How To Be Bold and Humble

One week ago, I arrived at a very small airport, hopped on a very small plane, and flew to a very small island. Nothing more about my weekend in Moloka'i was small... except for the two children that joined me in my sleeping bag for the best night of cuddling I've ever had.

This post is about getting there.

When I found the building that welcomes commuters to inter-island travel, I walked up to the counter and spelled out my name for the friendly young woman behind it. I handed over my backpack to the smiling man in the neon vest, only after he told me there was no added fee. I had an hour and twenty minutes and no security line-- just a bagel with lox, my notebook and a sky full of sunshine. So I sat on a patch of grass just yards away and scribbled down my scattered thoughts. I was determined to justify to myself my feelings of desperation.

How do I at once be bold and humble? How do I at once be thoughtful and brave? How do I know when to laugh off an insult and when to start a riot? 

The state of the world is in our hands yet we are not strong enough to hold it. We know this, and yet we carry on. We define ourselves as a species every single moment, and surely we must know this, and surely, we settle. We could do better, but even our best will never suffice, for the world will always be greater than our capacity to understand it. 

Need we understand to achieve? Need we know kindness in order to be kind? To love?

Our individual actions as a collective action will not save us from ourselves. There will always be pain and failure and misunderstanding. There will always be room to grow. This is beauty of our human state.

If our actions are doomed to be insufficient, our efforts, then, are our only indicators of progress. Our individual efforts as a collective effort shall define the character of humanity. 

"I am also other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness." This is a quotation from Gravity and Grace, a mind-blowing, mildly depressing read composed by Simone Weil. "Love demands that the lover sacrifice for the beloved." -Meher Baba.

We all stood at the gate as another guy in a neon vest called out our seat assignments, classroom-style. Nine passengers in all, we crossed the asphalt, climbed the stairs onto the plane, and crouched down the aisle to our respective seats. The co-pilot, looking over the lenses of his wayfarer shades, recited the rules and safety procedures with the Maui ease, holding the curtain that separated the control deck of the plane from the reliant rows of strangers. When finished, he turned back around to face the nose, and the pilot reached back to pull shut the little white curtain. I thought about his nerves and wondered if he felt the weight of lives-at-stake every time he lifted this island-hopper off the ground, or if it only occurred to him once in a while. 

Drive, turn, take off. Haleakala to my left, the rippling ocean to my right, I can't help but think I'm riding the magic school bus. The wobble makes me grin: Oh, Maui.

If you look down at the ocean from a hopper plane above on a windy day, you'll see a mass that looks not unlike the night sky. The deep blue vastness is speckled with spots of white-- little currents gathering and dismembering endlessly. Shift your gaze outward toward the horizon, and you'll see a blanket of waves. coming together as one breath, falling under and over itself like a silent warrior. 

As we flew over the cliffs of Moloka'i, I felt embraced. We landed smoothly. My Mor Mor would have called it anything but smooth. Upon braking, I looked left to see a family of smiling faces pressed against the windows as they beamed with anxious excitement over the arrival of one of my fellow fliers. Hoopea Airport is very cute. 

I hopped into the bed of Pihana's pickup truck with her husband Matthew. Uncle Mike was in the passenger seat. Matthew, a big-hearted young man, said to me, yelling over the rush of the air, "When people come to Moloka'i, they don't want to leave. This is the land that time forgot." When we stopped at his house to pick up his Coors, he gifted me and Kumu each an avocado. 

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To read about my weekend on the magical island of Moloka'i, read our most recent post in the Ho'omana Spa Maui Blog.

The Revealing

When is the last time you received a letter in the mail?

Not a call to action, a book of coupons or a bill, but a hand-written bundle of words meant solely for you? 

It is cliche to call snail mail old-school, romantic or old-fashioned. The first hand-written letter is said to be attributed to Persian Queen Atossa around 500 BC, so, yes, they are certainly old; my high school English teacher often spoke of writing letters to the love of his life while he was in the Peace Corps, as it was their only means of communicating, so, yes, letters are certainly old-fashioned; and surely there are few butterflies quite like those that arrive in the stomachs of star-scrossed lovers, so certainly, letters are romantic. These cliche descriptors shed light on a thread of nostalgia for this lost art. It is obvious to name one's lack of time the culprit for not engaging in this timeless practice. But when did we become so busy? 

