Twelve Thousand Miles To Visit A Tree in New Zealand

New Year Re-Stack

Deb Steele was a finalist in the AofA Awards with this brilliant piece…

I was sitting in a circle of women at the close of our three day retreat in Glastonbury, January 2020 just before the beginnings of a changed world. One of the women talked about kauri trees - I’d never heard of them before, and in my mind, I saw the word as cowrie, like the shells. Then the next woman said a word, a name - that I didn’t even hear clearly - but that had an immediate impact on my heart, as though something went straight into it.

When our circle ended, I found her and asked if she could tell me the name and as she said Tane Mahuta. I began to cry, with no idea why. As she went on to tell me that the name meant Lord of the Forest and that he is both an atua (God) in Maori cosmology and a mighty kauri tree in the Northland of New Zealand/Aotearoa. I continued to cry, and I knew that I had to visit him. When I put the name Tane Mahuta into the search engine on my phone later, an article from The Guardian appeared. It had the headline The tree that makes people cry.

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I started to prepare for the possibility of going the following January. Then the pandemic hit, two years of closed borders, lockdowns, no travel. For a while I felt in sync with the world again as everything slows down or grinds to a halt. Fifteen years previously my own personal journey with illness - severe M.E. - took me out of the workplace and into an individual lockdown which has continued to a lesser or greater extent ever since.

The call to visit Tane was still strong in my heart but it went on the back burner and the light gradually dimmed, though it never extinguished. As 2022 became 2023, my younger brother became seriously ill, and within a few short weeks of diagnosis, died. All thoughts of worldwide travel receded again - and yet the brief times spent with him before he went and his dying opened something up in me.

A couple of months later, I took part in another gathering of women in a Zoom call to take a guided journey together. During it, I found myself in lush forest, hearing completely unfamiliar bird song, and something in me knew it as another call from the lands of Tane. The next day I bought my plane tickets for nine months ahead, February 2024.

Parts of me immediately went into acute anxiety and outright fear. I had limited resources - physical and financial - I am seventy years old, and I know no one in New Zealand other than a woman there who had edited and published a book I had contributed to a couple of years before. I was grieving my brother, still in shock, and feeling generally pretty fragile.

But I also felt an expansion beginning in my awareness, and a literal felt sense of Tane in my body. I felt his energy rising up to me from the Southern hemisphere, and I experienced it as profoundly masculine. This continued throughout the months leading up to the flight and it was profoundly loving. I was conscious that for some people this may well sound woo woo and out there - I can understand that because even parts of myself, the rationalist materialist left brain parts, were judging it in that way. But it was also very persistent and very real - real enough to be taking me way out of my comfort zone in all possible ways.

I gradually researched and organised the different aspects of my month long journey. I began to find out more about Tane Mahuta the tree, and the atua. Atua are like Gods in Māori cosmology, yet also not. This was one of my biggest and most profound learnings on this journey - the differences between Te Reo Maori and English - and the concepts behind them. It’s an issue that is pressingly current in the politics of Aotearoa as the coalition government seeks to overturn agreements made in the Waitangi Treaty of 1840 between Māori Iwi (tribe) chiefs and the Crown.

In the Waitangi Treaty Grounds Museum, there is a plaque describing the differences between what land means to Māori people and what it meant to those early white settlers. In Māori, the word for land as translated into English is whenua. Whenua also means placenta - as the info board says: Papatuanuku, the earth mother, sustains her children through the land, as a human mother nourishes her baby through her placenta. In other words, it is sacred, and inextricably part of the people who have lived upon it for generations, whose placentas would be ritually buried in the earth following every birth. Between 1890 and 1920 alone, Māori people lost nearly twelve million acres in Northland to the Crown. Half of their land. The loss continues.

