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The "Whole Earth Catal...
Aging is a funny thing. Clearly, from birth to our first driver’s license and beyond, it doesn’t stop – until of course abruptly it does. Most typically, we’re more than able to ignore the process – save for those exceptional times when our loving compatriots insist on celebrating the accumulating birthdays that end specifically with a zero. So thirty, or forty, or fifty become times of reflection.
My mother lived to be 101; my father to 91. Both made aging look good. And maybe my brothers and I inherited their genes; maybe not. But as a family, we are collectively healthy and if we choose, we can ignore the reality of aging.
So yes, I’ve lived the Baby Boom experience in full. I danced at iconic outdoor concerts to the Grateful Dead. I was a war correspondent in Vietnam. I embraced the re-birth of feminism. I still mightily resist every single new technology, and depend fully on my adult sons to walk me through. In sum, I am not unaware that there are multiple named-generations after my own.
But absolute nothing tells me more starkly that I have lived a fairly long life than this. Tourism.
We’ve all read about the infamous Bernie Madoff who defrauded his near-and-dear of $65 billion - often from the charities he “served.” We are aware of the “Nigerian Prince” scammers who invade our email boxes with promises of great wealth.
That happens to others. Not to ‘Iokepa; not to me. We own almost nothing - and yet we have more reasons for gratitude than we can crowd into a day’s prayer. Our work daily delivers chance meeting with amazing strangers; consistently fills us with purpose greater than ourselves. Life is very very good.
I've already written the backstory in some detail. What I omitted and plan to address here is the quirkier one - when all material possession had been repeatedly relinquished, what remains? What on this good earth did we value enough to keep?
We receive each offering with gratitude. However when your life's physical bounty (by necessity and choice) fits in the trunk of a medium-sized sedan, and your life is determined by continual surrender...well.
The Back-Story
A funny thing happened on our way home from the Woman's March on Washington last January.'Iokepa and I were stuck shoulder-to-shoulder, buttock-to-buttock within a (genteel) crowd of exhausted Marchers hermetically-sealed inside a disabled Metro car in a subway tunnel underneath the Nation's Capital - for three hours. This after more than 12 hours enthusiastically chanting, marching, waving signs, and generally placing our aging bodies in the Women's Rights column amidst 500,000 other bodies. It was the day after the Presidential Inauguration.
Our audiences are diverse: ethnically, economically, geographically - and this year in particular, when these differences are so glaring and stark - politically. Human beings appear to have been reduced to their silk-screened, t-shirt and baseball cap slogans. And so before we began this winter's speaking tour, I worried - a lot. 1. How do we speak words outside of the smothering political rhetoric? 2. Within the current din of fear and anger, would our audiences care about the Native Hawaiian people and their generous but much-oppressed culture?
A Bit of History
For about twenty years (starting January 30, 1997), 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has been an obedient mo'opuna - grandson. Daily, he has listened for the voices - the direct guidance - of his ancestral Hawaiian Grandmothers. "I hear them as I hear you right now," he explains to Westerners. Native Hawaiians need no explanation. They know they'd be lost without the direct intervention of loving ancestors.
Never before have I been moved to do this. In the past, when a comment was too long for this space, I simply shortened it. But this time, the letter is so profoundly important - such a genuine affirmation of the work that 'Iokepa and I try to do, and the work that is at hand across the planet - that I am turning my Post over to this letter-writer. Sonia Trepetin attended our Return Voyage event in Reisterstown, Maryland a few nights ago. She wrote this afterwards.
Is it possible that indigenous peoples - Native Americans from the tip of Chile to the North Pole - and yes, the Native Hawaiian people out in the middle of the Pacific as well - still pose a threat to the rest of us immigrants, settlers and colonizers? Is it possible that these indigenous peoples, who have, by this point in time, been dispossessed of every conceivable cultural, economic, and political strength, still manage to pose a threat to our non-indigenous lives and livelihood? Whew, I wouldn't have thought it. I have lived on Hawai'i among the Kanaka Maoli (aboriginal people) for eighteen years.
We are frightened of all the wrong things. We are terrified that we will die; we are afraid of how we will die. Let me count the ways: by cancer, by Ebola, by terrorists, by warring gangs on city streets. We expend so much of our life-juices fearing the obvious, the inevitable. In fact: we will die. We are nothing, if we are not mortal. There is a far greater danger than that inevitability. It is the horror of a severely circumscribed life - to live, but to have never really lived at all.