On my twenty-first birthday I was asked, "What will you aim to do this year?" My intention was to write letters to those I love so far away. I think I wrote three that year.

I wonder what it means to have let go of such a luxury. We clock-in to buy food in bright packages and pay the electric bill to keep our refrigerators running so that our milk will keep. But when did tomatoes become reliant on 35 degrees F? Who is Fahrenheit anyway?

We clock-in again, this time to pay for a roof that may or may not leak. Again, to put gas in the car that will get us there. Again, to take hot showers; again, again, again. Finally, we clock-in to fill our abodes with shiny things we can stare at: the glimmer of the dream. 

Take my words with a half-grain of salt-- I've never paid rent with my own actual dollars in my whole life. 

When is the last time you received a letter? If you remember, then perhaps you remember the shock-- the joy, the curiosity, the gratitude. Your name written in pen, the ink smeared over the stamp marking a single moment in its journey toward you. Did you stare at it while you walked towards a place to sit? Did you stop everything you were about to do to tear open the envelope? Or did you savor its arrival, laying it on the table until the moment arrived when you could indulge in its revealing? Maybe you set it down to relive the surprise later--to prolong the anticipation. Maybe you tore it open right there at the mailbox and read it even before acknowledging the immensity of the pleasure it might bring. Maybe it was everything it could ever be.

Receiving a letter is surely a luxury. And yet the opportunity passes us by day after day. The snail beats the hare. For easily one can see that writing a letter might have something to do with receiving this intimate gift. Or maybe the chicken came before the egg. Regardless of how our world began, or what animal analogy we're concerned with, it is clear that we deny one another the most gratifying experiences day after day. I am not one to administer responsibility for the happiness of others to others alike; in fact I often feel defensive at times when others come to my rescue, Here, dainty gal, let me do that for you. But a plain and simple reality is that we are all, each of us, entangled in other people's shit-- and equally brightened in other people's light.

We are shaping our world every single day with our shit and our light. We are spreading ourselves like cheese on the bread that our fellow earthlings consume day in and day out. Our actions spread like wildfire and our non-actions like microscopic debris-- I never took Physics but this world of instant access to information tells me that particulates are cause for concern because they reduce visibility. Will we see each other or fill our atmosphere with the blinding soot of never having enough time?

My call to action, my book of coupons, my bill to you is this-- ask yourself a little question that may or may not have an astronomical impact on you or someone else but will surely shape the world we are living in: When is the last time you sent a letter in the mail?

We Got Spahk

This past week, I've been itching to write. I jotted a few things down here, typed up a few lines on my ipad mini there. But nothing came out of me that said, "don't stop! Someone will want to read this." I counted the days since my last blog post: six. I asked myself, "Did I live a day worth writing about today?" 

For six days, I'd answered 'no' to that question by not writing when I felt the urge to. So, I thought, something's gotta change. And since I don't see anyone following me around with a pen, I'd better get to it.

Friday morning, I ate my cereal quickly and hopped in the car with Jeana when she left to take Lei to preschool. She dropped me off at Marilyn's house, with whom I make soap and frozen pizzas and run errands and whatever else she feels like doing on a whim. Her husband Ricky dedicated his morning to helping me find a car, as my own search has been slow and unrewarding, mostly due to my passivity and denial that one won't just turn up in the driveway one day (yes, I'm realizing how much I really take for granted my handy, generous mechanic of a father).

We arrived at Ricky's friend's car lot, who was willing to give me a deal on a Honda Civic he thought was running just fine despite its cosmetic quarks. We test drove it up Haleakala Highway-- the big test: It ran great! We stopped back at Rick and Marilyn's house for a moment before starting it up again and-- nada. "No spahk" was Rick's catchphrase that day, with his Haliimaile-born pidgin. "Noo sparhk. Buhmuh."

To distract ourselves from the hunk of metal blocking the driveway, we turned around to face the '88 Nissan Pathfinder he had laying around (Ricky buys cars from auctions and fixes them up-- a common side-job on the island, and elsewhere I imagine). We replaced the starter in that car, and wouldn't you know it: "Nooo spahk. Buhhmuh."

