What the Mahoe Tree Teaches about Passion
This New Zealand plant and Maori culture balance passion with ancestral land
Fire helps us fulfill our primal needs for food and warmth, but what has always intrigued me about fire beyond its utility is its ethereal beauty. My eyes lock onto the breath and motion of a flame and it quiets my heart into submission. When I close my eyes, the flame’s color is seared into my mind’s eye. Even though I know better, I imagine that the pulse of the fire and my beating heart are one, and that the warmth spreading over my face is the fire feeding my life force.
Oatmail
This is Oatmail, the Environ-Mental Health newsletter about nature's design to help you un-learn and re-learn from the species we share space with. I hope to help you develop coping mechanisms to be well in today’s climate-changed world and the sustenance to grow a better tomorrow.
Today’s lesson: passion. I will share stories from the Mahoe tree through which we can explore humans’ relationship to fire. The Mahoe is a diminutive tree found in New Zealand that grows up to 10 meters (33 feet) of slim trunk splotched in moss and lichen that is only visible if you push past its dense outcrop of leaves. The Mahoe adorns itself with pixie-esque, yellow-green flowers and is peppered in violet berries from November to March.
Stories from the Mahoe tree
The Mahoe holds cultural significance for Maori—the people indigenous to Aoteroa, or New Zealand—through the way that it ignites and the dyes that can be yielded from its berries, both of which signify passion. Maori mythology recognizes nature’s sublimity and explains natural phenomena as originating from gods’ behaviors. The Mahoe tree features in one such story, the Maori legend of how the demigod Maui brought fire to the world:
One night, Maui grew curious about where fire came from, so he put out all of the fires in the world. When the people came to the gods full of fear, not knowing how they would feed themselves or keep warm at night, Maui offered to go to the great ancesstress Mahuika where she lived in her scorching mountain at the end of the earth.
Mahuika, with fire burning out of every pore in her body and her hair a mass of flame, gave Maui some of her fiery fingernails to take back to the humans. However, Maui was curious to see where fire would come from if Mahuika did not have any left and extinguished the fingernails because he wanted to trick Mahuika into giving them all to him.
With excuses such as tripping and dropping the fingernails into the dirt, Maui convinced Mahuika to give him nearly all of her fire until she realized she was being duped. In her rage, Mahuika hurled her last fingernail after Maui, and it fell at the base of the Mahoe tree and a few others.
According to the myth, “These trees cherished and held onto the fire of Mahuika, considering it a great gift.” Maui brought wood to the people and taught them how to coax fire from it.
Pleased by gods and humanity in this myth, trees agree to serve us by holding the fire and allowing us to use it. The only way in which humans can use fire is through working with the fire’s keeper. This relationship between humans and trees as an exchange of resources is a beautiful example of how we must consider our actions and decisions going forward in this shared world.
Firemaking Made Ritual
Maoris honor this legend through the routine-made-ritual of igniting fire. When Maori nurture fire into being, they recognize and honor the passion given to them by their ancestors that brings them life. Summoning the fire is a paired act—a woman holds a soft Mahoe stick, and a man handles a stronger and more compact Te hika, which translates to fire plough or generating stick. The Te hika is used to bore a hole into the Mahoe wood with speed and pressure which gives way to smoke, and eventually the aroma of fire, as it slips into the air. “A kua ka tea hi,” making the fire come to life, acknowledges, accepts, and celebrates passion as a gift that is inherited from the gods and that gives way to future generations.
Cultivating fire facilitated by the Mahoe is a balancing act of regulated passion. In the myth, the actions of Maui and Mahuika are indicative of the human passions that drive our actions but thwart our best intentions if unchecked. The environment acts as the control that tempers the fire’s potential to burn us and extinguish itself. Isolated, humans will drive ourselves to our demise, but we can depend on our neighboring species to survive. Nature shows us how we too can act in accordance with external regulators and wisdom to benefit from passion.
How to Sustain the Flames of Passion
I recently attended a virtual talk featuring the Regional Administrator for the EPA under Barack Obama and two-term mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, Heather McTeer Toney. She spoke about the delicate balance of harnessing passion. McTeer Toney praised the youth who have energized the climate movement by inspiring those like herself on the frontlines and demanding attention and action from those in authority.
