Hine-ahu-one

Tāne wanted descendants. Not forests, not birds — people. Someone of his own kind.

He searched a long time first, and this part is often skipped. He went to many atua wāhine — female beings — and with them he had children who were not human at all. With one he had the streams; with another, the stones and the mountains; with another, the ngārara, the reptiles; with another, the trees themselves. In one telling he goes to Hine-tū-a-maunga, the mountain maid, and their child is the rusty water that seeps from the rock, and he understands that this is not it either.

Eventually he went to his mother. Papatūānuku told him: the one you are looking for is in me. Go to Kurawaka.

So Tāne went to Kurawaka — the red earth, the pubic mound of Papatūānuku in the telling, the most sacred ground there is — and there, with the help of his brothers and of the female powers, he shaped a body out of the soil. Every part deliberately: the limbs, the belly, the head, the openings, the hair. And when it was made he breathed into her nostrils — the hongi (pressing of noses in greeting), the pressing of noses and the sharing of breath — and he said, tihei mauri ora (the sneeze of life — the call that life has begun): there is the sneeze of life.

She sneezed. She breathed. Her name is Hine-ahu-one — the woman heaped up from earth.

That is why, when you press noses in a hongi, it is not a greeting in the way a handshake is a greeting. You are repeating the moment life entered a person. Two people sharing one breath, the way the first breath was shared.

And it is why the word for land and the word for placenta are the same, and why a person is called he uri nō te whenua, a descendant of the land. Not poetically. Structurally. The first woman was made of soil, so every person after her is soil with breath in it, and when you die the soil part goes back and the breath goes on.

Their daughter was Hine-tītama, the dawn maiden — and hers is a harder story, which belongs to Hine-nui-te-pō and should be heard from her.

There is something else in this pūrākau worth naming. Tāne did not make her alone, and in most tellings he could not have. The female elements had to be there. Life does not come from one side of the whakapapa. And Hine-ahu-one is not a lesser copy of him; she is the beginning of a line that runs through her daughter into the night, and every one of us is on it.

So what do you do with this?

Notice your own breath once today, deliberately. Four slow ones. That breath was given, in this whakapapa, by a relative who had to search the whole world before he worked out that what he wanted was made of the ground he was standing on.

And when you next greet someone properly — hongi, or even just standing close enough to be present — know that the gesture is a re-enactment. Tihei mauri ora. It is still working.