(Aloha means "Breath of God") __________________________________ pages 11-20 For a menu of other pages, left-click anywhere on this page (except on a link or an image) |
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********* from Huna.com ********* THE TEACHING OF HA-WAI-I: (This legend is not necessarily verifiable, but it is fun!) When the first Haole (slang for Caucasian), no doubt one of Captain Cook's crew, arrived at the Island of Hawai'i, he came ashore, and asked the first Hawaiian he saw, "What's the name of this place? Where do you live?" The Hawaiian answered, "Hawai'i." Then the sailor went to another area of the Big Island and asked the next Hawaiian he saw, "Where do you live?" The second Hawaiian said, "Hawai'i." And then a third, with the same answer, so the island was named "Hawai'i." What each Hawaiian meant was, "I live in the supreme Mana that rides on the life's breath." When the sailor visited the next island, he asked the first Hawaiian he saw, "Where do you live?" This Hawaiian said, "Hawai'i." And then another island and another, and still the same answer, "Hawai'i." So Captain Cook named all the Islands, "Hawai'i." But Hawai'i isn't just a place in the middle of the Pacific, it's a place inside you -- a place that, wherever you go in the world it is still inside you. You see, what the Hawaiian was saying was, "I live in: Ha: meaning breath, or breath of life Wai: meaning water, but also a code word for Mana or life force, and 'I: meaning supreme But Hawai'i is not just in the Hawaiian Islands, you also carry it with you, and so you can connect with your Hawai'i -- the supreme life's force that rides on the breath, any time, anywhere. Just stop and take a full breath in through the nose, and out through the mouth with the sound, "Ha." The out-breath is whispered loudly, and is twice as long as the in-breath. *************************** Very interesting, that Ha means breath of life. In Japan, there's a very ancient science of kotodama ("word soul" or "word spirit"). Kotodama are the primordial, pre-human sounds, the vibrations of which bring into being All That Is. Each particular sound generates a certain kind of energy and therefore a certain effect. And the kotodama masters say that the sound of Ha has the effect of "expanding the light of life." So, yes, Ha is the breath of life and it expands life-energy. In working with reiki, there's even a practice called Hado breathing -- merely incorporating the "Ha" outbreath with the use of reiki, to make the reiki more powerful. Something else from Huna.com:
The lack of breath does seem to be rather characteristic of us Caucasians. Sometimes we literally have to remind ourselves to breathe. Duhhh! Look at our nostrils, how much smaller they are than Asian or African or Aboriginal nostrils! Those people are born to breathe -- but we've been holding our breath for so many generations, the nostrils themselves are shrinking. However, there's another side to this coin -- there always is -- and it may prove that we small-nostril types are actually on the leading edge of a quantum leap in human breathing! I say this because of some very interesting claims now being made, independently, by 2 Russian researchers. Well, gee.....it seems time is flying past me; I must be having almost as much fun as a human being can tolerate!! :^ ) Lately, every time I sit down to add to the journal, I end up being sucked into the vortex of HTML-land -- working on other webpages -- where time completely disappears, and then I find my way back only to discover that 5 or 6 or 7 hours have passed and it's 3:00 or 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning and the roosters are crowing their heads off. But here I am at last, with a few more words on the subject of breathing. As I was starting to say, 2 Russian researchers have apparently come upon more or less the same discovery: as I understand it, the discovery that a certain way of shallow breathing may be much healthier for us than deep breathing! It's a way of breathing called "endogenic" -- meaning that the energy is generated from within, rather than brought in from outside. Breathing with the lungs is "exogenic," bringing energy into our bodies from outside, whereas endogenic breathing is a way that conditions every cell in the body to breathe and generate energy for itself! They say this is the way whales and dolphins breathe. One of the Russian discoverers is a medical doctor named Buteyko, the other is an inventor named Frolov. (Thanks to my friend Ilanit for this information.) MEANWHILE, BACK ON KAUA'I, my own discoveries continue. Diane and I had made an appointment to meet on Friday, about me living in her house. I was showered and shaved and ready, at 8:00 a.m., to head down the hill to catch the bus for Kapa'a. I called her on the phone to make final arrangements, and she said it was not a good day to meet after all. So we rescheduled for Monday. I still felt like going somewhere, and decided I would take my new reiki fliers and Keith's workshop fliers and go explore Hanapepe. I tossed my bright yellow folder with the fliers, and an umbrella, and a bottle of water into my knapsack and went down the stairs and down the hill to stand at the highway with my thumb in the air. A half hour later I was still there and it was starting to rain. I walked a few yards and got under the roof of Steve's Mini-Mart and sat on the bench there for a minute. The rain was coming down harder and the clouds looked like they might not be going anywhere for a long time. I took out my umbrella, put the knapsack on my back, and started up the hill, back to the house, holding the umbrella firmly in both hands, bracing the handle against the stiff autumn wind. After going maybe a hundred yards, I heard a car come up behind me and stop, and a little toot of the horn, and looked around to see dear Donna there in her blue-gray Poi-mobile, returning home from spending the night in Waimea. I got in the car and she drove us up the hill. I decided this was not the day for me to go anywhere; came inside and upstairs and yoked myself to the computer, and disappeared again into the Black Hole of HTML-land. |
ON SATURDAY Donna took me to the Queen Emma festival. It's held every October, in a mountain meadow at Koke'e, to honor a trip made in 1871 by Queen Emma and a hundred of her friends, up the mountain from Waimea. It's important to realize, as Donna pointed out to me, that in 1871 there was no road up the mountain; the queenly party was in for several days of rigorous climbing. And Emma was not exactly lithe and light of foot, judging by the photos we saw of her at the festival. In 1871 she was also no longer Queen -- her reign having ended in 1863 -- but of course the title stayed with her the rest of her life. (She is loved and credited for bringing the Episcopalian Church to Hawai'i, and starting a hospital and a school for girls.) Remember that one Hawai'ian king, the only one we all learned the name of in school, Kamehameha? Well, he was the one Emma (maiden name Rooke) married; that's how she got to be Queen. He was not the only Kamehameha, but the Fourth one. His full name was Alexander Liholiho Kamehameha IV. He was King from 1855 to 1863, when he died. (In the photo I saw at the festival, he was dressed like a European monarch and looked quite uncomfortable.) He and Emma had one child, Prince Albert, who died at age 4, just 15 months before the death of his father. So, quite suddenly, Emma had her family taken away from her. She continued with life in an exemplary fashion, however, and is still so beloved by the people that they now have this yearly celebration to honor her. It's held in a huge meadow on the mountain; the kind of meadow where you would not be surprised to see Julie Andrews emerge from the tall grass singing, "The hills are alive.....with the Sound of Music....." And they were, on Saturday. Beautiful, Hawai'ian music -- some traditional, some more recent -- played and sung by various people. (The word is not "Yuke-a-lay-lee," by the way, it's "Ook-a-lay-lay.") The musicians were set up beneath a huge old tree.....and a temporary pavilion had been erected for the Queen (portrayed this year by a woman named Manulele) and her pals.....and the rest of us found places to sit on the