and in the end she went to live inside it.

Think about what that actually means as a choice, not just as a pretty image. Most of the atua (gods / spiritual beings) and ancestors in this whakapapa move through the world doing things — climbing, fighting, shaping, travelling. Hine-raukatauri's great act is almost the opposite of all that. She stops moving. She goes into a hollow piece of wood or bone and stays there, and from that point on she is not someone who occasionally makes music. She is the music itself, present in every note anyone has ever coaxed out of a taonga pūoro (traditional musical instruments) since.

That is why she is spoken of as the atua of taonga pūoro generally, not just of one instrument. The kōauau, the nguru, the pūtōrino, the pūkāea — every breath instrument carved from wood, bone or stone is understood to carry a trace of her, because the family of instruments all share the same essential act that first drew her in: breath moving through a hollow shape and coming out changed, as sound.

There is something worth noticing in the fact that she was not driven into the flute by grief, or trapped there by someone else's doing, the way so many transformations in this whakapapa happen. She went in because she wanted to, out of love, and she would not be persuaded back out. No one is recorded talking her down from it or treating it as a tragedy to be reversed. It is simply accepted as who she became, and what she became, from then on, was permanent company for anyone willing to pick up an instrument and breathe.

This matters for how taonga pūoro are still spoken about and handled today. They are not treated as ordinary objects you can pick up carelessly. A kōauau or a pūtōrino is understood to carry mauri (life force), a living presence, in part because of exactly this story — because somewhere inside that family of instruments sits an ancestor who chose to make her home there rather than anywhere else in the world. Picking one up and playing it, even briefly, is understood by many as a way of visiting her, not simply using a tool.

It is also worth sitting with what she gave up to make that choice, because it was not nothing. She gave up the wider world, the option of doing anything else, in exchange for being permanently present inside one small, humble, everyday object. That is not a small sacrifice. But it also is not spoken of as a loss. It reads instead as someone who knew exactly what she loved and did not hesitate to give herself over to it fully, rather than loving it from a careful distance the way most people manage most of their attachments.

You could ask yourself, fairly, whether you have ever loved anything of yours that completely — not admired it, not used it occasionally, but let it become part of how you exist in the world. Hine-raukatauri did not keep her music as a hobby she returned to. She let it absorb her, and in doing so she made sure that every breath instrument ever carved afterwards would carry a living presence inside it, waiting quietly for the next person willing to pick it up and breathe.