Writing the book Grandmothers Whisper was completely in my hands.  But my control stopped there.  I cannot – will not – pretend to know how any single human heart and mind will respond to their reading of Grandmothers Whisper.  I do know that each of us brings our own story to bear on the one we read on the page.

And love it, hate it, read into it, read out of it – in the silence of the reader’s living room – I have no problem.  It is only in the public arena – the arena of public opinion, of the necessity of publicity (so that the potential reader will know that the book even exists) does it become problematic.

But let me be clear here:  this is not a complaint.  Quite the contrary – this is by way of explanation.  So, if  you heard ‘Iokepa or me being interviewed in Detroit, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Central California, or Ontario, Canada (by phone and in person) in a single day (and this did actually happen a couple days ago) – you, the listener, would have sworn that you had heard us speak about five completely different books.

In Atlanta, the book was emphatically described by the host/interviewer as a “Wonderful love story” – a story of destiny fulfilled only in the merging of two strangers on a sacred Native Hawaiian site on Christmas morning fourteen years ago.

But in Minneapolis, the host challenged the “Craziness” of a woman who irresponsibly, without good enough reason, abandoned a perfectly wonderful life in a fabulous hilltop glass home with mountain and city views in Portland, Oregon – to selfishly drag her fourteen year old son to a life in tents on Hawaiian beaches.

In Central California – it looked like the deepest spiritual account of an aboriginal Hawaiian people who had within their ancient ancestral wisdom (and within their 12,300 year matriarchal culture that refused even the possibility of war) the answers for a modern confused and warring world.

In Detroit, however, the book was about personal freedom, about what constitutes genuine poverty or wealth – about the oppression of a Native people…about all oppression… and about the choices we make to surrender or refuse to surrender the gifts we were born to use.

And in Canada – God bless those wonderful Canadians – the book was about simplifying ones life, about the ‘stuff’ we accumulate, about a woman and man who live quite well, thank you, owning only what we carry in the trunk of our car.

That was just within a single day.

On other days, it looked like this:  A Jewish woman who discovered the depth of her own beliefs and culture via her immersion into her husband’s (of all things!) Native Hawaiian culture .

Or it sounded like this.  Grandmothers Whisper is about rekindling the faith that we will all be be taken care of – and we need only ask.

I have also heard an interviewer describe the book as, “About relationship: our relationship to change (do we fear it?); our relationship to intimacy (do we fear it?); our relationship to our children (do we fear for them?); our relationship to (as the Native Hawaiians understand it) our ancestors, the earth, and to all of God’s creation.  Finally and totally, our relationship to risk.

And at last, our public responders have told their listeners that Grandmothers Whisper is about a break from modern lives that have been  narrowly constructed around:  ‘Only’ our nuclear families (versus responsibility for every living thing); around consumption (forever needing more); around isolation from one another (that we call ‘privacy’); around resounding noise and distraction that we call life.

‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani are I required to anticipate each of these lines of inquiry.  We are expected to imagine what a single reader might bring to our story to make it his or her own.  And like the ancestral Grandmothers say about life itself:  “Everything and anything can change in a breath.”  Never do we choose to contradict a well-intentioned reader’s attempt to join the story at the places where it touches heart or mind, emotion or intellect.

The solemn fact of this matter is this:  Every single thing that has been said about Grandmothers Whisper is absolutely true.  The words on its pages are now your story – we hope that you take them wherever they take you…fearlessly.

But like all writing – the micro or anecdotal only has meaning if it sheds light on the universal.

When I was a very unbending, recalcitrant young woman – rather sure that I was smart, and even more certain that my parents were stupid – my mother would calmly say to me:  “Wait until you have children.”  Mollie Miller was not wishing me  a dose of that which I was dishing out – she was truly incapable of that.  She was advising me that then I would understand.

And, in later years, when she would repeatedly refer to the degree to which I had caused them “worry” or “trouble,” I would genuinely draw a blank.  I’d repeat over and again:  “But I was such a good girl,”  and silently list the possible directions I did not take -  drugs, promiscuity, unwanted pregnancy,  poor grades.”