grass. There was a pavilion with historical information and photos, where programs for the festival were being sold (Donna bought one and won a T-shirt!). There was a pavilion selling food; beautiful little handcrafted snacks. One was called Spam Musubi: a block of sticky white rice (almost the size of a schoolroom chalkboard eraser) with a thin slab of Spam on top, the whole thing wrapped generously in a sheet of seaweed! There was another one called Kulolo: a smaller block, almost a chocolate color, very sticky and gummy and very dense. We bought one of those. It was made of taro root and coconut milk and sugar and corn starch. Mmmmm, very delicious! We found an empty spot in the shade of some evergreen trees, unrolled our grass mats and sat and listened to the music. We had arrived shortly after 10:00 and the Queen wasn't due till noon. It was great to sit there in the cool, delicious, mountain air with beautiful music to hear and people to watch and Kulolo to eat. When the Queen arrived, she was on horseback, attended by a man on one side and a woman on the other; all of them on horseback. They walked their horses across the meadow to the Royal pavilion, where they sidled up to a set of green, wooden steps on the ground, and dismounted. The horses were led away and the Queen and her escorts took their seats in the pavilion. There were some opening presentations and then a string of performances by various Hula Halaus -- Hula schools -- some on Kaua'i, some from other islands. The director or a teacher of the school would say a few words and then sing while the dancers danced. Some of them were accompanied by a string bass or ukeleles, and some accompanied themselves with a marvelous drum of sorts, made from a giant gourd (called ipu). SOME OF THE GOURDS must have been at least 3 feet tall, and as big around as a large dinner plate. Flat on the bottom, they swelled out just a tiny bit as they went up; then, three-quarters of the way up, the sides suddenly narrowed way in, enough that a hand could hold the gourd there. Then the top quarter flared out again. The very top was flat, with a hole in the center, where the stem had been. These drums were decorated, each with a garland of leaves around the narrow part: long, narrow, dark green maile leaves, which grow only on Koke'e and seem to be spiritually significant to the natives. The hula singers and dancers wore headbands of maile leaves also. To play the gourd drums, the singers would cinch one hand tightly to the neck of the gourd with a strap, then slap the side of the gourd with the other hand and thump the bottom of it against the ground. The Festival was scheduled to go till 3:30. We left at 1:30. I was quite surprised at the small number of spectators -- maybe 60 of us around the Queen's area, and half as many more at a great distance down the meadow. Donna said there were usually many more people than this, and the hula performances were usually much more professional looking. We looked into the museum for a few minutes as we were leaving, then stepped into the restaurant, where Donna introduced me to her friend Sherry, who has been the manager for years. Donna said they serve delicious cornbread and Portuguese bean soup -- but we were already full of Kulolo and bread and sweet potatoes. We got in the car and went down the mountain, stopping once to look down into Waimea Canyon. The guard rail at the overlook was shoulder-to-shoulder with Japanese tourists. Most of them were speaking excitedly and gesturing at something in the Canyon, but we never figured out what. Waimea Canyon is touted as "The Grand Canyon of The Pacific" -- and there is enough resemblance to see how someone could have coined the phrase, though this canyon is a lot smaller and a lot greener than the one in Arizona. Quite beautiful, nonetheless. We took a different road down from Koke'e, more to the west, which gave us a great view of the island of Ni'ihau in the distance. When we got to the bottom, it seemed remarkably hot in contrast to the mountain meadow. We headed east, back to Kalaheo. We stopped between Kekaha and Waimea, at a place called Waimea Plantation Cottages: a 27-acre coconut grove, right along the beach, where probably about a hundred sugar plantation cottages have been transplanted and refurbished. They were built in the early 1900s as living quarters for sugar cane workers and their families, and have been beautifully and historically restored. Some are now rented by tourists, some hold businesses. We went there to see another friend of Donna's, who has a massage business in one of the cottages -- to ask about leaving fliers for Keith's workshop and for reiki. She was gone, though, to San Diego. We came home and Donna went to Lihue for a meeting at 5:00. |
MONDAY I MET DIANE. We spent several hours together and got along very well. We're the same age and share some interests. While I was growing up in Colorado, she was in New York City. Eventually she moved to San Francisco, then to Kaua'i in 1992, just after Hurricane Iniki. She said she loved it here then because there were so few people and nothing was happening. The Hurricane had swept the energy of the whole island clean and, in the calm after the storm, everyone was grateful just to be alive. People were suddenly more conscious than before, and more reverent of life. In California, Diane had become interested in Macrobiotics. Her first macro counselor had been Kaare Bursell, whom I would meet and become friends with years later, through the Pacific Macrobiotics Conference, when I was living in Arizona. She had also spent a lot of time with Herman and Cornelia Aihara in California, and helped them run their macro center. At some point, she had been attuned to reiki (though said she didn't use it on herself, because she never felt as much happening with self-treatment as when she received it from someone else). Then she came to Kaua'i, where she happened to meet a man named Serge King -- who was one of the contacts I was given just before coming here. Nowadays Serge is probably the best-known teacher on the Island of Huna healing methods and way of life; but, in the days and months immediately after Iniki, when the tourists were not coming, Diane palled around with him a lot and became a close friend. Anyway, despite what she learned from him, and despite the reiki, and despite the macrobiotics, she still has some health problems that began in California. My part in this picture will be to help with her healing, and to do some chores around the house that she is not able to do. The house is in the hills above Kapa'a, on the east side of the Island. She lives there with a man named Brian, a building contractor by trade and a musician by desire. I met him a couple days later, in the cafeteria of Wilcox Hospital in Lihue, while Donna was at the Hospital for a meeting. I'll be moving into their house on Monday. I would have gone sooner, but I stayed to help Donna with a concert last night (as I write this, it's 1:20 Sunday morning). She's the President of Kaua'i Concert Association, and her duties include providing food and drink for the performers in their dressing rooms, and setting up a backstage reception for them, and cleaning up afterward. WE LEFT KALAHEO yesterday afternoon at 4:00, with a Jeep full of stuff: thermal chests full of ice, tablecloths, napkins, plastic utensils, styrofoam plates, plastic drinking glasses, soft drinks, grapes, flowers, and the makings of a big bowl of green salad, already washed and torn into bite-size pieces and ready, in zip-loc bags, to be dumped into the salad bowl. The concert hall is at Kaua'i Community College, just a few miles from here. Donna backed the Jeep down the long ramp to the stage door, and we started unloading everything. Once inside, we met the piano tuner, doing his thing on the big black Steinway (I believe that's what it was) on stage. He had what looked like a high-tech ratchet wrench, and a laptop computer plugged into the piano's innards somehow. He interrupted his electronic brain surgery, though, to give Donna profuse greetings and a hug. It was a very nice stage and auditorium, and a great-sounding room, as we discovered a bit later, when the piano tuner cut loose with an impromptu concert of his own. We were too busy to really listen, though -- setting up tables and plates and utensils and fancy swirls of napkins, and washing grapes for the dressing room. We met Norman Krieger when he arrived. Norman was the concert. Norman plays the piano. He lives in Princeville, right here on Kaua'i. But he was a full-time scholarship student at Juilliard School of Music at age 15, and has studied with Alfred Brendel and Maria Curcio in London, and with Russell Sherman at New England Conservatory. Now, according to last night's program, he "regularly appears with major orchestras across North America and throughout the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston Pops, Hong Kong, Prague, Turkey, New Zealand and Taiwan." He certainly looked the part: dressed all in black, a slight bowling-pin shape to his figure, complete with a bald spot on top. When we shook hands, we didn't really: he gave a little squeeze to my fingers, before I could really engage his hand. (Well, I suppose, with hands as valuable as his, that may be a wise strategy, to keep them from getting crunched by some lummox.) He was easy to please in the dressing room; wanted nothing but water. Not even the grapes. Couldn't eat them, he said, he was diabetic. As he was telling us this, he was talking on a cell phone with his wife, asking her to bring him 2 chocolate bars. Oh, they were diabetic chocolate bars, he explained: they had very little sugar. Hmmm......Maybe the chocolate wasn't really chocolate, either :^ ). We got everything set up, and I changed my clothes and went outside the stage door to eat a slice of bread I had brought. I've made 3 loaves of bread since I've been here, and it's the best bread I've ever made in my life. Sourdough, as usual, but really much better than before. In this latest loaf I put cooked sweet and wild rice, cinnamon and sesame seeds. It made a huge loaf, amazingly tender and light. I steamed it, as usual, instead of baking it. I think maybe the sweet rice gets a lot of credit, and maybe also the Aloha spirit that really does permeate the atmosphere here. I was leaning on the railing outside the stage door, munching a slice of that delicious bread, gazing at a gorgeous cloud formation in the west: a great pillar of mushrooming cloud, very close, with beautiful, late-afternoon, golden-rosy tones. A car rolled up and a woman got out, dressed in a beautiful shade of purple. Her name was Jo and she was bringing wine glasses and a plate of dessert and a bowl of pasta salad. I helped her carry them inside. Before long it was seven o'clock, and then we were listening to Norman Krieger. The house was almost completely full, and Norman's keyboard prowess was truly extraordinary. The man is really, really good! Surely the nimblest fingers I've ever seen at a piano. And the sound in that room was marvelous. He started with a piece written by Mozart at age 5 -- Yes! -- which was absolutely beautiful. Then a Mozart rondo, then Beethoven's "Tempest" sonata. Then something very different and intriguing, called Kachina Prelude, by Judith Sainte Croix. He explained that he had met her when he lived in New York, and that she had spent some time living with the Hopis in Arizona, and that she had written this Prelude for him, out of that experience. Then another piece -- I've forgotten what it was -- and then Intermission. They were selling cookies outside at Intermission. On my way there, I saw a woman I recognized: a chiropractor from Kapa'a, named Charlotte. I met her one Saturday, weeks ago, in Lihue, when I happened into a Women's Health Fair. They had all kinds of health-related things there: Healing Touch and Reiki, a Chi Machine, nutritional supplements, iridology, aura readings, you name it. Even a Most Beautiful Breast-fed Baby Contest! And Charlotte the chiropractor was one of the people I met there. She was doing photographic spinal analyses. I let her do one on me, when I finished with the Chi Machine, and was quite amazed to see, in the photo she took, that my head was angled considerably forward. Thirty-three degrees, in fact, according to her computer analysis of the photo. It was really a shock to learn that I was carrying my head that way! She called it a "Fight or Flight response." I didn't feel I was fighting anything or fleeing from anything.....but ever since then I have certainly been more conscious of the position of my head, and many times I find it is indeed thrust forward! I realize, too, that I have been living my life that way for a very long time, if not from the start. I always seem to be pushing forward, reaching forward, heading into the future, as if there's never enough time to relax into the present, as if I always have to be doing, doing, doing. Always looking for the next thing, and the next and the next. It's a great thing to realize about myself after 49 years! (And, as I write this, the clock says 3:53 a.m. :^ ) Anyway, Charlotte wanted me to come to her chiropractic office for treatments, to train my neck into the proper alignment. This is Network Chiropractic that she does, not the old snap-crackle-pop variety -- and it's something I would like to do. Now that I'm moving to Kapa'a, I probably will do it. So it was interesting that we met again at the concert last night. She was with a guy named Peter, and the 3 of us went outside to check out the cookie selection.....where we met another friend of Charlotte's, a woman named Susan.....who introduced us to her friend Chuck. I've been introduced to so many people here already, and they all seem genuinely friendly and interested in their fellow beings. I feel I know these people even before I officially meet them. I feel at home. There was an astounding variety of cookies to be had; must have been 20 different kinds. Three cookies for a dollar, and they were big ones. I bought 3 Cranberry Oatmeal models and barely had time to eat one before the concert resumed. The second half of the program consisted of 2 Etudes by Chopin, 3 Preludes by Gershwin (Norman seems to have quite a fondness for Preludes), and finally Gershwin's masterpiece "Rhapsody in Blue" (which, Norman reminded us, was written at the behest of Paul Whiteman). It was truly the high point of the evening. As many times as I've heard recordings of that song (even by Whiteman himself), there were parts tonight that I would swear I've never heard before! And a recording simply doesn't measure up to a live human being tickling the ivories in a room with perfect acoustics. The reception after the concert was excellent too. Everywhere I go here, I'm impressed at how friendly everyone is, to me and to each other. People look you straight in the face the whole time they're talking, and they ask questions because they're truly interested, not just to be polite. It was that way at the reception, plus beautiful food. Donna didn't even assemble her salad, there was so much other food: 2 huge pans of green salad brought by Sandy, the caterer.....and a giant bowl of vermicelli seasoned with herbs and lemon juice and olive oil.....and a big pan of chicken (which didn't attract me).....plus Jo's pasta salad, and a delicious bean salad, courtesy of Brett, the Concert Association Secretary. Then there was a whole table of desserts: Dutch apple pie, shortbread, fudge brownies, and some disc-shaped wafers with frosting on one side, outrageously sweet! After a plateful of the vermicelli and salads, and a plate of desserts, I started bouncing back and forth between a little more pasta and a little more dessert -- searching for just the right balance of yin and yang! People cleared out, and Donna and I and Ryan packed things up, and we were on our way home about 11:00. We arrived, Donna and I, with bags of leftover food.....and I just couldn't resist another serving of that vermicelli. Afterward, I made a cup of twig tea and took it upstairs and worked at the computer till 5:00 the next morning. RIGHT NOW that seems a lifetime away. Monday I packed all my things and Donna brought me to my new home in the hills above Kapa'a. She had an appointment nearby at 4:00 p.m., and we intended to be at Diane's at 3:00. As it happened, it was almost 3:00 when we left Kalaheo. Then we took a wrong turn on the backroads up from Kapa'a; we got on a road I've not even been able to find since then. By the time we got on the right road and arrived at