Huliau - The Return Voyage

Each of us cherish certain values above all others.  Honesty?  Courage?  Common Sense?  Responsibility?  Generosity?  What have I missed?  The order may fluctuate with the day.  We  gravitate to people who  share our values.  Political.  Occupational.  Spiritual.  Ethnic.  Intellectual. What have I missed?

At the top of my personal priority list has always been, “Loyalty.”   A few memorable times in my life, my heart has been broken by a friend who lacked the guts (at no particular personal cost, that I could discern) to stand up for me, when their voice would have made a tremendous difference to outcome.  Instead, they hid out, voiceless.   I considered the act a dereliction of friendship–and disloyal.

Understand that I count myself a loyal friend.  And yet, I am about to offer the heretical:  Perhaps the hardest thing to do in this world, is not (as we might assume) to stand up for a dear friend (that  seems  obvious, practical,  and relatively self-serving), but to stand up to a dear friend.   To say, “No” when “Yes” would be infinitely easier; to refuse when we just want to get on with it.

With tongue firmly in cheek, I suggest some familiar  circumstances:  “Does this dress look good on me?”  “Do you think I should marry her?”

What I am proposing here is the possibility that there may be a higher loyalty than that we owe our best and our dearest.  And that loyalty is to our own vision, our own knowing, our deepest truth.   I am saying: When our loyalty to friendship is at odds with our inner certainty, we are obligated to follow our own.

‘Iokepa and I seemed to have  hit a few, simultaneous, interpersonal, obstacle courses during the past week.  We’ve been forced to consider this matter.

First.

A dear friend, a writer, agreed to read my book and critique it.  Hers is a noble and generous under-taking in the life of  a very busy woman.  I am grateful.  But before she could even turn the first page, she had a dream. Her dream’s editor demanded an entirely different beginning–a good one, with great purpose.  My friend told me the dream, and made a strong case for it.

‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I are great believers in dreams.  He is from a people who say that when we dream without fear:  “The past, present and future open to us.”   So, first of all, there was the remarkable explicitness of the dream.  How could it not be significant?  And second, there was my generous friend.  How could I oppose her, when she was gifting me her love and time?

The problem was this.  The dream editor’s first chapter (though crafty and attention getting) was not at all congruent with my vision for a book I’d considered now for ten years.   I absolutely welcome critique, and potential change–and  I feared that I would sound defensive opposing the dream editor.   I worried, too, that I’d offend a woman who was giving so much, so selflessly–with no return for herself.   I feared, finally, that I had lost my fresh-eyed reader to the dream’s determination.

I wanted to say absolutely nothing.

Finally, however, I found the words–blessedly clear words–to say what I needed to say.  She heard them.  She apologized profusely for what needed no apology.  In sum, she completely understood.  She is my old and dear friend.  She knows me.  She didn’t need to be told:  That  I am very open to critique and change; that I value dreams; that I am grateful for her gift; that I could not agree to the dream’s edit.

In this same week:

Two valued friends competed for the use of our eleven year old Subaru (sitting, in our absence, on Kaua’i).  The first asked us a month ago if  his visiting son could use it.  We agreed.  He’d been using it since then; he planned to use it for another two weeks.

The second friend had an unforeseen need, and assumed that it would be available.  When it was not forthcoming–this friend, magnanimously allowed that she would manage without it.  She did not want to create any hard-feelings between friend number one, and us.  She relinquished her claim.

Remember, this was happening at a six-thousand mile distance.  We are on the Mid-Atlantic coast of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States–skimming across Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.  For me, at this distance, it would have been easier to let sleeping dogs lie–to do nothing, to say nothing.

But ‘Iokepa saw it differently. He followed his own moral compass, and I had to agree.  There were other cars the son could use.  The second friend (who housed our car in her driveway, in our absence) had no other.  ‘Iokepa helped me craft the loving and assertive email  insisting on the switch–immediately.  Again, it was accomplished with grace and ease.

Loyalty–if it is not to that which I hold dear, than it certainly is not to those whom I do.