Apparently, none of that was what my mother had in mind.  Inevitably, I did have children, long-delayed by parental expectations, experience, and standards.  And frankly, I still did not “understand.”

I gave birth; I cheerfully reared infants, toddlers; I rode out 13 years of single motherhood to soccer games and bar mitzvah – and still I did not understand.  Still, their reference to the ‘trouble’ did not compute.

But now – this week – my baby boy, somehow aged 28, (‘the easy one’ in childhood and through early adolescence) is offering me the dawning awareness of exactly what my mother had in mind. And damned, it is hard.  I am now on the ride of a lifetime – the one my mother knew in her ‘stupidity.’  It is the roller coaster of a child who clung hard and fast to his mother’s wisdom and perfection, now kicking hard to build distance.

It is mean-spirited, rude, and heartless in ways than any witness would attest to on a stack of bibles.  And yet, he sees himself (as I most certainly did back then) as faultless.  He has graduated college with glowing job recommendation from adoring professors for his willingness to help without recompense, his unselfish humility, his creativity, ingenuity, sheer intelligence, and promise.  He put himself through college working minimum wage jobs in New York City; he graduated magna cum laude.

But this week alone, my son in a wonderful and rare visit during which we shared long walks and deep conversation about literature, told me: “You don’t do anything…” and in the next breath, “Your psychology is meaningless…”

I suffered his refusal to share a thing with me one moment (icy silence and no eye contact), and to share his very heart in the next.

And after I’d made him a week’s worth of his favorite breakfasts and dinners: “You can get your own glass of water.”  (He returned with only one for himself.)

I recall well a story that I’d heard many years ago about a tribal rite of passage somewhere in Africa.  When the young man was leaving the village with the men who would initiate him into manhood, there was a ritual:  It went like this.

“Son,” the mother asked, standing in her doorway, “would you bring me a cup of water?”  Her dutiful son went to the spring, scooped the cup of water, returned to the doorway of his home – and threw the cup of water in his mother’s face.

This week, my “easy son” did what he had to do. And I wonder whether it took him this long to stir in me that awful pain of reaction – or has it taken me this long to realize that my mother’s prognostication was on the money.

Mom, finally, I understand.

We have just been gifted by a generous donor the amount necessary to engage the publicity firm of our dreams – out of the blue, and yet completely on our hoped for/prayed for schedule.  We are thrilled.

We left the Islands in late December, booked to the fill with Grandmothers Whisper book events until mid-February – at which point the Grandmotherly guidance was absolute:  “Book no more events.  Allow this space to be filled with something other.”

We asked; we prayed…that “something other” meant, by some miracle $12,000 would be put in our hands to hire the firm of Dan Smith Publicity (an international firm whose CEO we met at the Book Expo of America last May).

Under the Grandmothers’ tutelage, we asked Dan to read the book only last December.  He loved it, sent us a proposal, and told us what it would cost.

Well, friends and Grandmothers Whisper readers, you know how we travel.  You well know how hand to mouth…or donation bowl to donation bowl…or gas tank to gas tank this walk of faith continues to be. 

While we were busily offering book events in Florida, we heard from a woman who had attended one such event at The Book Shelf in Winchester, Virginia weeks before – and she was eager to offer us a place to work and just be in the midst of this intense/exhausting/rewarding book tour.

We accepted her offer in mid-February and were gifted with this 1810 renovated (beautiful) farmhouse on 260 acres next to the Shenandoah River in Virginia. Read my Ever Changing Page story about this below.

Then in the next few days…again, out of the resounding blue of these Blue Ridge Mountains surrounding us, another stranger stepped up and asked: What do you want to do with this book and this message next…?

I answered:  “Take this to the next level of outreach by hiring Dan Smith Publicity for three months.”  He responded:  “It sounds as though you could use some help.” That day his gift found its way to the Return Voyage account for that purpose alone.