the house, it was 3:45. No one was home, but they were expecting me and I was supposed to go on in. As soon as we stopped in the driveway, though, we noticed a high-pitched, ear-piercing sound pulsing through the air. We walked over to the house and, sure enough, the sound was coming from inside. We unloaded my things and Donna raced off to her appointment. Need I say, I didn't go in the house. The noise was obviously some kind of alarm, and I was sure I would have no idea how to turn it off. I went back to the driveway, and to the other side of the garage, and sat on the grass looking at the beautiful clouds in the western sky. I must have sat there for almost an hour before Diane showed up. We went in the house to discover that the screaming noise was coming from the smoke detectors. Good thing there were only 5 of them! All screaming in unison. There was no smoke, just the alarms. Brain-splitting screeches (as Brian said later, reminiscent of the screams of The Birds in Hitchcock's movie), caroming off the hard surfaces in this house, which is nothing but hard surfaces: tile and glass and stainless steel and marble. It's also a house of very high ceilings, and naturally the smoke detectors are located at ceiling level. Fortunately there was a very tall ladder in the garage. I took it in the house and set it up and removed the battery from one of the alarms. No change in the screaming. I went to all the others, removed all the batteries. Still screaming. The batteries were only a backup power source, the alarms were wired into the house current. We found the main breaker switches for the whole property, on the wall of the garage, and shut them off, and there was silence in the house (just the lingering echoes of the screaming, like ghosts chasing each other around for a bit). Brian arrived about that time, and he and I put the batteries back in the alarms and pushed the reset buttons. No screaming. We turned the electricity back on. No screaming. Not for 3 or 4 minutes anyway. It started as a chirp, one single chirp. Then a couple more. Then the whole banshee ruckus, just like before. We grabbed the ladder again and started climbing and plucking batteries. And shut off the electricity. We couldn't think of anything to try except replacing the batteries with new ones. Brian went to town to get some, and it was after dark by the time he got back -- so we did the ladder routine in the dark, with a flashlight. And the smoke detectors were satisfied with their new batteries. Tuesday I helped Diane prepare some food to take to the beach (she spends most of her days there), then she left and I unpacked my things and arranged them in my room. Tuesday evening I fixed supper for the 3 of us. Wednesday Diane decided that her own health concerns were going to preclude my having reiki clients and students here. It had become obvious that her condition was more fragile than it seemed the day we met. So, as it turns out, this is not the place for me. I'll stay for a while yet, at least through Sunday. She wants to take me to Princeville Sunday, to meet her friend Serge King at his weekly public event called "Talk Story." In the meantime, I had lunch with her at the beach, and later we went to the Farmers' Market, on our way back to the house. Thursday I wrote Donna and asked if I could come back to her place. Friday I went to see a nearby resort/retreat center called Magic Sunrise Hawaii, and to meet the owners, Fabienne and Desiree. Magic Sunrise Hawaii is up in the mountains, beyond Opaeka'a Falls, overlooking the Wailua River Valley. It's very secluded, yet only about 3-1/2 miles from the beach. I found Fabienne and Desiree sitting on the lanai of the main guest house with a man named Art. Fabienne gave me a tour of the place -- beautiful, homey rooms with lovely furnishings, everything exuding a great aura of peacefulness and love and warmth. Fabienne is Desiree's mother. The 2 of them came to Kaua'i about 4 years ago from Switzerland, for a vacation. They were here for 7 months and then decided they could never go back to live in Switzerland. Desiree had just finished school, and Fabienne had been a Kindergarten teacher -- and they bought this property with 50-year-old buildings on it and transformed it into Magic Sunrise Hawaii. The energy of the place was indeed almost magical to me. I drove back down the mountain, to find Diane at the beach and have lunch with her. On the way down, I stopped for a look at Opaeka'a Falls.....and discovered this was the one where Donna had brought me, in my very first days on the Island, to leave an offering for the Spirits. There, in the parking lot at the viewpoint, was Radar the basketmaker, sitting in the bed of his orange pickup truck again, making palm-frond baskets. I said, "Aloha" as I passed him. He grunted something around the cigarette in his mouth, showing no sign of remembering me, not looking up to meet my eyes. I found Diane at the beach near the library. Back from the beach, actually, in the shade of a tree, sitting in her car, looking out at the beautiful ocean, talking with someone on the phone. When she finished, we sat and talked. We ate lunch. We walked up the beach to the north. She pointed out some tiny Man-O-War jellyfish that had washed up on the sand, and said they could sting you if you stepped on them. I picked up a piece of coral that had also washed up, and we sat on the sand for a while, talking and looking at the beautiful blue water with distant whitecaps as white as shaving cream. The ocean was picture-perfect today, the water as it rolled up on the beach looking absolutely clear, and not another human in sight as far as we could see in either direction. Friday evening Brian and Diane and I had a wonderful dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Kapa'a, named Kintaro, during which I learned more fascinating things about them. That Brian had worked 13 years for the Forest Service in California, and his career had included appearances as Smokey the Bear, in parades and visits to schools. And that his father had played Smokey on television commercials and, when he retired from the Service, they gave him the concession of selling Smokey the Bear memorabilia, which turned into quite a lucrative business. Also, that Diane had produced several programs for Kaua'i Public Television, a career which had brought her to meet and work with and become friends with the legendary Carol Merrill, of "Let's Make a Deal" fame! We came home and I received an email telling me that a friend in California had died. SATURDAY I TOOK A WALK just before sunset, from Diane's and Brian's house: west on the narrow blacktop, past the place with the 2 mules and the tall grass behind the white board fence, then north at the T-junction; past 2 fences with KEEP OUT signs (looking out of place here); past a hilly and immaculate stretch of pasture with more white fencing and 3 of the sleekest Angus cattle imaginable, and 3 little trees planted across one hillside, each with a big square of fence around it, apparently to protect it from the cattle. I came to another T-junction. Straight ahead was an old house, totally dilapidated, no identifying features left on the walls, a corrugated tin roof half rusted. For Sale. Beyond a fixer-upper, I think, this one is a starter-overer -- but what a beautiful location! I went to the left again, to the west, the fading daylight coming through and around a bank of huge clouds. Montana may be Big Sky country, but this is Bigger Sky country. Wherever you are on an island 25 miles across, your world has a lot more sky in it than land, and the clouds here are like magical creations that come and go as fast as the snowflakes in those little egg-shaped scenes that you turn upside-down in your hand, the ones that fascinate children so much. In the north and east there were darker clouds, the ones to the north sitting right down and covering the top of the mountain range. You could see there was plenty of water in the air up there; but no rain here, just beautiful views in all directions. Everything quiet, except for an occasional rooster or dog in the distance. The air was even still. I walked along, through all this, just thanking everything and everyone for my being here. I passed a big rectangular 2-story house dwarfed by a great old tree. The light was dimming fast. The explosive greens of hillsides and pastures were quieting down for the night. So were the cattle -- some red, some black -- and the cattle egrets, all in white, with their long necks and long beaks and clumsy-looking movements. There were groups of cattle and a few egrets on both sides of the road, behind barbed-wire fences. It all reminded me of where I was born and raised. There was a road that went past our house, to the west, and I certainly took plenty of walks down that one and looked at a million sunsets. Cattle there also, and barbed-wire fences; but the road was gravel and dirt, the cattle had sagebrush, not grass, up to their bellies, and magpies instead of egrets for company. I continued on the road until it was just dark enough that I figured I could turn around and get back to the house before it was so dark I'd have trouble finding it. By the time I did get back, all the houses around had become just squares and rectangles of electric light behind windows, in the darkness, and the air was thrumming with insect sounds. I opened the door and stepped into the kitchen, and Diane said, "We were just about to send out a search party for you!" |
