Matariki

In the depth of winter, before dawn, a small cluster of stars lifts above the horizon in the north-east. Tiny. You need a clear sky and a bit of patience. That is Matariki, and its rising turns the Māori year over.

The name is read two ways: Mata-riki, the little eyes, and Mata-ariki, the eyes of the atua — and both connect back to Tāwhirimātea, who in one telling tore out his eyes in his fury and grief at the separation of his parents and flung them into his father's chest. His anguish became the marker of our year. That is the kind of resolution this whakapapa keeps making: the pain is not erased, it is set in the sky where it can be useful.

Matariki has whānau. In the tradition carried by Rangi (sky) Mātāmua and others, there are nine stars and each one has a job:

Matariki herself — wellbeing, and the reflection at the heart of it all. Pōhutukawa — the star of those who have died in the past year. Tupu-ā-nuku — food that grows in the ground. Tupu-ā-rangi — food that grows above, in the trees; birds and berries. Waitī — fresh water, and everything living in it. Waitā — the sea, and its food. Waipuna-ā-rangi — the rain. Ururangi — the winds. Hiwa-i-te-rangi — the wishing star, where you set what you want for the year coming.

Look at that list. It is not decoration; it is an audit. Are the ground crops good this year? The birds? The rivers, the sea, the rainfall, the winds? A community reading Matariki was reading its own food security, one star at a time, and ancestors who knew how to read the brightness and haziness of each star used them to forecast the season ahead.

And the practice around it has three movements, which is why it works so well as a new year.

First, you remember the dead. Everyone who has died since the last rising is named to Pōhutukawa. There is crying, and there is food, and it is done together and out loud, not privately and neatly.

Second, you give thanks for what you have — and you eat. A hautapu ceremony, food offered to the stars in steam before dawn, and then a feast. In the old world this was the season when the storehouses were full and the work was done.

Third, you look forward. What are you planting, literally and otherwise? What are you setting down to Hiwa-i-te-rangi?

Grief, gratitude, intention. In that order. It is a much better structure than a countdown and a hangover.

Matariki became a public holiday in Aotearoa in 2022 — the first one drawn from te ao Māori — and the date moves each year because it follows the maramataka (Māori lunar calendar), not the Gregorian calendar. That in itself is worth noticing: a national holiday that requires the whole country to consult a lunar calendar and the sky.

So here is the thing to do, and it does not need to wait for winter. Learn to find Matariki. Then, at the next rising, get up in the cold, go outside before the light, and say the names of the people you have lost this year out loud to the stars.

They came from a son who was grieving too. He will understand.