Last Thursday, we drove to Philadelphia to engage Dan Smith as well as his extensive team, who will work on behalf of Grandmothers Whisper and its messages. We were met by a collection of some of the brightest, most earnest, compassionate, and diverse people we could have imagined.  These good folk (working in a profession that too often has been brushed with less than savory associations like manipulation, superficiality and artifice) are the diametric opposite:  these folks define integrity.  Again and again, when offered the chance to be less than forthcoming – they defied that choice.  They share a commitment to representing us the way we are comfortable being represented:  authentically, without frills or dissembling;  exactly as we represent ourselves.

So, for the very first time in ‘Iokepa’s fifteen years on this path, we are trusting this mission  – the proliferation of  the ancestors words, the Native Hawaiian cultural wisdom – our story to hands other than our own.  We do this because the Grandmothers decree it and provided for it to happen exactly as it has.

And yet, it is not in truth the first time that we have trusted others to speak this aboriginal wisdom on our behalf.  Consistently, we have depended on strangers to speak their truths as they heard them echoed from our mouths and from the ancestral wisdom.  We’ve depended, at every step since Grandmothers Whisper was released and well before, for your word of mouth to be our voice.

This is no different.  The Grandmothers have answered our prayers:  they’ve brought us strangers (who, like so many of you, are strangers no more) to lend us a hand, a voice, and some gifts where ours may be lacking to reach the world with the message of a culture that refused war, violence, racism, sexism, and hierarchy for more than 12,000 years.  And interestingly, the fair-market cost – though a huge amount to us in the scheme of the life we live – is simply proof once again, that we are (everyone of us) supported when we use our gifts to walk our path fearlessly.

Our prayers have been heard.  What’s more we heard the guidance that allowed the opening – and you must know how affirmed we both feel.  We are nothing but grateful…to the Grandmothers, of course, but to each of our wonderful friends who have (and continue to) support us on this journey every step of the way.

Thank you.

We will be revising our schedule page as the publicity campaign kicks in on March 12.  Please continue to follow us on that page: http://returnvoyage.com/wordpress/?page_id=6

‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I live a life that is at odds with the person that I am – and it is not.  This life, as he and I live it, addresses only one half of me – the half that communicates meaningfully with other humans.  My very destiny is caught up with the skill, the need, the substance of words – speaking them aloud, writing them aloud within the hearing of other ears.  And it fulfills me amply.  That is my nature.

I grew up in a family that encouraged exactly that.  We spoke our thoughts and our feelings.  We were rewarded for being social – and we worried over the family members who did not share the skill.  There was no praise for being a ‘Bump on the log.’  There was no praise for an interior life.  That life might not appropriately show on a face or in the sparkle in ones eyes.

So I have been well-trained in the manner of social interaction – and maybe I took to it like a duck to water.  But it most certainly does not define the ‘who I am.’  Through much of my early life, I did not know the difference.

But the difference is huge – and somewhere around age forty I came to understand that.

From college until thirty-five, I occupied myself with daily journalism: words spoken from my reporter’s mouth to others ears; words spoken from others’ mouths to my ears.  I recorded all these many words on many pages over the years, and I got paid to do it.

Then there were the early years with children: Five years buried  in the heart of Southern Appalachia on a forty-five acre farm that sat at the end of so many connecting and increasingly diminishing roads through mountains and valleys to our driveway.  I lived those  years in isolation from the social.  I reared babies; I grew potatoes and I grew asparagus, apples and plums.  I took blue-prize ribbons at the state fair bake-offs for apple pie and strawberry shortcake.

I fed parts of myself that I didn’t know that myself contained.

But ultimately, that isolation – the lack of society – of words spoken and words received tore at the very fiber, and a marriage ended.

And then, somewhere around age forty the balance was struck.

I surrendered the farm, and I surrendered the earlier programming too.  I moved with my sons to a neighborhood in a small city.  I put my sons on the school bus at 8:00 a.m. and lifted them off at 3:00 p.m. – and in between I sat in silence at my roll-top desk in a glass room that I constructed for the purpose, and I wrote.

And for thirteen years alone with my sons, I wrote books – long treatises examining my own life and the lives around me.  And then, after 3:00 p.m. and on weekends, I engaged humanity via children on the soccer field and Hebrew school and birthday parties; via the neighbors and a writing workshop that I taught; via television appearances – book promotion.