SUNDAY DIANE took me to Princeville to meet her friend Serge King. In the Princeville Shopping Center, next to the Foodland grocery store and upstairs, he has a one-room museum of Hawai'ian artifacts, where he holds open house on Sunday mornings from 10:00 to 11:30. He calls it "Talk Story." He starts by giving everyone a tiny pink booklet he wrote, The Aloha Spirit, which describes the very same thing as the Hicks/Grabhorn material on Deliberate Attraction, though in different words. He translates "Aloha" as "the joyful sharing of life energy in the present." "As you share this energy," he says, "you become attuned to the Divine Power that the Hawaiians call mana. And the loving use of this incredible Power is the secret for attaining true health, happiness, prosperity and success." "This is the most powerful technique in the world," he says.....and, "The secret is this: Bless everyone and everything that represents what you want! He goes on to describe what he means by blessing, and gives examples of using the technique (a free copy of the booklet is available through his website). At "Talk Story," People sat in rows of green plastic chairs and asked questions about anything -- Hawai'ian seasons, the philosophy and practice of Huna, what causes hurricanes, what to do for specific situations in their own lives -- and Serge sat up front in a taller chair and gave answers. At the end, he passed around a calabash (a bowl made from a calabash gourd) full of stones and shells and asked everyone to take one, and another calabash for us to put money in. I took a beautiful, cylindrical shell -- cream colored with precise, reddish markings -- the same length as my palm. Then a man named Earl, dressed all in white (even a white beard), got up and led us through a short healing visualization as we held the objects we had taken from the calabash. Then we were asked to return the objects to the calabash. Then we all stood and made a circle, holding hands and singing a short song, partly in Hawai'ian and partly in English. Serge said a few final words and the meeting was over. WE HAD LUNCH with Serge and his wife, Gloria, and Earl and his wife, Lois, at the Bali Hai Restaurant in the Hanalei Bay Resort -- a big, lavish, open-air restaurant looking out on the bay and mountain that were used as backdrops in the movie South Pacific. (I really need to see that movie, but Diane tells me there's not a rental copy of it to be found on the Island; they've all been run so many times, they disintegrated.) Another friend of Serge's, a man named DaEl (no, it's not a typo, and it's pronounced as Dale) Walker, was going to be giving a presentation of crystal skulls at 2:00 p.m. at Serge's museum. We finished lunch about 1:00. Serge went to meet DaEl, and Diane and I went down the road just a few miles to the little town of Hanalei. This area is the unofficial headquarters for New Age/Light Worker/Metaphysical/Healer types, I'm told -- as well as refugees from the '60s and all sorts of surfer dudes and chicks. We went to the Bay and took our shoes off and walked in the surf. It was Sunday and a lot of people were enjoying the beach and the water. When we got back to the museum, DaEl had already started his talk. We sat in the green plastic chairs again, and he in the front -- and in front of him on a low table were 2 crystal skulls. One was the size of a child's skull, only much more elongated than any human skull we're familiar with. DaEl said (If I'm remembering correctly) the shape of it most closely resembles the skulls of Homo erectus. The other skull was adult-size and had a modern shape. They were both made of quartz crystal, clear as glass and highly polished for the most part. The small one was named Rainbow, the large one Madre. DaEl said he did not name them, the skulls told him their own names. He has other skulls, too -- all of them from either Mexico or Central or South America -- and all of them have told him their names, either telepathically or audibly. They also tell him (and his wife, who was there with him) other things. They tell him where they want to go, for instance (he has taken crystal skulls to 11 different countries so far, to talk about and show them to people). They was here on Kaua'i for this one day because Rainbow and Madre told him to bring them here. He believes the skulls may be somehow anchoring an energetic web around the world, at the places he takes them. Modern science has no way of determining the age of quartz, he said, so no one knows how old the skulls are. It has been determined that they were not machine made (not even with the use of a simple machine like a wheel to form or polish the quartz), but no one knows how they were made. They have some very mysterious qualities. Modern gem cutters have an understanding of stones based on a set of 3 axes, X, Y and Z, and they say, if a stone is cut with a particular alignment of those axes, tremendous pressure will build up and break the stone. They also say the quartz that makes up the crystal skulls was cut in just that way -- and they cannot understand how it was done or what is keeping the skulls intact. DaEl has taken thousands of photos of the skulls, and says, when the photos are developed, some of them show images on or within the skulls, which were not visible to the human eye when the photos were taken. In fact, he even says that the images in some of the photos change as time goes by. He has also taken videos of the skulls, in which there are moving images. He believes that whoever made the skulls did so as a way of long-term information storage. He believes the images are somehow stored on bands of light -- but has no idea how it was done. Like the building of the Egyptian pyramids, it's a feat that we, with all our ultra-modern technology, are unable to duplicate. He and his wife told of their experiences with the skulls and then let each of us handle the two they had brought. The larger one, Madre, was remarkably heavy. Some of us took Rainbow outside, into a patch of sunlight, where we could actually see rainbow sequences of light in her, mostly at the temples. All in all, it was a fascinating presentation and a rare opportunity. WEDNESDAY: I can't say enough how beautiful it is here. This afternoon I was at the desk writing and looking out the window, and it started to rain, and there was a magnificent double rainbow, one very bright and one softer. One end of the brightest one was in a cow pasture, maybe 200 yards from my window, and the other end was just across the road that goes in front of the house, less than 100 yards away. Thursday: I went for a walk, a little after 5:00 this afternoon: the same route as before. It turns out the mules in the pasture on the corner are really a mule and a horse :^ ). The mule is the friendlier of the two, he comes right up and sticks his head over the fence to be petted. The horse stays back and munches grass and shows no interest in human silliness. As always, the beauty in all directions is breathtaking. To the north, mountain ranges: Sleeping Giant and the other one, whose name I don't know. Sleeping