We tried this and that, this again and that again on this car and that one. By 3 that afternoon, we had returned to my Honda with a new distributor in hand. Looking down at the old one under the hood, I was worried about not knowing how to line it up right, considering I didn't know what a distributor looked like until that morning. We both hesitated a moment, until Rick smiled:

"We ain't no scaredycats. The one thing I ain't is a scaredycat. Too many people have fee-uh, ya know what I mean? We might not get it right, but we ain't gunna have fee-uh."

That said, the old distributor came right off. We rigged the fresh-out-the-box toy where we thought it might go. I'm not sure how much Rick knew what he was doing-- "I've never had luck with distributors," he said once and again. I certainly didn't know what I was doing. But we did it anyway. One 4pm lunch--and a fight with some plastic piece that has something to do with connecting wires--later, we cranked the key and-- "Ha. Noo spahk." 

Wow, was all we could say, over and over, totally defeated for the day. "Well we got some hands-on experience," we tried to redeem one another. "Rough day," we joked. It wasn't really funny, but we laughed anyway. We cleaned up, with a bit more tinkering in between sighs and jokes. When we were ready to start pushing the Civic to get it out of the driveway, that smile of Rick's returned. "What if it starts!" he said, smirking. One foot out the car door, he cranks it: Vroom. 

"What!" was all I could say.

We had spahk. In fact, we had more than spahk. That thing got us all the way up Piiholo Road--2,000 feet of elevation packed into 3 miles of windy mountain turns.

When I walked in the door that night, I said I'd be in the office the next day, "since I didn't work today. Today I was a mechanic." 

Ha. Hardly.

I didn't buy the Civic. I don't know if we really fixed anything, or if we got lucky when it ran for us that night. But we didn't have fee-uh, and I did have a day worth writing about.

Marcella, and a Guava Tree

I'm returning to the online world after a 46-hour power outage that heightened my understanding of off-grid living, and living with(out) attachment in general.

A few weeks ago, I became very committed to the idea of building a tiny home on wheels with off-grid capabilities. What does that mean? 8 X 16 feet of permanent living space, on a trailer, that can be hooked up to running water but also functions comfortably in the middle of open land. What else does that mean? A whole lot, I'm beginning to discover. 

On December 31, 2014, I prepared mentally for my "blogging resolution": X/365 would be a year-long daily blogging project that would lead me to my tiny home's construction. In fact, by New Year's Eve, I had probably written my first blog in my head twelve times over. I was anxious for the challenge, to see what would come out of 365 manipulated decisions to write: to put my thoughts into letters, words and sentences. As you may have already calculated, I failed on January 1st.

My decision to fail was a product of my New Year's Eve, for I was feeling a bit under the weather. I resolved that I would hit the sack early and welcome the New Year in the morning, feeling rested and ready. Until I ran into Marcella.

Marcella is a massage therapist on the brink of getting her license. She was cleaning up her table after working on a sweet woman from Austria when I passed through the spa and she stopped me to ask my New Year's Eve plans. "I think I'm coming down with something," I told her, "so I'm pretty okay with welcoming the new year in the morning." A few minutes went by as we both continued doing whatever we were doing, when she stopped me again. This time she took hold of my arms as they hung at my sides:

"Paige. I was thinking about what you said. And you can't sleep through the new year," she began, looking at me straight in the eye with her theatrical Colombian accent. "2015 is a year with a lotta vibration. You have to welcome it. You gotta match the energy. This is what you do: Get some salt in hot water and run it up your nose, you know those things? It's kinna uncomfortablea but it clears out all the sinuses. Then sit down and write-- all the things you wanna do this year-- date, time-- everything. It doesn't matter if you actually do it at that time, but, you know. You gotta welcome the new year, welcome the energy, you can't let it start without you."

I smiled and nodded as she spoke with such certainty. "Okay," Marcella, "I will." 

That night I took a salt bath, never having searched for the tube I needed to stick up my nose; I cleaned my room and cleared it with incense and an apple-scented candle from Ross Department Store; I rolled a cigarette under the cloudy night sky as I thought about the moon being in Taurus-- a time to finish old projects and acknowledge nature's beauty; I drank two cups of that vitamin powder that turns green and bubbly when it's mixed with water; and then I snuggled into bed at an hour before midnight, notebook in hand.