I struck a balance.  I walked trails on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.  I later walked the shores of the Oregon Coast.  I had deep friendships – and  seven hours a day, for at least five days a week, I had solitude.

And then ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani entered my my life with his ‘prophecy,’  his life force, his ‘destiny.’

I met this Native Hawaiian man whose very being defines ‘extrovert’ – who fills and who feeds from humanity, who finds only strength from the exchange of  ideas with other humans.

I met a man who many call charismatic.  He bleeds interest in others – he listens with an intensity that is rare, and he speaks with a commitment to his own truth that is riveting.  And I (like many others) was drawn into his world.  The book, Grandmothers Whisper, tells the story of those ten years.

What it does not tell is the story of the life that has followed – these past four years, the ‘Return Voyage’ years, the years of  “Taking what we lived and learned and speaking about them across the American continent” – so often away from home in Hawai’i.

And here the ‘Back story’ ends.  I bring that now to the story which resides in this moment.

I am writing these words under a hand-stitched quilt, in bed, within an 1810 farmhouse, on 260 acres stretched along the length of the Shenandoah River in the valley of the same name.  I am propped on flannel-covered pillows, and I am gazing through windows that frame hills that rise from the river bank, in a room without curtains or ‘window treatment’.  There is no need for them.

There are Canadian geese within my site line at a pond that sits between me and the river.  There isn’t another house in view. There are perfectly maintained wooden fences for cattle that are absent during these months.  There is a barn just outside my windows’ frame that houses a single horse at the moment.

‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani is down in the kitchen at breakfast, and I have been given the gift of solitude, of personal privacy, of utter and total silence.  This simple space (empty of a thing that feels ‘extra’) has been newly renovated to perfection and the refrigerator and pantry filled with the food we love.

We are the first people to live in this newly refreshed house.  We share it only with the spirit of a much earlier inhabitant.

This farm is the gift of a woman who heard us speak at a bookstore in Winchester, Virginia over a month ago on a book tour that took us in that month to Pittsburgh and Baltimore, to Richmond and Asheville, to Sarasota and Atlanta.

It has been an intense, exhausting, and remarkably rewarding and successful series of appearances at bookstores, clubs, and churches throughout the Southeastern United States.  It has used us – used me – well.  It has served my nature, my need to communicate, my need to exchange words with other humans.  But it has starved me as well.

We are appreciative always of the hospitality offered in the guest rooms of our many wonderful hosts, and we know how to be good guests:  we move about on their schedules, attempt to not intrude, clean up after ourselves – of course. We work at not distracting from the household’s expectation and experience.

I sit now in this home that is solely ours this week – or for whatever time we can spare of ourselves on this series of Grandmothers Whisper events, of our speaking out and telling stories, chanting and answering questions.

And in the midst of these engaging and generous months and years of shared homes and meals and conversation that last well into the nights and early mornings, we received an email from this stranger and her newly renovated, totally unoccupied farmhouse. – a woman who has “Taken in critters” all her life.  She intuited (sitting there listening to me read in that bookstore) a need in the  midst of this intense and homeless travel of ours – and she offered this.

And this, on the banks of the Shenandoah River where the maples and oaks are leafless in winter – my heart and soul are full of the ‘Sounds of Silence.’

I have written that the Grandmothers say:  Not one of us is born with the same destiny.   I have repeated their words:  We each are gifted with individual and cultural gifts to fulfill our specific ‘promises’.

I am a writer; I am not a doctor, sculptor, computer programmer,  pastry chef, or automobile mechanic.  I was not gifted with those skills.

I am a deeply Jewish woman – so my cultural gifts are not my husband’s.  He sees with his Native Hawaiian eyes the whales on a distant horizon – I do not.  He feels the changes in the ocean water when a shark is nearby – I do not.  I am from a scholarly tradition – he is  not.  We share our gifts with one another; we celebrate our differences; we do not judge one another where we fall short of the other’s possibilities.