This is not going to be an easy story to tell. Not easy because I might seem to be targeting our dearest friends, our most heart-felt supporters: the uniformly educated, caring progressive, environmentalists on our Island. These are Americans; many who moved here years ago. They love these Hawaiian Islands, and they feel the pain inherent in the glaringly apparent destruction all around us. These are Americans who care that the reef fish are now toxic and inedible, the rivers are poisoned with the run-off from cattle feces, the fields and hence the ocean around us are full of pesticides. These are not Native Hawaiians, but they are the very best of the malihini (guests) who've arrived and settled these sacred Islands of my husband's people.
Thanks to Doctor Seuss, when the calendar announces the annual cap and gown ceremonies, his classic book (named in the title of this essay) speaks to the day. I think of this now becauseit's June and there is another generation heading into those places. Some of those places will be comforting; some, threatening - that's the Seuss-an map. 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani and I have a couple weeks left before our flight home to Hawai'i from this pastoral spot in Virginia. I'm reminded that there's a story that remains to be told before we leave. It could be called, "Oh The Places We've Been..." Perhaps, it is these words rather than Dr. Seuss's(we're not, after all, twenty-two year old grads) that should head this post.
Racism: it’s in no way subtle. But neither is it consistent. There are ironies that would be laughable if they weren’t so painful. Like a bad joke, it only hurts when I laugh. So our president, Mr. Barack Obama – whose mother hails from Kansas and whose father was the son of an African tribal chief (making our president by any mathematical calculation half white and half black, and royalty to boot) – had his fate sealed in American eyes, word, and deed. He is simply “Black;” no subtleties are permitted.
Tell me why it’s so much easier for modern men and women to delineate – to draw big black lines around our thoughts and our hearts, to categorize, to isolate, toseparate – than not. Oddly, this ability has come to pass for intelligent, educated discourse, for a level of sophistication. I suggest that it is none of the above. Now tell me why aboriginal men and women (the ones whom we tend to dismiss as primitive) saw only unity, only the connections, the relationships, the whole. They could not, in fact, see other than that.
I want to speak about our friend Francis Xavier Warther - and I want to speak about a great deal more as well. Francis Warther, now crowding ninety years old, grew up in my hometown - Baltimore. His childhood and mine were light-years apart, by generation and ethnicity. He grew up German, in downtown Baltimore. early in the 20th century, and was educated by priests at Loyola. I grew up Jewish, in the suburbs, after World War II, and celebrated my bat mitzvah at Beth Jacob. But our unlikely paths crossed a dozen years ago on an Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean - me, securely in middle age, Francis already an elder. Who could have known?
It looked something like this. 'Iokepa and I had just had an enormously successful Grandmothers Whisper book reading and discussion at the Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota the night before. We had a free day before the next book event on the Ojibwa Reservation in Grand Portage. We decided to do that rare thing for us: be tourists for a single day.
It is impossible to travel as ‘Iokepa and I do – from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Washington State to Washington, D.C. – and not notice the differences. I am not speaking about mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, prairies, and deserts. It’s the human differences – the face of a place. I’m speaking of the angles and planes of the human face – and I am speaking of the human temperament of a place. They aredifferent. We are at this moment among the cool, reserved New England faces. They are lovely and angular and they are comforting to me.
Exactly two years before the Camry met its fate, we crossed the width of the continent in that black Toyota with the gold wheels in four weeks. On that particular crossing: we had dinner with a saintly, eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest in Portland, Oregon; we had high tea with a Japanese Buddhist. We stayed in the home of the eldest of eight siblings in a Mormon family that traces its roots to the earliest church founders. In Missouri, we broke bread and bared souls with a Unity minister – a woman whose heart is as open as the roads we traversed across Nebraska.
We’d been invited to a Friday evening Shabbat dinner at the home of a Portland Jewish family. It had all the trappings of the ritually kosher home I grew up in. We lit the candles and said the familiar, traditional Sabbath blessings in Hebrew. Our host, an accomplished professional woman and the mother of three, held her hands over the heads of her teenage sons and prayed that they would grow to be men in the likeness of their forefathers: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
We have been driving down the road of civil disobedience. The place names flash up at me with the increasing vagueness of an aging memory: Birmingham, Alabama; Meridian and Hattiesburg, Mississippi. For 'Iokepa and me, these are fleeting interstate highway signs--a quick stop for gas or food on our way to Baton Rouge. But they tickle memory, and memory is nothing if not the instructor of this present moment.