Marcella's voice in my head, I decided to free-write, so as not to become too attached to the dates and times of the things I would set out to do, and so as not to spend the next four hours writing them, which is not so out of the question. I wrote for 30 minutes:

Marcella told me to write everything I want to do this year. I will compose as a free write, so as not to get too attached. My birth chart says that my impulsiveness prevents me from seeing the bigger picture, or something like that.

January 1 @ 11am - I will do yoga. 108 sun salutations, or what have you.

January 2 @ noon - I will buy a jeep.

January 1 @ 8pm - I will post my first blog of X/356.

I will climb a mountain - January 17 @ 4pm.

I will cook a great meal - January 12 @ 7pm.

January 31 @ 9pm - I will spend time with the moon and the stars.

March 3 @ 1pm - I will submerge myself in the ocean.

May 1 @ 12pm - I will have lunch with Grandma Sweetheart.

June 2 @ 8am - I will take a long walk in honor of my birthday.

As these dates get farther away, I find my pauses are longer.

January 3 @ 9pm - I will practice my Lomi.

January 30 @ 11am - I will read an entire book in one day.

What will these commitments bring me, if written with such haste and uncertainty?

September 14 @ 4pm - I will light a candle for Kari's dad.

March 30 @ 3am - I will create something.

Now with thought, for my loose hand is making me nervous. (I scratched this out, pushing aside my discomfort.)

My loose hand is making me nervous.

February 12 @ 1pm - I will meet a new friend in a coffee shop.

January 9 @ 2pm - I will visit Tencia at Nui's Farm.

October 31 @ 11am - I will make a fabulous Halloween costume.

This feels so real and so detached all at the same time.

What I really want to do is go to sleep.

Where is this anxiety coming from?

April 4 @ 5pm - I will drive somewhere I have never been before.

October 14 @ 2pm - I will drive somewhere I've never been before.

I succumbed to this feeling of anxiety, turned off my light and waited for midnight, feeling unsure and wondering why this writing exercise brought these feelings upon me. At 11:55 I tore myself out of bed and walked to the farthest end of the yard, where lays the stone alter. I stretched out my arms and took deep breaths, and listened for the celebrations nearby to tell me when the new year came. When my tiredness fell away and was replaced with a breath of fresh air, I thanked Marcella for the motivation. I thanked Ke Akua, the Spirit, for all the beauty that surrounded me. Because this is what the Hawaiians do, and becaues Ke Akua is the only godly form I've ever felt humble enough to accept. I stretched and breathed and spun in circles. I said happy new year to myself, and I ate a guava off the guava tree, returned to my room and fell asleep. 

Marcella's list filled me with ideas about what life means to me, about how I want to spend my days and what I want to do in the world. The anxiety I felt scheduling my year led me to skip Day 1 of x/365 because when the time came to write, I had no words ready to share with the world. As the days rolled on and my connection to the internet screeched to a halt, I realized that writing a daily blog for the sake of writing a daily blog would be like planning to stand outside to welcome the vibrations of the new year, and missing the guava tree. If I can treat life like a free-write, I will know with certainty not that my thoughts will form according to plan, or that my dreams will be realized in some perfect fashion, or that my words will somehow take on some incredible meaning-- but that I will have lived each moment in harmony with whatever it is inside me that feels like saying, I will drive somewhere I have never been before. "It doesn't matter if you actually do it at that time, but, you know... You can't let it start without you."

Lomi Lomi, Show Me, Show Me

I am now 33 Continuing Education hours closer to being a licensed massage therapist. Funny thing is, a few weeks ago I never considered touching people for a living. And it's not that I now see massage as my new career path, but after taking Jeana's Lomi Lomi (which is an ancient art form rooted in Hawaiian healing traditions) Fundamentals class, I have in fact discovered a new guiding light. For as I stood over a body on Day 2, following the instructions being called out with minor frustration, something came up through me and suddenly the tears were flowing. I'm not quite sure what started it--though I have my theories--but what I do know is that the energy was moving at that moment and I couldn't stop it. What I didn't know until a few days later was the force of this energy, and how warm it can feel when you are ready to accept it...

Read more in my guest appearance on Jeana's blog

A Day with Kumu

I am often absorbed by minute details of day-to-day life and find such moments easy to write about. I often skip over big events when writing about my experiences, perhaps because I feel that I wouldn't do the moment justice, and so I'd prefer to let it fall into the past untouched, unrecorded, untainted by hindsight.

