Te waiata tangi me te koa

If you have been to a tangihanga (funeral rites) where someone brought out a kōauau (small flute) or a pūtōrino to play beside the casket, and later been to a celebration — a birthday, a wedding, the opening of a new house — where the very same kind of instrument was played to welcome people in, you have already met the part of Hine-raukatauri's story that is easy to miss: she does not belong more to sorrow than to joy. She belongs to both, equally, because what she governs is not a mood but the breath itself, and breath moves through a person the same way whether they are grieving or rejoicing.

This is different from how instruments and songs are often divided up in other traditions, where certain tunes are kept strictly for funerals and others strictly for weddings, as though the vocabulary of grief and the vocabulary of celebration had nothing in common. In the world of taonga pūoro (traditional musical instruments), the same kōauau, the same pūtōrino, played by the same hands, might be heard at both. What changes is not the instrument or even always the tune, but the breath behind it — slower and heavier in grief, lighter and quicker in joy — and Hine-raukatauri is said to be present in that breath either way, because breath itself is her domain, not any single emotion carried on it.

There is real wisdom folded into that. Grief and joy are often treated as opposites, kept in separate rooms of a life, but anyone who has properly grieved someone they loved deeply knows that the two sit closer together than that — that laughter can arrive in the middle of mourning, and that a wave of loss can catch you unexpectedly in the middle of an otherwise happy day. A music that refuses to separate the two, that offers the same instrument and the same atua (gods / spiritual beings)'s presence to both states, is being honest about how feeling actually moves through a person, rather than pretending it stays neatly sorted.

Waiata tangi, songs of mourning and longing, are among the oldest and most treasured forms carried in this tradition, and they are not spoken of as morbid or something to be gotten through quickly. They are given real space, real time, because the loss they carry is real, and putting breath and melody around it is understood to help carry a weight that words alone cannot always lift. At the very same time, waiata composed for joyful occasions — for a birth, a return home, a wedding — are treated with just as much care, because joy, in this way of thinking, is just as worthy of being properly voiced as grief is.

What ties both together, underneath everything, is that a person needed to breathe out what they were carrying, one way or another, and Hine-raukatauri is there in that breath regardless of which direction it is carrying a person's heart. You do not need to be skilled, and you do not need to know which emotion you are supposed to be feeling before you start. You only need to be willing to let the breath move, whether it comes out as a long low note over someone you have lost, or a bright quick one over someone you are welcoming home. She is not particular about which. She is only ever interested in whether you let the sound out at all, rather than holding it in and carrying it silently on your own.