‘Iokepa’s promise – or destiny – lies within his name.  Traditionally, each Native Hawaiian child carried the key to his or her destiny inscribed within his name.  That name was communicated to the child’s parents or grandparents  (sometimes in a dream) by the ancestors.

But because within every Hawaiian word there are vastly different meanings, a parent could not dictate her child’s ‘destiny.’  The name was guidance only to the carrier of that name.  And each person would spend half  their lives imagining what the name meant – and the other half living it.

Herein lies the confusion.

‘Iokepa and I spent ten years living in tents on the beaches of Hawai’i – what the Grandmothers called, his “grooming period.”  This was our intense cultural immersion, our challenging “walk of faith,” and our preparation for what we are doing now – speaking of a history, culture and people who have been badly misrepresented – sharing authentic aboriginal answers to the very modern problem of disharmony and war.

But there have been some people – Native Hawaiian and other – who have read Grandmothers Whisper and challenged our “walk of faith’ in this way.  They have said,  “I have problems with you returning to the authentic traditional life of our people, and yet you did not partake in the traditional methods of feeding yourselves.  Why did you starve instead of fishing or instead of growing kalo?”

‘Iokepa answers:  “I am not all Hawaiians.  I am one Hawaiian.  I do not own every gift of every other Hawaiian – nor anyone else’s destiny. Through community we share them. “

He says:  “I have fished, but my destiny is not as a fisherman; I have tended the aina (land), but I have been in these years without land to grow food.  My destiny – my work – lies within the name that I carry, and my ancestral, cultural gifts are those that will support that work, that destiny.”

Modern Hawaiians are a great deal like other people.  They can be critical of one another; they can be judgmental.  ‘Iokepa’s work is to remind them (and us) of the ancestral wisdom that all of us carry in our DNA – a wisdom that refuses judgment, competition, hierarchy, gender segregation, and of course, war. ‘Iokepa’s work on the Islands is in the face of those infections from the modern, western world.

People in the United States often ask us:  “How do the Native Hawaiians respond to ‘Iokepa?

The answers:  Often with tears of gratitude.  Often like this.  “The words you speak are exactly the words that my grandfather spoke.”

And sometimes with challenges:   “Why did you starve?  Why didn’t you do what your ancestors would have done?”

The answer to that looks like this.  ‘Iokepa says:  “Not every Native Hawaiian was a fisherman or a farmer – and community always took care of those who were not.  Now it does not. Apparently Inette and I were to live that – to be able to speak about it now.”

This has been a tougher time for ‘Iokepa and I to to live what the aboriginal Hawaiians lived effortlessly for over 12,000 years.  We work to turn that around.

I was twenty two; Merrell was a year older with twelve months experience.  On the strength of that experience, I thought she was the epitome of a seasoned reporter.

But in truth, Merrell was born to the work; she was a natural and brilliant editor.  Let me say this:  A natural editor is not a blue-pencil-in-hand, comma chaser or spelling fixer – that is for lesser minds and hearts.  Merrell’s gift was profound.  She found her way to the soul of the story, the vision of the writer – and lent that wisdom to nudging the writer to fulfill that vision.

So first, I must tell you that Grandmothers Whisper is the book it is because Merrell Fort Gregory agreed (without a cent of compensation) to spend four or five months of her life reading, re-reading, and nudging this intransigent author to a degree of near-perfection.

Next, I must tell you that Merrell Fort Gregory of Asheville, North Carolina was a quintessential Southern Lady, so her nudges went like this (and I am unable to replicate the soft vowels and kindness of the speech rhythms).  “Inette…this is your book, and you know that I’m just a simple, very literal reader, with a short attention span – your other readers will undoubtedly not need the changes I’m asking you to consider…but I really do need shorter chapters…and I need to know what the chapter is going to be about in the first sentence…”  Like that:  she gently pressed, dismissed her own knowing, accentuated mine.  And without exception, she got her way.

When she was diagnosed with advanced colon and liver cancer, out-of -the-blue some months later – Merrell had the grace (and this word occurs repeated in any reference to Merrell) to tell me:  “When I think of my life, I will always be grateful for working with you on Grandmothers Whisper.”

