Archive for March, 2008
Road Signs.
We call these past eleven years our, “Walk of faith.”
On the tropical Hawaiian Islands, that has meant sleeping on beaches in tents (thirteen tents, and eleven air mattresses); eating oranges, avocados, and mangoes that fell from tree to ground (on the street side of the fences)–and being led, always, by the ancestors.
Return Voyage, in these past seven months, has taken that, “Walk of faith” up a notch. We have criss-crossed this enormous continent in a gifted Camry: We have needed gas; we have needed motels. Still, in every breath we are guided by unseen, spiritual benevolence. We are constantly grateful.
As ‘Iokepa says: “Our survival depends on it.”
Return Voyage participants sometimes wonder how that works.
Here’s a recent story.
Friends in Albuquerque planned to take us sightseeing on their day off–a Saturday. They gave us travel guides and several choices. We chose Bandelier National Monument: A cave-dwelling ancient pueblo. It was a two hour drive. We missed one turn-off, and we were delayed.
We were driving down a large highway in the far right lane. ‘Iokepa was driving; I was in the front passenger seat; our friends sat behind us. A Honda SUV approached immediately to our left.
A dark-haired woman in the back seat of the Honda began pointing aggressively at ‘Iokepa. I studiously ignored her. (People often stare–or point–at his thick, silver, mid-back length hair.) This woman grew more animated.
I thought that perhaps we had a flat tire. ‘Iokepa knew that we did not.
Finally, this woman rolled down her window. ‘Iokepa looked over.
He recognized her–and her driver, husband–immediately.
This couple (touring visiting relatives to the exact place, where we were headed) were, remarkably, friends of ours from Kaua’i. We’d eaten dinner in their home, just one week before we left the Islands last September 5, to begin this Return Voyage tour.
‘Iokepa and Dave both pulled to the edge of the highway, slammed on their brakes, and all of us (friends of friends, relatives of friends) leaped from the two cars. Fast and furiously, we exchanged hugs–and stories. We’d been out of communication in these intervening months.
Unknown to us, this couple had accepted a job that mandated a move from Kaua’i to Santa Fe–a month after we’d left the Islands. Unknown to them, we were in Albuquerque until Monday, when we were headed to Arizona.
We exchanged phone numbers, went on our way, and returned to Albuquerque.
They called the next day. They wanted us to do a Return Voyage gathering in their new home, “Though we don’t know anyone–we’re so new here.” We said: “We’re headed for Arizona tomorrow–we can’t.”
Anyway, it seems that the ancestors didn’t go to all that trouble–didn’t laugh up their collective sleeves while they moved us around like puppets–for nothing. So the story unfolds. The next day, the Arizona Return Voyage gathering canceled out for a week later. Our friends (who knew no one in Santa Fe) held that gathering in their home, and filled it to capacity. Each of us knew this was so obviously supposed to happen–and it couldn’t be anything but easy.
And that is how our, “Walk of faith” works.
The Task of Youth, The Task of Age.
The Return Voyage is nestled, this week, under the brilliantly, watermelon-colored, Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Nearby, we discovered the weathered lava fields resplendent with American Indian petroglyphs–remarkable, symbolic stories that indigenous peoples etched in stone thousands of years ago.
Some of the symbols took us by surprise. They look identical to the ones at the mouth of the Wailua River on Kaua’i. These indigenous narratives have certain things in common, but I can’t overstate their similarities: This is the desert; our Islands are surrounded by ocean. The stories share common threads, but they are not the same.
It’s the point I want to make on the matter of our four-score-if-we-are-blessed, human lives: The defining work of the young; the defining work of the elders. We share common threads, but our work is not the same. These differences have been particularly transparent to me on this journey.
‘Iokepa and I have reared three adult sons and an adult daughter, between us. We are neither unconscious of, nor insensitive to, a young adult’s search for individuation. Any number of youthful “Spiritual seekers” have found their way to the Return Voyage gatherings.
Barely past adolescence, hardly emancipated from their parental home: These young men and women are often working overtime to find an elder who has their answers. They have traveled from ancient wisdom to ancient wisdom, from shaman to guru, from meditation cushion to crystal, from India to Sedona.
They sit, they pray, they retreat from authentic human experience–from the trial and error; risk and failure.