Giant is always there perfectly at peace, hands in prayer position on his chest as he snoozes, reclining. In the other mountains, Diane says, there's a place where two waterfalls form when it rains hard enough. They start down the mountain and come together, making what people call The Pearl Necklace. She says it's visible from the kitchen window of her house. I haven't seen it; there hasn't been a hard enough rain since I've been here; and I'll be leaving tomorrow. This will be my last walk here for a while. One reason everything is so beautiful here is that the scenery feels so close, you can almost reach out and touch it: trees, mountains, waterfalls, pastures, fields of sugarcane. It feels this way partly because it's a small island, of course, but also -- and this is the really notable factor, I think -- because the air is so clear. Because the AIR is so CLEAR. It seems miraculous. When was the last time I remember seeing the world through clear air? Probably growing up on the ranch in Colorado, before leaving for college and a life in the cities. It does indeed seem miraculous to find air like this again, and pristine mountains, and lush meadows of grazing cattle. And the wonderful egrets that keep them company. They're so WHITE. Almost phosphorescent. Whiter-than white. On our way to Princeville on Sunday, we passed a big reservoir with water so green it looked surreal. Diane said there's one big tree there, where all the egrets on the Island come every evening to roost for the night. The whole tree turns white in the dusk, she said. It reminded me of a place in Bali, near the town of Ubud, where all of Bali's blue herons come to roost every night. They're quite similar to the egrets, and more white than blue actually -- only there are so many of them, it takes a whole grove of trees to hold them. Later Thursday night, just before I went to bed, I stepped outside to brush my teeth. Again I couldn't help feeling reconnected with my childhood on the ranch -- because the stars were o v e r w h e l m i n g. |
I WAS PLANNING to use Brian's car to take my things back to Donna's house in Kalaheo, then bring the car back and get a ride to Kalaheo again; but Donna offered to come and pick me up instead. Friday morning I washed the bedding and answered emails and started packing my things. Diane went to the beach. About 11:00 I sat outside and ate some rice and stir-fried greens. I cleaned the dishes and brushed my teeth and was just getting all my stuff ready to go, in front of the house, when Donna arrived about 12:40. We made 2 stops in Kapa'a, one more on the way to Kalaheo, and arrived at Donna's house about 4:00. The past 3 days, she had been attending a seminar in Poipu about monk seals. I told her, while she'd been doing that, I had seen a monk seal at the beach in Kapa'a one afternoon. There's a low wall of lava rocks that people have constructed, paralleling the shoreline for some distance, to make a gentle pool for swimming. It's a popular place for children especially. The beach there is called "Baby Beach" for that reason. I was sitting on the sand there, not 10 feet from the water, when this seal cruised in on the tide, carried over the wall, and slowly flippered its way through the shallow water, just off the beach, down to where a pair of young girls were playing. When I told this to Donna, she said I should have called her immediately, because she's a member of this organization -- Monk Seal Watch, or some such thing -- that was having the seminar. It had certainly not occurred to me to call her when I saw the seal; but she explained to me that the Monk Seal Watchers like to be notified whenever anyone spots a monk seal. They want to go see it themselves, and document the sighting, and figure out whether it's male or female, and how old, and is it there to have pups or for some other reason, and so on. It seemed rather comical to me, this picture of the official Seal Watchers cloistered in some airtight hotel conference room in Poipu, talking about their seals, when the phone rings to inform them that an actual seal has been sighted in Kapa'a. What would they do? Race to their cars and speed up the highway, fingers crossed, praying to weave their way through all the traffic in time to arrive before Mr. or Ms. Seal gets bored with the beach and heads back out to deeper water? But no, Donna said they would have merely called someone in Kapa'a to document the sighting; there are Seal Spies everywhere! I told her about meeting Serge King, and about the crystal skulls. Again, she wished I would have called her; she had some knowledge of the skulls and was very interested in them. It simply had not occurred to me to call her. There was little advance notice about the presentation of the skulls -- and, more than that, it was just that I'm not much of a telephone person. I still remember the days when the telephone was a huge, boxlike thing on the wall, with a rotary handle that cranked an electric generator, which created the electricity that ran through the wires (assuming they were intact at the moment, hadn't been broken or grounded by a storm, or shot by some prankster with a .22 or some deer hunter trying to nail something 600 yards away that might or might not be a deer, and not seeing the phone line in between) and rang the bell at the other end, so someone would know you had something to tell them. In those days, there were multiple households on a single phone line, and the phone tended to be used mostly for important matters. Maybe that's why I still tend not to use a phone unless it seems truly necessary. I'm such a Neanderthal! Nowadays, 5-year-olds have their own cell phones, and would die of shock if they were ever separated from them. That's okay, it's good that some of us still remember the old hand-crankers. If nothing else, we can tell stories that the kids will find completely incredible. I remember the first time I ever saw the generator from one of those phones, taken out of the phone. It was all black metal (except the glass handle on the crank), and about the size of a well-risen loaf of bread -- and it must have weighed at least 10 pounds. Tommy Kline had it, on the school bus one day. He must have been taking it to school for some scientific demonstration of electricity, I suppose. And he decided to practice his demonstration on me (I was one of his best friends, and felt very honored). There were 2 wires coming off the generator -- I remember, I was impressed by how fat and heavy they were. He told me to hold one of the wires in each hand, then he turned the crank. It seems to me that Tommy Kline had so much fun demonstrating his generator on the bus that day, that he brought it again the next day. Maybe even the day after that. Pretty soon the bus driver figured out what was going on, though, and the generator was banned from the bus. I know, this doesn't have much relevance to my life on Kaua'i in 2002. Civilization and technology march into the future, with or without me. My first full day back at Donna's, I took an evening walk, down the familiar hill.....and, instead of going toward town, I went the other way. I'd never been on that piece of road before. It goes back into the woods: big, tall, old trees and the silence that always seems to surround them. It was dusk, and there wasn't a sound except my sandals on the road. It could have been a scene from Grimm's Fairy Tales, and the farther I walked the more it began to feel a bit creepy to me. A little bit eerie and ominous. I was half ready for all you-know-what to break loose, in some form or other -- you could just feel it in the air -- so I was not totally taken by surprise when 4 dogs appeared out of the forest darkness, hurtling toward me and bellowing like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Oh, they weren't that terrifying. None of them was any higher than my knees. And they were probably 20 yards away -- so I did have a few seconds to consider which one would get to me first, which one would have the longest teeth, etc. The road was climbing a steep hill there. The dogs were up the hill from me. They may have been at the very top of the hill, in fact; the trees were so dark and close there, it was hard to tell. In any case, the dogs had barely let out their first yelps when I heard