So that is why the reader of this page or of the book, Grandmother Whisper, might care about this uncommon woman who today is being memorialized by others in Asheville, North Carolina.  But I need more.  I need to speak about what Merrell, her husband Hamilton, and their three children have been to me for over 43 years.

I will attempt to briefly chronicle why the Gregory household nestled in the mountains of North Carolina – more than any other geographical spot on earth – welcomed me home, though I’d never lived anywhere nearby.  Neither Merrell (nor her husband Hamilton) had a judgmental bone in their attractive bodies.  But do not mistake either of them for door-mats.  They have both always been sharp-witted, bright as the Hawaiian sun, and funny.

Allow me to reminisce.

Still in their Asheville dining room sits the brass birdcage (without bird) that Merrell scored at a Goodwill Thrift shop back in 1969.  I was by her side scratching my head at her enthusiasm for this odd artifact.  Still, sitting in my mother’s bookcase is the photo album from my first wedding in 1970.  Standing up for us in what then passed for a mini-skirt was Merrell (and Hamilton, not in skirt) surrounded by a tiny collection of family members.  Still I look at photographs of our respective infants:  June and Sam, naked as jaybirds (decidedly not in birdcage).  We plotted a marriage for them that was not to be, and considered threatening them into submission with their naked photos on any number of occasions.

Merrell and Hamilton were there when I got married, when I was a young correspondent heading into the war in Vietnam from whence Hamilton had just returned, and when I returned unscathed.  They were there sixteen years later when my marriage ended.

I was there in their first house in El Paso, Texas.  I was there in those first days after they adopted daughter Jess, and then son Jimmy (who terrified us with  his disappearance on a crowded Chesapeake Bay Beach), and in our shared months of pregnancy too.

But the heart and soul of our friendship, I often think, was walking together for hours, days, and years on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I remember the walks that preceded any existence of official “Walking Shoes” – and I remember Merrell lecturing me about the necessity of buying a pair so that I would not ruin legs, knees and back.  She was always careful.  I was not.

When I told a sister-in-law about “My best friend’s” death, she responded.  “Best friends are the women who are exactly like us.”  But that was not true for Merrell and for me.  My best friend embodied so many of the qualities that I admire, treasure, and envy.  But we were very different.  Merrell was cool and steady – again, Southern grace embodied.  Inette, well, is something quite other.

We shared penetrating honesty with one another.  It was effortless.  I remember her typically straightforward observation when I presented her with my just-ended relationship with a man whom I extolled for his “sense of humor.”  We were walking the trails when she stopped abruptly, looked me in the face and said:  “Inette, it is not funny when a man makes fun of his partner.”  She was right of course.

My favorite Merrell and Hamilton story (breaching her confidence only now) was this:  A family therapist who told them:  “In all my years of practice, I’ve never met a couple with no control issues.  You two have none.”

In sum Merrell is my oldest and dearest girlfriend.  Hamilton and Merrell together are the couple I admire most on earth for their unflagging kindness, mutual intelligence, intense curiosity, and selflessness.  (And I refuse to use the past tense here.)  I am practicing being grateful -  but I am struggling today to imagine a life diminished, without Merrell in it.

We flew from Kaua’i to Seattle on December 27.

On December 28, we had an incredibly glamorous Grandmothers Whisper book event in a hair salon!  The following day, we claimed our parked Camry and winter clothes from a friend’s home within site of Mt. Rainier – and just three days ago we began our cross-country drive for the eleventh time in just over four years.  We have only six nights to make the crossing East.

On night one, we stopped at a sweet, aging motel on the Western edge of Oregon, in Baker City.  The second night we stopped in Tremonton, Utah – a couple hours shy of Salt Lake City.

Today we took on just about the entire state of Wyoming.  Wyoming’s Interstate 80, through those spectacular mountains has become very familiar – but never ever routine or boring.   Every season, every moment of every season, those mountains look shockingly different – and stunningly breath-taking.