I knew nothing of that until my visit to the Museum during the last week of my stay. But the sense of the sacredness of the land - and all that grows upon it, or swims in the waters, or flies through the skies - built strongly in me through my pre-departure reading. At the same time, I was steadily organising the practical aspects of the journey. It felt a bit like I was planning an expedition - though the strongest sense of it was a pilgrimage, with the visit to Tane - in the Waipoua Forest right up near the very top of North Island - the central focus around which everything else was working towards. That and my physical limitations, which meant that times and places for rest were always at the heart of arrangements.

Once I had arrived, I spent a few days resting and recovering in the airport hotel. I also practiced driving the hire car, and then tackled the highways around Southern Auckland to make the four and a half hour journey north to reach this sacred tree.

Something that I had only vaguely recognised about the significance of staying on both the east coast and the west coast of Northland when planning my visit became much more apparent once I was actually there.

Russell, and Keri-Keri, on the east coast are significant in the beginnings of the settlement of the lands by British traders, whalers, missionaries and are home to many of the first buildings made there. It was also at that time an area lived in by many Maori, and is the site of the Waitangi Treaty Grounds.

Meanwhile I also learned that Hokianga Bay on the west coast, where I would be staying to visit Tane Mahuta, was the landing and departure point of the first Māori ancestor Kupe. It was his wife, Kuramarotini who named Aotearoa as they approached the island - it means Long White Cloud.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how much I would feel at home in different ways on both coasts, with both people.

My excitement at finally meeting Tane was high by the time I arrived at Hokianga. To be this close after all these years and all those miles. It felt strange to be so passionate about visiting a tree and yet he had also drawn a lot of my friends and my family to him too. By the time I got to see him I had a list of ninety people in my pocket who had responded to my offer of taking them with me to be in his presence - to honour him - and to tell him their names.

A twenty minute drive from my studio room took me to the forest - through a beautiful landscape of rolling hills and flatlands, crops and sheep, occasional dwellings and a small town or two - with mountains on the horizon and a growing incline taking me higher and higher. The vegetation began to grow lush and there were trees as the road wound and climbed.

Then there was the sign that let me know I had found him. Tane Mahuta, Lord of the Forest, spirit in matter, the sacred in tree form.

The approach is along a curving boardwalk, through tree ferns until suddenly on the left there is clear space and a soaring massive trunk. I couldn’t help gasping. I arrived early in the morning - as I did on each of the three visits that I made. No one else was present but across the hours that I spent there I observed a similar reaction again and again. People may have been chatting as they walked along the boardwalk but as they saw him they exclaimed then fell into silence. It was a silence that felt akin to being in prayer. Sometimes there were quiet conversations, requests for taking photos, but largely there was silence. He is a mighty presence who draws people to him from all over the world.

Before my second visit, I experienced another encounter with the spirit of Tane as words poured through me which seemed to come from him and which I wrote down as they flowed. The central message was of Love. When I arrived the next day and sat facing him a young Māori woman came to talk with me. She told me her name and that she had just started a training with the local iwi to learn more as a volunteer, about the forest and the Kauri trees and Tane in particular. As she spoke about Tane, her whole face lit up.

It was moving to experience how deeply she cares about this tree, this forest and this work. As other people started to arrive she began to share some of her knowledge and passion with them and I got up to leave, mouthing thank you to her. As I walked back along the boardwalk, I heard footsteps running behind me and turned to see it was her. She flung her arms around me in a hug and said that she just wanted to say thank you, for coming all of this way to see Tane, and for telling other people all about him and bringing them with me in my pocket.

We were both in tears, moved so deeply in our different ways by this tree that makes people cry. I felt as though - in some mysterious way - she had become the embodiment of the love which called from Tane to me, four years ago and twelve thousand miles away.

I am writing this on the anniversary of my first having met him last year. I’m still integrating, still recovering from the physical impact of the journey, still learning from the experience, still trying to make sense of it all and why and how I was so strongly called across the other side of the world by a tree.

And I keep remembering words written by Coleman Barks in the notes section of his beloved book The Essential Rumi, about a particular mystical experience he once had. I cannot explain this but nor can I deny that it did happen.