She celebrated the youth for not letting age be an obstacle in their effectiveness towards climate change. McTeer Toney also recognized the tendency for youthful and inflammatory passion to burn out over time and the importance of its being linked with older generations’ restraint. To account for the passion in herself, McTeer Toney shared that she leans on spirituality to sustain her purpose long-term and recontextualize her role within the universal cause.
Regulating our precious emotions through powers and wisdoms outside of ourselves can help us sustain their value over time. This is how we burnish passion, like the ribbon-blues and fox-fur pennants within flames, as both a gift and a product.
A Gift and a Product
Nature is always giving us gifts and services through its products. These products can serve us as instructions, through their designs, as to how we too can best manifest our talents and passions.
One particularly sweet example of a gift of nature is a berry like the ones found on the Mahoe tree. Berries are another feature of the Mahoe tree that symbolize passion.
Berries swell into brighter and fuller colors as they mature, progressing through a spectrum of hues, until they are ripe to bursting. I imagine the berries’ cellular development lyrically: inside the berry, seeds and juices are like blood and mimic embryonic development. The process in reminiscent of stem cells specializing, and the slow, quiet, developments that complete an object of impressive taste and function. When the berry has the most volume that its surface area can withstand, the slightest impression will rip it apart. My teeth could end the whole process of generation in an instant.
Ironically, being eaten is the Mahoe berry’s evolutionary intention. Bright hues and sweet juices attract birds such as keruru, bellbirds, silvereyes, and blackbirds, who carry the Mahoe’s seeds away when they pluck the berries from branches and eat them. The seeds are coated in hard exteriors to resist digestion and reach their destination on the ground floor after they are defecated. The seeds that are eventually scattered on the floor are susceptible to light, temperature, and moisture that will guide them on the much longer process to future treedom. The seeds heed external cues to refine themselves, in an anthropomorphic sense sizing and shaping their life force relative to necessity on the journey to maturity.
Casting Joy
It’s a lovely thought to imagine that the berries’ appearance is the Mahoe’s desire to cast its joy of life throughout the world made manifest. In this way, the Mahoe’s ‘desire‘ is not dissimilar to my own wishes to make a difference in the world—I want to create impact and be impacted. The act of casting, I believe, communicates passion. To cast something, I must be bold and sure; I must absolve myself of the resulting effects of my action, which in turn confirms and fulfills my belief in it. An act of passion aligns with the sentiments that I place the most truth in and allow to represent my identity. An act of passion is a gamble that bets my entire being on the fervent hope that my beliefs continue beyond my mind and into reality.
Watching the life cycle of trees teaches me important lessons about life; its phases, and the intersectionality of everything without end. Perhaps the reason humans like trees so much is because we see ourselves in them: children are seedlings; trees centuries old are sages. We count our wrinkles as a trunk’s rings.
Identity Integrated Through Ta Moko
Capitalistic and competitive cultures blind us to our inherent natural connections, but the Maori culture credits nature as integral to all actions. For instance, Maoris recognize how ancestry and nature contribute to their lives when they come of age through ta moko, the sacred ritual of tattooing. Mokos are signs of status and identity, and traditionally Maoris used Mahoe berries as dyes and serrated and straight-edged bones as chisels.
Ta moko began at puberty as a rite of passage and would continue throughout life to mark important events and ancestral history. A moko was an identity card that chronicled a person's ancestral and life history, as well as their tribal affiliation. It indicated the whakapapa or line of ancestors a person descended from and the land to which they were connected. A moko also carried values such as loyalty and commitment from the past to those in the future.
Through the ink of plants like the Mahoe berry, prominent Maori made permanent their birthed and lived identities for all to see. In fact, it was insulting for a person not to recognize another’s lineage through their moko.
Maoris’ bloodlines were literally bonded with and brought out by the earth’s colors. Families buried their individual dyes in small containers in the ground, which they prized and passed down from generation to generation. Ta moko is an explicit expression of mana, or pride and prestige, that Maoris have reclaimed through the revival of the art form in the modern day.
Ta Moko Tradition Today
The Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand has an exhibit dedicated to ta moko. When visiting, I spent most of my time in the museum studying the photographs in the exhibition room and reflecting on this video essay of people describing what their Samoan tataus mean to them. The transcendence of the human body through a physical connection to spirituality and nature fascinates me. Through the moko, passionate emotions that characterize an individual and their family ties are delineated and regalled through exquisite designs including characters, regenerative swirls, and manawa lines representative of the journey through life. A person’s passion and discipline are merged together as a permanent reminder to themself and an expression of the self outwards.