“The gift is life, ” ‘Iokepa has told them. “The experience of life is in the living it–almost to the edge sometimes.”
He has said: “Being young is about about experiencing. But these young men and women are seeking it, not living it. They are busy looking for someone who has their answer.”
To my mother’s eyes, these seekers look like our most terrified children. They are afraid to experience the life they’ve been handed. They want to skip the trial and error, the fall-down and get-back-up, of any authentic life. They want to bypass that exciting messiness, and reap the fruits of an elder who has lived, who already has his or her answers.
They are mistaken–and ‘Iokepa attempts to turn them back to their own resources, their own potential knowing.
In youth we experience. With age, we digest our experience. When we no longer run so fast, we are freed to contemplate our years of running. But if we never run…
These scared young spiritual seekers idealize all that ‘Iokepa surrendered at age forty-six, to take this “Walk of faith.” Repeatedly, they gush: “You must be so much happier now!” (Without the fast cars, the fast life, and the pursuit of the dollar.)
Their mouths hang open when ‘Iokepa answers: “No, I am not. I loved that life! I loved my cars. I loved my work. I loved going fast. That was then. This is now. It’s different: Not more, not less.”
In point of fact, ‘Iokepa often awakens in the early morning from dreams of the life he surrendered. It is not a yearning. It a a re-experiencing: The gift of age.
The comedian and actor, Redd Foxx, said it best: “I don’t want to be lying in a hospital bed, dying of nothing.”
Outsiders.
It appears that, as a culture, we rear our children to fit in. And it breaks our collective parental hearts at the first sign that they do not. We attempt to protect them: From being the last chosen for team kickball; from the lunch pail full of food that no other child would trade up for; from visible orthopedic shoes instead of Adidas; from finding their Valentine box empty.
We live in a culture that has very narrow parameters for difference. Most of us grow up feeling marginal in some way–by virtue of the narrow boundaries of conventional acceptance, and the harsh social judgment around those differences.
It was not like that among the kanaka maoli–the aboriginal Hawaiians. This culture that Return Voyage celebrates, understood: That no two souls had the same destiny; that no one, other than that soul, could direct his destiny; and that every single life held a unique contribution to the whole.
As ‘Iokepa has said: “Even if you sat under the coconut tree every day of your life–at the end of each day, the community fed you. We never knew whether there would come a day, when you would stand up and utter a single word of wisdom.”
Our outsiders, these days, seem to be speaking their wisdom loud and clear.
Barak Obama is twice cursed as an outsider. He is African American, in a nation that still feeds off the collective residue and guilt of slavery. He is not “White.” But neither is he a grandson of slavery: His father was African. He stands outside of the dominant Caucasian community, and he’s marginal, too, among the African American descendants of slaves.
‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani was born and raised in Washington State, not on his native Islands. Unlike most native Hawaiians, he does not speak pidgen. “I speak Hawaiian, and I speak English.” He was born free of the laws that oppressed his culture for 150 years. He is decidedly different.
The Return Voyage (guided always by the ancestors) begins outside of the Islands, across the continental United States. After the ten years of preparation: Walking and living on each of the Hawaiian Islands, ike papalua–communing with the ancestors, Return Voyage speaks the kanaka maoli message, first, as an outsider.
This week, Return Voyage landed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We were the guests in two homes, for two very successful gatherings.
In the first: a Jewish woman waxed eloquently about the nature of being reared Jewish in the deep South: The necessity to fit where you do not fit–into a fervently Christian majority. She spoke of the compromises to faith, and to person, it demanded.
In the second home: We were guests of first-generation, Vietnamese immigrants, who struggle between the pull of their ancient culture and the attraction of their new home.
In the first family, I witnessed: Heightened creativity, gifted prose, and lively articulation. With our second family, I saw the invention of ideas, philosophy, and intellectual discovery. In both, there was the transcendent birth of something powerful, new…other.
Each of them: Barak…’Iokepa…Return Voyage…the delightful Jewish family…the lovely Vietnamese one have reaped the rewards of a life apart. Each carry their soul’s gift–heightened by a deep sense of marginality.
‘Iokepa says: “Standing on the outside, looking in, we can see and hear the pitfalls of a people and a culture who are buying into something that is not authentic. “
Perhaps, that’s the greatest gift we can offer our children.