I am going to taint this experience. For the sake of preservation, I hope.

This past Tuesday, a rust-red moon took center-stage amongst a sea of stars, and I was lucky enough to join Kumu Mike Lee at the ahupua'a-- a pie slice of land with cultural significance-- that is supposed to become a stomping ground for Target shoppers any day now, to watch this miraculous event. Uncle Mike led a group of us all day up the volcano of Haleakala to do cultural practice. He taught us about the sacred waters and the limu-- a seaweed plant that absorbs angry spirits; he chanted, calling upon his ancestors, and played the nose flute in a cave along the mountainside; he showed us how the mist rolls in upon the ancestors' arrival.

And when a yelling, swearing bald man stumbled out of his tent at Haleakala National Park, shouting at him to "move your religious bullshit over there", Uncle Mike chanted some more, calling upon his ancestors to be with us, and he chanted until the man's shouting stopped, until he walked away. "This is my family's land," he said, "and if you don't like it, it's a beautiful world out there, take a walk."

As the battle between men came to an end, I felt a hotness come through me, from my center out to my cheeks, and it didn't stop until tears flowed down my face. My heart sank and floated at the same time, as this hopeless determination came over me. It wasn't about me at all, I knew this. And yet I felt so utterly connected to this timeless war: people against people, fighting for their own versions of peace.

We moved on. We felt the angry man's defeat and we moved on when we finished our lunch. And we continued on to the summit of Haleakala where we observed Hawaiian cultural practice from 10,000 feet high. On our way there, La'au and Kala, two of the young boys I look after some evenings, debated the tallest thing in Maui. "What's taller than Haleakala?" one asked. "A billion jillion ants stacked on top of each other," the other answered. "Ninety-eighty-five people standing on top of each other," the smallest laughed. What's taller than Haleakala? The twelve-story telescope that the government is building at one of the island's most sacred spots.

So Uncle Mike encouraged us to take pictures to document Hawaiian cultural practice. For it is no longer enough to put heart and soul into something-- to save what he loves, he has to prove it.

Uncle Mike, like countless other Hawaiians today, is willing to taint his experience. For the sake of preservation, he hopes.

Circular Journeys and Rules of Grammar

It's a funny thing to end a journey where you started. If you separate life into journeys, that is. 

My seventh-grade Language Arts teacher had it right. He said that sometimes teachers lie-- that they don't tell the whole truth. When you're learning the concept of a sentence structure, he might have used the example, you don't need to be bogged down with all the exceptions-- you'll have an easier time understanding them once you've already conceptualized the verb and noun in their general forms, their untainted states. The elementary school teacher says 'Never start a sentence with "because"' and eventually you learn that you can, too, do this, understanding how to make your fragment a complete sentence by adding another clause after a comma, following your clause.

If you want.

"Speaking is different from writing," my teacher said. You don't have to speak in correct English in all situations, in fact oftentimes it's simply inappropriate, he encouraged us in our resistance to formality-- our fear of seeming to our peers too eager to embrace the knowledge handed to us by figures of authority; written English, he encouraged us, is a different beast. He presented to us, in this Language Arts class, this opportunity to stray from our acts--for in those days, we were all acting most of the time. 

I was comforted by this chance, as I often felt--and still feel at times-- the need to subscribe: to one image, one system of beliefs, one consistent lifestyle--  But here I was being told that I could learn a language, the written English language, and I could convey a precise message about the world. By knowing where to place my punctuation in describing "the wide brick path" I could speak of the world and be completely understood.

But he, too, was not telling the whole truth. And this I did not know until journeys later; and to what extent he dismissed the whole truth, still I do not know.

To end a journey where you began is like learning the exception to the ruse. And you get this feeling like you never really knew what something was the first time around. You return to it, having abandoned that place, that moment, for another, re-contextualizing its entire significance and meaning. Your perception does not alter its being but to you, its and your existence have forever changed.

-

I wrote this sitting on a couch in Meadville, four months after graduating College in that very place; these months held many homes for me until I completed something of a circle, ending my summer travels in the town that birthed the idea, back when it was still snowing. It's a funny thing to end a thought as you began it; that is, I suppose, life begins to seem so funny.