On this day, January 1, 2012:  it was cold, the sky was flawlessly blue, the sun blazing. The mountains were just barely dusted with snow. It was New Years Day; the typically empty roads of Wyoming were emptier still.

Wyoming is a scenic travel poster come alive. Wyoming is also largely devoid of human population. So when we drive from west to east across the state – almost 400 miles – we don’t pass cities, towns or even villages except at the eastern and western edges that border Utah and Nebraska.  To put it graphically:  We don’t expect to find a Starbucks.

And yet, a couple hours into our drive both of us were seized by an irrepressible desire for real caffeine. (To me that means a “Grande Latte”; to ‘Iokepa it means a “Vente Pikes with two shots of espresso – a Red Eye”).

We pulled off the interstate into a town hugging the state border for the gas station bathroom only.  In front of us sat a spanking new Starbucks! It was like a mirage in the desert.  I had in my purse last week’s farewell present from dear friends on Kaua’i:  a Starbucks gift card.  We offered disbelief -  (We’d never have seen it if my bladder wasn’t insisting!) – and gratitude.

We resumed our drive.

It might be helpful to know this about our drives:  On these 87,000 car miles ‘Iokepa has driven in the U.S. during the past four years, we have been spent almost all of them in either contemplative silence. or in our deepest, most important conversations with one another. A very small proportion of those hours have been spent with music – almost always when the driver gets drowsy.

At those times we have two choices for music:   the radio (we enjoy country stations as much for the ambiance – the local color – as for the music); or the tapes, made specifically for our drives and to our tastes, by my eldest son.

Today, we listened to no music. The mountains were singing their songs; the solitude was transcendent. After all, this was January 1, 2012 – time for old pondering and new beginnings.

When we were closing in on the final couple hours of our drive, and heading toward Laramie, I asked ‘Iokepa: “Would you like some music?” He answered: “Sure.”

I punched on the radio and began as I always do, the random scan from station to station for the radio waves that make it through the geographical obstacles that surround us. I’d only punched twice when ‘Iokepa insisted: “This one.”

It was an instrumental without lyric. But it wasn’t just any instrumental. It was recognizably Hawaiian slack-key guitar. Remember:  We are exactly five days removed from our home in Hawai’i.  Know this: It is never easy to leave home.

The song ended. What followed was Garrison Keillor’s voice – that sonorous. brilliant voice from Lake Wobegone, Minnesota. And yes, miracle of miracle, Prairie Home Companion was being broadcast to our ears in the mountains of rural Wyoming on the first day of the New Year – from home, from Hawai’i.

And so we drove for the next half an hour to Laramie listening to our familiar and passionate Hawaiian music – the real stuff, by a series of gifted native musicians.  And I, for one, sobbed throughout.

It is January 1, 2012.  We have left home to take the aboriginal Hawaiian ancestral message across the country.  We carry the book Grandmothers Whisper with us on the back seat.

The Hawaiian Grandmothers told us a very long time ago:  “There is no such thing as a coincidence.”  We know that what they say is absolutely true.

I am told that there is a distance of 26,000 miles around the Earth’s equator – that dead center mark among the latitudinal grid lines we studied back in fourth grade.  We, who live in proximity of that equator, tend to measure things most easily from its reference point.  Our seasonal sunrise and sunset varies no more that an hour – from winter to summer.  We get a good view of the Southern Cross in the night sky.  We take our sunscreen seriously – and our daily consumption of water also…a necessity of the equatorial proximity.

By the equatorial measure of distance, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I have circumnavigated the earth more than three times in three years – but all of that distance within the continental United States.  We’ve put 82,000 car miles on our black, 1998, Camry with the gold wheels – all in service to the Return Voyage mission and the Grandmothers Whisper message.  In between those miles, we’ve left the car in the Washington State countryside, in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, and returned home to the Hawaiian Islands – to Kaua’i – for nurture, respite, and recalling the source of the aboriginal Hawaiian wisdom we disseminate.