a human voice telling them to stop. It was a man's voice. He was standing just off the road,turning a pile of smoldering leaves with a long stick of some kind. In the dusk, he was barely more than a silhouette. He yelled at the dogs and 2 of them stopped. He yelled again and another one stopped. Number 4 kept on coming. "Don't worry," the man called out to me, "he won't bite." Which I did not necessarily believe.....but it turned out to be true. The dog was in fact a strange little comical creature. His legs were so short, a good-sized speed bump would have high-centered him. He stopped, 8 or 10 feet away, and made some more ferocious sounds. He was so ferocious, he was afraid to come any closer. I bent down and started telling him I was his friend, to see if he would let me pet him. He would come a little closer and then get scared and start barking and gyrating his body again, and move away. He made a great comedian. He had short, brown hair but his skin looked incredibly thick. It was loose, like it was a couple sizes too big for him, especially around the mouth -- so, when he would bark and shake his head around, it looked quite funny. He never did trust me quite enough to let me pet him, even though the other 3 did. They came trotting down the hill and were very gentle and sweet. I petted them for a minute, and was about to go on up the hill and say hello to the man -- when I realized he was talking to someone else. I didn't see anyone else, maybe they were in the shadows. But I didn't hear them either, only the man; he would say something, then there would be silence, then he would say something again. He was talking on a cell phone. Of course. |
WELL, IT SEEMS a very long time since I've written here. Days and nights at the computer, designing reiki fliers (4 different versions, each for a different audience). The writing and designing went quickly and smoothly, it was the usual computer and printer SNAFUs that ate up the time (so much for the theory that PageMaker, being an Adobe product, would be any less plagued by anomalies -- "undocumented features," as Donna so diplomatically called them -- than Windows software). Anyway, all's well that ends well, and the fliers are finally coming out of the printer beautifully. I've spent several hours printing and folding them the past few days, and will be doing much more of that in the coming ones. I went to Lihue on Wednesday with Donna, and went around town planting fliers while she was at a meeting of the Mokihana Club. I met her after the meeting and we went to lunch at the hospital. Yes, the hospital. She was going to do some work there in the afternoon.....and it happens that the hospital cafeteria is known as one of the best lunching sites in town! Everybody who is anybody eats at the hospital cafeteria, says Donna!! She had a great-looking bowl of Green Papaya Chicken soup (heavy on the chicken, little evidence of the papaya, actually) and I had a scoop of brown rice. Brown rice -- at a hospital cafeteria! Unimaginable, I know, but there it was. Medium-grain, brown rice, properly cooked and everything: a good-sized scoop of it for 55 cents! I would have had 2 scoops, and some veggies or soup or something with it, but I had eaten barely over an hour before. I had misplaced my list of places to deliver fliers, and went looking for a phone book, so I could re-create it. Of course the phone-book holders hanging from the pay phones had nothing in them, so I went into a little, fast-food shop called Zack's and ordered a bowl of Portuguese Bean Soup and a piece of cornbread and asked to use the Yellow Pages. So, at lunchtime, a scoop of brown rice was perfect for me. Donna went to do her hospital work and I went back to exploring the town in her Mazda Poi-mobile, distributing more fliers. I met Dr. Steve at the Natural Health Clinic, who welcomed the fliers. I left more at the little health-food store on Rice Street.....and at a day spa in the Marriott Hotel (what a beautiful place!).....and another spa just up the road. I left some at the Concierge desk of the Hotel also, to be approved by the Manager. Everywhere I went, people were very nice about accepting the fliers. It was a magical day for me altogether. So nice to be out of the Black Hole of Cyberspace, with printed fliers in hand, moving about in the physical world, connecting with flesh-and-blood human beings! The day started with gentle, steady rain (continuing from the night before). The sky was uniformly gray, as if the rain would continue forever -- but it stopped raining as soon as I made the first delivery of fliers! It stayed calm and dry and beautiful then, until we arrived back home in Kalaheo in late afternoon, when the gentle and much-needed rain resumed. The next day was very different. The wind came in the night, howling, vicious. Cold and ominous. I started the day with my usual reiki-in-bed; but my stomach was tense and I had such a feeling of foreboding. I finished the reiki and didn't want to get out of bed. Wanted to curl up, under the covers, barely breathing, and wait. For what, I didn't know; I just had the feeling I was waiting.....for something.....to happen. I stayed there awhile, finally got up. Had trouble tuning into any sort of normal activity. Just kept feeling that something very strange and unpleasant was coming. The wind was absolutely vicious: huge gusts of it slamming the house from one direction and then another, howling and churning and bending trees. Maybe it was only the wind that was bothering me, I thought. Maybe it was.....only what is the wind, except a physical manifestation of mass consciousness? I couldn't help wondering what was stirring up the mass consciousness in such a violent way. The whole day was like that. I put on long pants and a jacket. That night, I turned on the radio -- a call-in program called Coast to Coast -- and people were calling from several parts of the country to report unusual military activity: lots of planes in the air, and a few military people calling to say they had just been called to report for duty, with no explanation. The next day, yesterday, the wind was the same, and throughout the day I kept feeling a sense of undefined urgency. I would work awhile at the computer (going through the emails that had stacked up in the preceding days) and then would have to stop all doing and connect to Source and just BE for a while. And such a melancholy feeling -- all the more haunting because of not knowing why. Where was it coming from? I would sit on the floor in the middle of my room like a statue, just being a conduit to flood the whole world with Love and Peace and Well-being. Today has been very similar. I ate about 1:30, went back to my room and felt so foggy I had to lie down. By the time I was functional again, 2 hours had passed. Maybe it was only that I had been so ravenously hungry and had overeaten. I came down and plugged into the printer and started printing more fliers. Went out and stood on the lanai about 5:30 and watched the horizontal rain moving from east to west. It was like a curtain of tiny droplets, and you could see the wind pushing it, making vertical lines, like folds in the curtain. Standing there, thinking how to describe it.....thinking of myself standing on the lanai.....what suddenly popped into my mind was the name of the apartment complex where I had lived, in Tempe, Arizona, my final year of college, nearly 30 years ago: Bali Lanai. It was a name that meant nothing to me at the time. I didn't even try to make sense of it; it was merely the name of where I lived. Now, all these years later, it still makes no logical sense, putting the words Bali and Lanai together -- since lanai is a Hawai'ian word and Bali is Bali -- but, to me personally, it now seems remarkable that I would live in a place with that peculiar name, and then, years later, in Bali, and that I would now find myself contemplating all this on a lanai in Hawai'i. I suppose life is always showing us the future, the past, EVERYTHING -- only, much of the time, we don't know how to read it. |
