Archive for September, 2008
HOME.
We are grateful, indeed, for the loud, echoing voices of genuine friendship and loving support from across that Big Land: “I imagine now the joy you are feeling to be home on your beloved Islands.” And from within this Tiny One: “I’ve missed you. Welcome home! “
It has been, now, almost a full month since we stepped foot again–ten days shy of one year away–on our Hawai’i. I’ve felt the pressing necessity of recording the fresh rush of feelings. But I have not.
In the first week, we hid out in the comfortable home of dear friends who were away on business. We stepped outside, tentatively, to meet selected folks, and were taken by surprise at the outpouring of gratitude for our Return Voyage journey.
In the second week, I renewed my suntan. We pitched a tent under the blazing tropical sun at the beach park where we had lived for many of those ten years of “Grooming.” It was where we’d lived among the Native Hawaiian homeless, and among the residual behaviors of 200 years of legislated cultural oppression: Alcoholism, drug use, spousal abuse.
For ten years, before we were allowed to speak the authentic messages of the ancient native culture outside of these Islands–before the birth of the Return Voyage journey–we lived that oppression. We were required to live without home, food, or any predictable source of income. We were required to live an alternative behavior to that which surrounded us–an example of something quite else: That no one can take our freedom. We too often choose to give it away.
We were required to live our faith. Within that faith we lived a deep connection to the ancestors’ wisdom, and to the this land.
Our second week at the beach park awakened in me, all that ‘Iokepa and I had lived those ten years–all that we had surrendered. Week number two stirred deep, remembered emotions. I spent four or five hours, one morning, alone, in silent tears. The pain of those early years (easy now to transmute into inspiring narrative) seared my heart. I looked around and felt the horror of families crowded into canvas shelter–trying to prepare children for school under a single public shower, without use of the one clogged toilet.
I was confronted fully with that required personal surrender–over ten years ago now: The loss of my family’s magnificent hilltop house, my 30-year collection of revered books, the kitchen where I entertained lavishly, the computer where I wrote daily, the identities I savored: Devoted mother, Author, Workshop teacher, Daughter, Friend–gone!
So in our second week, I began to remember. And after I remembered: The searing pain, the heartbreak–witnessed and lived fully–something else emerged. Gratitude. And I repeated to ‘Iokepa: We are–at this moment (after one year absent)–gifted with unique clarity. Our senses are sharpened–sight, smell, sound and touch–by the year spent elsewhere. We can see, what we’ve never seen before. This is a very sacred time.
In our third week, we pitched our tent on the side of the volcano–on the mountain (cool at night, bright with stars). On the mountain: With incredible birdsong for conversation; the momentarily shifting clouds for companionship; the gift of a growing to full moon. In the splendor and the renewed silence of Koke’e (cell phones couldn’t reach us; email was non-existent), I began to sift the conflicting emotions that poured through my alert senses and my complicated memories.
Now it is week four. We are living in the guest cottage on the spectacularly fertile five acres of a friend who is away on vacation in France. Every morning we pick papayas, oranges, bananas, starfruit, grapefruit and we eat all this freshness in a bowl or in a blended smoothie. In the afternoon we pick avocados and snack on guacamole. In the evening, we pick our lettuce and kale and spring onions from the garden–and pick up a few eggs from those fat and sassy Rhode Island Reds.
Every few minutes I lay down the book I’m reading (Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama), and I stroll these incredible orchid filled acres. And today, I am finally writing once again.
Over these four weeks, the questions have remained the same: What is it that I mean by “Home?” Why can’t I satisfy our friends and write simply and with pure reverie about the glories of being home?” Today, the answers emerge.
In the early morning, I walked these acres (knowing that today was the day I would begin to write my thoughts). I prayed, as I do, before I sit down and put words on the page: “Ke ‘Ioakua–God Almighty–ancestors of this land, give me the words.”
This is what I heard.
These trees I walk among, the ocean I swim in, the sky I study, the fruit I eat: This is my real “Home.” But only in this moment. That magnificent Lake Superior, last January, was my real “Home”–at that moment–and the Mississippi delta, in Louisiana, one month later. The alligator babies, with the Anhinga perched above them waiting to snatch them away from their mother, was home, last February. The soaring Grand Canyon–my home, last March. The foothills of Eastern Missouri–rife with red-bud–my home, last April.
Home is, of necessity, momentary–fleeting. But, always, it lies in our fundamental connection to the natural world. So “Home” demands an awareness. “Home” does not gift itself without our conscious choice to notice it–and know it.
We mistake all of the wonderful people in our lives for “Home.” Where they live, we call “Home.”
I am told that they–Our loving mothers, our at-odds teenage sons, our present or absent husbands, our friends who-we-can-call-in-the-middle-of-the-night–are the powerful human community who give us comfort (or not). But these relationships are never our source. They are at times comforting, at times the opposite. The human community (and our varied relationships within it) are where our hearts and souls are challenged to grow into our truest selves–where we become deepening shades of the heart and soul of our Creator.
But it is–and will always be–the natural world where we find home. We will find it only in that moment where we stand still among the trees, or on the shores, or at the mountain, or near to the dolphins. And so, every moment of this year with ‘Iokepa–in the desert of Albuquerque and the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia; on the Atlantic coast of Delaware, and Central Park in the heart o f Manhattan–I was most certainly home.
And, yes, here within this culture that we speak of so lovingly, on the land that is filled with my husband’s ancestors’ bones, I am brimming with with joy and gratitude to be home.