At the end of this month, after just six months at home on Kaua’i, we will (with hesitance and regret) leave once again.  In these past months, we’ve had three amazingly well-attended Grandmothers Whisper book events in public spaces on three distinct corners of the Island. Daily: we have reconnected with, mingled with, and shared meals with every ethnicity, social grouping, and occupational pocket of Hawai’i.  Daily:  we have listened to friends and strangers (in tents, on beaches, at the pinnacle of the volcano) who inhabit this unique place in the middle of the Pacific.  They have filled our days, our minds, and naturally our hearts as well.

On December 27, 2011 we will take all that we are and all that they are; we will fly into Seattle’s airport and we will begin once again the act of speaking both the Native Hawaiian ancestral wisdom and describing the social, spiritual and political challenges that face Hawaii’s peoples now, to the caring people of the United States.

One more time we begin the book tour with Grandmothers Whisper. So our work – the act of listening compassionately, speaking when invited, and representing as best we can, a way of living that the Native Hawaiian culture modeled for the world for more than 12,000 years – continues across the American continent.

Again, we depend on the invitations of interested folk.

Keep an eye on our schedule page at:

http://returnvoyage.com/wordpress/?page_id=6

As if I had any doubt in the matter, Jose nailed it.

Here is still another of my small stories with a simple message.

‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I took a reprieve from one month living in the tent last week.  We accepted a friend’s hospitality; we were guests for a couple days in a lovely home nestled among lush green hills on Kaua’i.  Our host was at work.  Before he stepped out the door, he generously shouted:  “Help your selves to anything in the fridge or freezer.”

Several hours later, ‘Iokepa and I were hungry.  I heated a hot dog and baked beans; ‘Iokepa fried up a couple frozen salmon patties.  We offered out gratitude.

I looked across the table at my Native Hawaiian husband and he looked deeply contemplative – perhaps even sad. I asked him why.

He answered:  “I was hungry and I love salmon.  I am thinking about this salmon patty–and your hotdog and beans–the convenience.  And I tell myself, ‘This convenience – it has come at a huge cost.’”

I asked:  “What’s the cost?”

‘Iokepa answered quickly:  “Dependency…shame.  At this moment, I can’t even feel gratitude.

“Shame because it is all that I know.  It is so removed.  I couldn’t tell you what plant I could or could not eat…which berries…  And I am not just feeling my own shame – it’s the larger shame of my people and what has been removed from us.”

This small story with a simple message shifts locale.

I am reminded.  I grew up a Jewish suburban woman outside of Baltimore.  I did no gardening, no household or car repair, no carpentry – and frankly, very little cleaning.  For each of these things in my comfortable childhood, we hired other people.  Perhaps, my adult life can be best measured in the ways I determined to defy both gender and class expectation:  I learned to lift a hammer, clean a toilet, and grow my own food.

I became painfully aware that the trade-off for my considerable ease was disempowerment – the things I didn’t know how to do.  Just stand over there little lady.

So ‘Iokepa was right in both his small personal way – and in his larger cultural one as well.  His people – once the healthiest people on the planet – suffer an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, addiction and more.  They are addicted as well to the American welfare system.  This proud, self-sufficient nation with a people deeply committed to the stewardship of their land has been unwillingly reduced to near-total dependency on the whims of an occupying nation.  These adept fishermen – these men and women who knew the subtleties of growing a field of 500 different varieties of kalo for food and medicine – are now the highest consumers on the planet of canned Spam.

And then there are our American people – born into the most affluent nation on earth.  We suffer epidemics of cancer, heart disease and more.  We too have been sold a bill of goods – the great god convenience.    We live inactive half-lives – traded to those who sell us ease.  We have become simply consumers of the choices that others (in distant boardrooms) choose for us.  We no longer know the sheer pleasure of experiencing the relation between the labor of our hands, backs, or minds and that which we use to live.

Don’t mistake my words here.  This small story is about far more than food and physical well-being.  It is about confidence – our actual competence – and about the simple observation that we have chosen to give those precious possessions away.

We are dependent on distant manipulators in almost every way you can name or consider, and when we wake up, we know it.  We are collectively shamed because of what we’ve surrendered.  But that too can change.  We have that power.