MELE-KALIKI-MAKA is the thing to say....on a bright Hawai'ian Christmas day....... And Maka-hiki is the thing to say on Thanksgiving...... I went to Serge King's Makahiki Celebration on that day. He's been doing this for 29 years now, hosting a Thanksgiving potluck. He provided a beautiful setting for it this year, at a place called Kahuna Springs, on the east side of the Island, near Kapaa. There was a long, narrow builiding, with long tables set up in a line down the center of it, where we all put the food we had brought. Then, outside, a big, canvas, tent-like canopy was erected, with dining tables and benches, a small stage and space on the grass for hula dancers, and a table where Earl and Lois were selling raffle tickets. I was transported to and from this magnificent gathering by a reiki student who had come into my life just days before. Her name was Mana. I had received an email from her the previous Sunday; that she had just arrived on Kauai and would be leaving Friday morning, and would like to have reiki training while she was here. She was staying with her mother, in Poipu. Her mother had been here a week already, and had come across one of my fliers -- the original, photocopied, black-and-white version I had made before I had a phone number -- in Serge King's Hawaiian Museum in Princeville. I had left some there the day Diane had taken me to Talk Story, the day we saw the presentation of the crystal skulls. Mana wanted to learn reiki. We arranged to do her first-level initiations on Monday, and training on Tuesday. It turned out she is Japanese, and lives in Tokyo, where she works for an American company. She was vacationing here with her mother, who is a 3rd-degree reiki person. How amazingly the universe brings things together -- my reiki flier to Serge King's museum --> to Mana's mother --> from her mother to her --> then Mana to me --> then all 3 of us together to Serge King's Makahiki Celebration! A complete circle. WHAT BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, Mana and her mother, Naoko! Even dealing in a foreign language, Mana picked up the reiki training as if she already knew everything about it. It was so natural to her! Her mother has been doing reiki for 10 years.....and now, in just the past few months, both Mana and her sister have become interested in it and have been initiated. Mana and her mother have both traveled very widely. Mana has been to India, Nepal, Bali, East Africa, and most of Europe, and said that this little island of Kauai feels the "most balanced" of anyplace she has ever been. Her mother, Naoko, owns and operates a coffee shop on the slopes of a sacred mountain in Japan. Before this trip to Kauai, she had just returned from Findhorn in Scotland; she had been traveling for a month with Mana's sister and the sister's husband, who is a well known novelist in Japan. His books have been translated into several languages, and he was on a promotional and teaching tour, which included Findhorn. His wife, Mana's sister, had received her reiki initiation on this tour, while in London. The day of Makahiki, Mana drove the car, and her mother and I sat in the back seat, and we all talked. About reiki; about johrei (in previous years, Mana and her family were members of Mahikari, an offshoot of Johrei); about the amazing, psychic children who seem to be everywhere these days (I had shared an email with Naoko, from James Twyman, about one of these children he had recently met in Japan: a 4-year old boy who has been paralyzed all his life, but has communicated by a letter board since the age of one! And Naoko told me about another Japanese boy, who is now 10 years old and has written and published several books of spiritual knowledge.); and about genmai, brown rice!! We were talking about Mikao Usui's supposed reiki enlightenment on Mount Kurama, and Naoko said there was a man who had been meditating on one of the sacred mountains and had received a special recipe for cooking rice and beans. A recipe she now uses at her coffee shop. This recipe uses white rice and azuki beans. The smaller the beans, the better, said Naoko. The beans and rice are cooked together in a pressure cooker for one hour, then left in the cooker for 50 more minutes. Then they are kept at 75 degrees for 4 days -- during which time fermentation happens -- and, after that, Naoko said, they will keep, unrefrigerated and unspoiled, for an unlimited time! Tremendous health benefits are attributed to them, because of the digestive enzymes produced by the fermentation. I said I would love to come to her coffee shop and eat her beans and rice; and she said I was welcome to come and stay with her anytime. This connection with Mana and Naoko was only the most recent of an infinite number of things to be thankful for, and it was a beautiful Thanksgiving day. We had pouring rain the morning of the day before (starting at midnight the previous night), and more rain on Thanksgiving morning; but by 10:00 o'clock, when they picked me up here, the sky was almost cloudless and the sun felt hot. We arrived at Kahuna Springs and put our food on the long tables in the building, then we all gathered in a circle outside on the grass. Serge arrived, in a red and white shirt, wearing an elaborate flower lei and a straw boater, carrying a carved and polished walking stick, and introduced us to the history of Makahiki. He gave an opening blessing, and asked several students of his, some of whom were there from around the world, to introduce themselves. He said all of them have made a commitment to spread the teachings of Huna, to support his Aloha International organization, and to work together as a family for the betterment of the world. It fascinates me how, in some languages, many words have so many different meanings. Japanese is like that, and so is Hawaiian. I guess, considering there are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet, it makes sense to get the most mileage out of every word! Anyway, there seems to be a great range of meanings for many words. Makahiki, for example. Donna's husband, Rick, said it meant "The Great Gathering," and Serge gave us 2 other meanings for it. He said, as one word, it means "year" -- and, in ancient Hawaii, the ending and beginning of the year was the time when the 7 stars of the Pleiades appeared on the eastern horizon when the sun was setting in the west. The Makahiki period started on the night of the first new moon after this rising of the Pleiades. Taking each part of the word separately, he said Maka means "to begin" and Hiki means "to be able" -- and Makahiki is a time when we begin to be able to look to the future; a time of finishing the old year's projects and beginning to plan new ones for the year ahead. The period of Makahiki traditionally lasted about 4 months, and was a time of peace, thanksgiving, and sharing throughout the Islands, and a time of preparation for the new year. A time of games and contests, feasting and dancing. We had a bit of all that on Thanksgiving day: there was spear-throwing and a couple other Hawaiian games; even hula-hooping! There were people making necklaces and anklets of leaves, and people making ancient string figures on their hands (like the games with string that many of us played as children). There was certainly feasting -- and we were all very thankful for the outdoor canopy, because the sky turned completely gray and started raining just about the time we were ready to eat -- and plenty of dancing. Hula dancing, of course! And beautiful guitar and vocal music from a guy calling himself Antion. As he says himself, this is his third incarnation in this lifetime: the first was as Vic Briggs, playing guitar in the 1960s with Dusty Springfield, Rod Stewart, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eric Burdon & The Animals, among others. Then he was Vikram Singh Khalsa, doing yoga and playing Sikh sacred music. Now he has found his home on Kauai and is mastering Hawaiian music and calling himself Antion. It was certainly good music! WOW! It's going to be fun, singing this Christmas carol this year --- "Mele-kaliki-maka is the thing to say on a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day! That's the Island greeting that we send to you from the land where palm trees sway.... Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright -- the sun to shine by day and all the stars at night....." __________________________________ pages 11-20 For a menu of other pages, left-click anywhere on this page (except on a link or an image) |