I was drawn to learning about ta moko because such powerful and encompassing communication is a rarity in my daily media consumption and interactions. I seek out what the Maori prioritize in my spare time and on my own dollar. I find passion that speaks to my soul through carefully composed literature and music, and artistry that people pay to consume in constructed formats reserved for professionals who have “made it” in their industries.
In our culture, we do not always speak and share passion readily with those around us, let alone with ourselves. Quite the opposite—we deny our passions in order to feel safe in a dangerous world. I struggle to obey and balance passion myself, which is why I write in the pursuit of tapping into the human experience.
Passion Worth Protecting
The Mahoe and the cultural expressions that it so inspires encompasses why passion is worth defending: it’s real and it’s everywhere. Sharing care and love is as natural as plants growing and water falling from the sky. Perhaps the youthful, brazen confidence of passion is due to the simple security that passion just feels right. Ignoring the electricity within us is ultimately more expensive because muting what is natural exhausts our energy reserves and chronically kills us inside day by day when it would be so much easier to let live.
A spread Mahoe tree, flowering and fruiting and buzzing with visitors, or Maori in full face moko, tongue out, and legs stanced in an imposing haka, will both stun me as beings who are attuned with their sacredness and have accomplished passion by design. I am envious of them.
Matauranga Maori in a Climate-Changed World
Climate change threatens the Mahoe and humans both. Matauranga Maori, the Maoris’ way of life, is bound with the existence of species unique to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Aotearoa itself. Every place in Aotearoa has its Maori name in addition to its English name and a spirit’s story that goes with it. Maoris see the spirits and their ancestors living now as the land, and the land is revered as such. Generations of Maori families have been strengthened by the surrounding kilometers of nature that they steward that are as emblematic of their identities as the moko that they wear.
The loss of the species, the land, the Mahoe tree, would mean so much more than bullet points or words could convey. How could you convey the loss of centuries’ old bloodlines, lessons worth permanently tattooing on one’s body and the bodies of their descendants, the biological blueprints to a berry that we don’t even fully understand? These are lessons that can instruct world leaders today on how to save the world, and if we miss the point —even if we were to survive the loss of powerful plants—the damage to our own species would be incomprehensible.
So in addition to the long-term practice of balancing passion—for instance by noticing the world’s examples of beauty from flames to colors to tastes—, it is imperative that we take immediate and direct actions as well to ensure that our mentors survive to teach us.
Thank you for taking the time to read and care about the Mahoe tree and Maori tradition. If you would like to read future posts about Environ-Mental Health and mentoring species to guide your climate-changed future, please subscribe to the Oatmail newsletter to endorse my work.
Wishing you an impactful day - Mary Rose.
P.S. drop a comment about which mentor or lesson you would like to read about next, or share any stories that this post brought up for you.
Human Homework:
Set Ecosia as your default browser to plant trees whenever you use the internet.
Support reforestation through One Tree Planted
Watch the film Whale Rider, about a Maori girl named Pai
Donate to the Te Papa museum in Wellington
Currently in Climate: Sign this petition to Stop Line 3, a pipeline over indigenous sacred ground. Donate to support frontline activists who are jailed and persecuted
Follow and support any of the links referenced in this post
Suggest more direct actions in the comments!
Links
Wikipedia; Melicytus ramiflorus
New Zealand Plant Conservation Network; Melicytus ramiflorus
Maori Plant Use; Melicytus ramiflorus
Pukaha; 5 Native Plants Used in Maori Medicine
CitSciHub; Phil Bendle Collection: Melicytus ramiflorus
Ke Tehe Purangi; Maori Myths, Legends, and Contemporary Stories
Bushman’s Friend; Melicytus ramiflorus
Heather McTeer Toney
New Zealand Journal of Botany; Germination behavior of seeds of the New Zealand species melicytus ramiflorus
Critic; Ta Moko, A Revived Art Form
World History Encyclopedia; Traditional Maori Tattoo of New Zealand
Te Papa; Tamoko Maori Tattoos
Te Papa Samoan Tattooing and Photography; My Tatau Video Essay
Ministry for the Environment; How climate change affects Maori