Matariki, the Māori New Year, is happening in New Zealand as I write this. It quietly rewrote what I thought the word nourishment meant.
Picture a headland above a dark harbor, an hour before dawn, in the cold heart of July. People are arriving in the dark, wrapped against the cold, their breath hanging white in the air. Nobody is rushing. They gather and wait, faces turned to the northeastern horizon, watching for a small cluster of stars to lift clear of the sea. When it finally rises, someone begins to speak. Food is lifted toward the sky as an offering, steam curling off it into the freezing morning (it is winter in NZ after all). Thousands of people, standing together in the dark, welcoming a cluster of stars home.
This is Matariki, and it is one of the most beautiful things I know of.
Matariki is the Māori name for the star cluster the rest of the world knows as the Pleiades. Every midwinter it reappears low on the horizon just before dawn, and for Māori that rising marks the turn of the year. Many in the country now stop for it. Matariki became an official public holiday in Aotearoa New Zealand only in 2022, the first holiday in the calendar rooted in Māori tradition, and its date moves each year with the stars rather than sitting on a fixed square of the Gregorian grid. This year it lands on Friday, July 10, 2026.
There is something about it I find almost defiant. In North America, we are used to new years that arrive with fireworks and champagne, at the very top of the calendar, in a blaze of noise. Matariki begins in the cold. It rises in the darkest, leanest stretch of winter, at the hour when the world is least convinced anything good is coming. A new year that starts in the dark understands something the confetti version has forgotten. The turn back toward the light always begins before you can see it.
I came to Matariki the way a lot of outsiders do, charmed by something lovely from a respectful distance. What stopped me cold was learning what the stars actually stand for. This is where it becomes a nourishment story, and where I have to hand the knowledge back to the people it belongs to, because this is Māori astronomy and Māori tradition, carried for generations and revived in our own lifetime by scholars like Professor Rangi Mātāmua.
The cluster holds nine stars visible to the naked eye, and each one governs a domain. Matariki, the star that gives the cluster its name, watches over the environment and the health of the people. Tupuānuku is the star of food that grows in the ground, everything planted and harvested and gathered. Tupuārangi governs food that comes from the sky, the birds and the fruit of the trees. Waitī holds the fresh water and everything living in it. Waitā holds the ocean and its food. Waipuna-ā-Rangi is the rain. Ururangi is the winds. Pōhutukawa is the star of those who have died since the cluster last rose. Hiwa-i-te-Rangi carries our wishes and dreams for the year to come.
Sit with that list for a second. Food from the land and the sky. Fresh water, salt water, and the rain that feeds all of it. The people we have lost, and the hopes we are carrying forward. An entire theory of what sustains a human life, mapped onto a handful of stars you could cover with your thumb.
The old knowledge went deeper still. People read the stars themselves. If Matariki rose clear and bright, it promised a warm, abundant season and good harvests ahead. If the cluster looked hazy and dim, you braced for a leaner year and planned accordingly. The stars were a calendar and a harvest forecast at once, hanging in the sky for anyone who knew how to read them.
Matariki asks three things of the people who keep it. You remember everyone who has died since the stars last rose. You gather your people and give thanks for what you have, usually over a very great deal of food. Then you look to the year ahead and say out loud what you are hoping for. At the center of it is a dawn ceremony called the hautapu, where food is offered to the stars as the cluster appears. Different iwi keep it in their own ways, and the feast that follows carries its own deep traditions, like the hāngī, a whole meal cooked slowly in an earth oven under hot stones and leaves. The thread I keep pulling on is this. The food is never only food. It is offered up, shared out, and eaten in the company of the living and in memory of the dead.
Here is the part that undid me a little. Somewhere along the way, most of us learned to treat nourishment as a private project. A solo negotiation between you and your plate, counted in macros and managed alone at the kitchen counter at 9 p.m. The oldest definition was never that small or that lonely. For most of human history, in most of the world, being nourished meant being fed by a place and by a people. It was communal and seasonal, tied to the land under your feet and the ancestors who worked it before you. Matariki is one of the living versions of that older, bigger idea, still practiced out loud by an entire country before breakfast.
This year the invitation is especially wide. The national theme for 2026 is Matariki Herenga Waka, which translates as the gathering of many canoes. The image is of waka drawn together and moored side by side, and the meaning is exactly what it sounds like. Different peoples and different lineages, tethered together for a shared journey into the year. Matariki belongs to Māori. The 2026 theme extends a hand to everyone else, whatever waka carried your own family to wherever you woke up this morning.
That lands somewhere tender for me, and I suspect for you. Most of us are the descendants of people who crossed oceans to get somewhere, carrying seeds and recipes and the names of their dead. The food on your table has ancestry too. The dish your grandmother made without ever writing down a recipe is a form of nourishment no supplement will replicate, because it is carrying so much more than nutrients. It is carrying a line of people all the way back to a kitchen you never got to stand in.
Which brings me, as most things eventually do in this magazine, to the table. Most of you reading this build gatherings for a living. You know, better than almost anyone, what happens to a room when people stop performing and start sharing a meal that somebody made with real care. What Matariki names so beautifully is a thing you have already felt in your own retreats. The deepest nourishment in any room is the company you keep, and the sense of being part of something older and larger than one hard year.
You do not have to be in New Zealand this week in July to carry the real lesson home. The practice underneath it travels. Remember the people you lost this year, and say their names out loud to someone. I’m saying my moms in whispers to the sky. Gather whoever is near and feed them something made with love, not just assembled. Then, before the new year gets its hands on you, look up at whatever sky you have and let yourself actually want something.
The stars have been keeping this appointment for far longer than any of us has been alive, and they will keep it long after we are gone. Once a year they rise over a cold sea and remind an entire nation of a thing the rest of us keep having to relearn. We are fed by each other, and by everyone who came before us. The rest of the world is welcome to listen.
Mānawatia a Matariki. Celebrate it, wherever you are.
Stay wild. Write more. Change the world.
Your Next Fave Read
- What Is a Createcation — And Could One Change Your Book?
- Writing Retreats for Authors: What to Look For (And What to Walk Away From)
- Why Every Createcation Is Capped at 6 Writers
This piece first appeared in RetreatBoss Magazine, where I am Editor-in-Chief.
