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.
We’ve been off Island long enough to see (without blinders) the changes. After more than a full year away, it has felt important in these past months to explore our old haunts, to revisit the paths we’ve walked together for fourteen years, the beaches where we’ve sunned and surfed, and the mountain where we’ve slept to the accompaniment of bird song. So when there is sufficient money for gas, and leisure time too, we do just that. We revisit; we reminisce.
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?
There was a time on our Island, not very long ago, when there were independently owned bookstores. But maybe thirteen years ago, the chain store Borders set up shop in the dead center of the Island. One by one the independents dropped off the map. It is pretty near impossible for an independently owned small store to compete with the mega-store and its deep discounts.
There are two distinctly competing versions of this story. Both are equally true. In both stories, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani and I have just returned home to Kaua’i – the northwestern-most Island in the Hawaiian archipelago – after more than a year on the American continent. In both versions we loved touring the U.S. with our new book and in both versions we were yearning for home. In the first version: last Thursday, we put up our great-in-the-rain-and-cold, but less-great-in-the-tropical-heat donated German tent. It is our fourteenth tent in thirteen years without a house on the beaches of Hawai’i.
In early April we met the editor of a Virginia business magazine over lunch in Roanoke, Virginia. Unexpectedly, three full months later - on the very day we arrived home to Hawai'i - this book review greeted us. We thought we'd share it.
Like all good stories, this one has a beginning, middle, and an end. After thirteen years writing and rewriting, drafting and re-drafting, Grandmothers Whisper found its miraculous way to a bound book that could actually be held in your hands (or alternatively downloaded onto your Kindle) just last Thanksgiving.
There is nothing more humbling (or exciting) than attendance, in one short and compressed week at: the international Book Expo of America; the Jewish Book Council's kick-off of their nationwide authors' tour; the Flying Eagle Woman's Fund annualcelebration of women who have powerfully contributed to justice for indigenouspeoples. Nothing at all like the week that 'Iokepa and I (and the book, Grandmothers Whisper) just experienced.
I was born on Mothers’ Day, the much valued daughter after two sons. Mothers’ Day has always had a resonance to my little family. It is a terribly long distance from the Hawaiian Island that ‘Iokepa and I call home to the places where my sons and mother call home – six thousand miles to be exact. But this year, by happenstance, we landed in Baltimore (between a book signing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and a scheduled speech in New York City). I was able to share Mothers’ Day across three generations with my ninety-nine-year-old mother and my thirty-year-old, first-born son.
The material and successful life that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani surrendered fourteen years ago - to take up arms (heart and soul) against the deception, the greed, and the oppression visited upon his people and his nation - included a house on a lake, seven cars “and a hot rod.” Despite the fact that his lavish passion in these last years has been cultural - language, history and spiritual practice - for the first forty-six years of his life focused an equal dose of passion on cars that go very fast.
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.
I’ll admit it upfront. Last week, I had no idea whether a 'podcast' was: animal, vegetable, or mineral? This week, ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I were participants (?) subjects (?) occupants (?) of one.
It is just a few days before Christmas 2010. And it is also exactly thirteen years since this remarkable convoluted journey began for me. The first words of the firstparagraph of thefirst chapter of the newly released book, Grandmothers Whisper read.
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.
For the past two weeks I’ve been blaming the heat. And yes, it’s been a record-setting 100 degrees in inner-city Baltimore, with an unconscionable level of humidity. But yesterday I realized, that is not it – not my problem at all. Allow me to explain. My oldest brother is a professional man. He was the apple of my father’s eye. My next brother, the self-proclaimed “middle child,” tried harder. He took over the family business and cared for our aging father every day of his life.
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.
At the end of almost every Return Voyage gathering in these past years, well-intentioned folks have asked ‘Iokepa: “What can I do to help?”
He answers: “When you hear that things are changing on the Hawaiian Islands – and you will – I ask that you offer a prayer for the Hawaiian people.”
This is the story of trust, faith, and the powerful support that accrues when we agree to use our unique gifts, our best natures, and take the path ofgreatest good--to fulfill our life's purpose. Every one of us has one. Our task, really, is to find it--and then, fearlessly, to live it. For thirteen years now, 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has actively reclaimed his aboriginal Hawaiian history, language and culture. He has (at his ancestors' insistence) carried not a scrap of paper that might confuse his native identity with an American one. That has meant, of course, he carries no American driver's license, uses no social security number.
For every memorable year of my adult lifetime, I have had just one recurring and terrifying nightmare. In that dream, I am running for my life from a rapidly approaching, formidable wall of water that I cannot outrun. I am absolutely certain that it will overtake me. Ironically, for every memorable year of my adult lifetime, in all of my many domestic and foreign homes, I have never lived anywhere near that possibility. I never once lived on the edge of an ocean – until I met ‘Iokepa, and moved my life to these Hawaiian Islands.
The very first American Court House erected on the Island of Kaua’i was built in 1837, with complete awareness and intention on the top of the bulldozed ruins of what was the oldest heiau on this Island.
Heiau were (and those that remain are) sacred stone enclosures for Native Hawaiian ritual and spiritual practice, prayer and ceremony. Every heiau was built in alignment with the planets and the stars – with an ancient people’s sophisticated awareness of the night sky. Each heiau sat within full view of the ocean horizon.
