Category Archives: Great Work

Great Work, Travel

Malama ‘Aina

Leave a comment

When night comes, Maui or Pele or one of Them pulls the curtain fast.  Dark.  Stars.  Where there was light.  Fast.

The Hawi’ians Great Work (see Thomas Berry’s book of the same name) was to manifest Aloha in their treatment of the land.  Malama ‘aina means to care for the land as one would a family member. 

The land provides taro, the staple of the Hawi’ian pre-contact diet.  As a taro plant matures, offshoots known as ‘oha grow up around the plant and, in time, create new plants.  This gave Hawai’ian the word ‘ohana, family.

The pre-contact kama’aina (kama=children, ‘aina=land, therefore, native born) “honored nature and the ‘aina as a possession of their gods.” from the Limahuli Garden self-guided tour booklet.  Over time this took the form of ahupua’a, a method of land division that ran from the coast into the heights of the mountains.  In essence an ahupua’a divided the islands by watershed.  This division allowed for self-sufficiency since each ahupua’a had fresh water from its source, usually a waterfall high in the mountains, land suitable for various kinds of agriculture and living along the gradient from mountain to shore and a spot from which to set out into the sea to fish.

At the Limahuli gardens the NTBG wants to restore the Limahuli ahupua’a.  The gardens begin near the ocean and continue, in three large reserves, all the way to the source of the Limahuli stream which runs through the garden on its way to the sea.  On the garden tour the NTBG has recreated a large section, 5 beds, of taro irrigated in the traditional manner through small ditches connected to the stream, the guided through a series of waterfalls and sluice gates onto the taro beds.  As I walked among them today, the sound of the running water melded with the quiet but energetic plants to create a sense of peacefulness and abundance. 

Watersheds as a political unit is an idea that’s been kicking around the environmental movement for some time now, but has not gotten much traction.  I’ve always liked it and the ahupua’a gives a real world for instance of how it could work.  I worked out the watershed for Andover.  It begins in Lake Mille Lacs and focuses on the Rum River as it heads into the Mississippi at Anoka. 

Think what it would be like if that watershed was a state senate district and two state house districts.  Imagine congressional districts composed not of gerrymandered counties and chunks of counties, but as an agglomeration of watersheds.  Imagine the citizens of these watershed districts imbued with malama ‘aina.  Don’t know about you, but that sounds substantial to me.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Travel

So, This Guy Trips and Falls in the Ocean

Leave a comment

7:12PM  Night.  Had the weird experience of seeing Oscar winners announced at 4:30PM. 

Tripped and fell in the ocean.  Got wet. Of course.  Mumbled.  Then, ah, what would one expect when in the ocean.

Have a burgeoning collection of coral, have found few shells here.  

This morning on the way to Hanalei I had just passed the taro field after crossing the one-lane bridge and there in a field was a painted pony with an egret sitting happily on his back.  A few miles further on I noticed a field with horses had several egrets.  Is there something about their relationship? 

It looked like a fable.

The tao continues to make inroads into my thought process.  It’s almost Platonic, in that this feels like stuff I have always known.  My intuitive processes have led me here, in spite of my rational faculties which spent so many years concentrated on Christianity because I wanted to read religion in my own cultural idiom.  It didn’t occur to me that my own personal faith language may speak in a different tongue than the Judaeo-Christian.

Here are a few things.  All things are one.  This means, in simplest terms, that things that may seem separate, light and dark, good and bad, men and women actually compose a whole when we realize each is necessary for the other to exist.  Without light, no dark.  Without women, no men.  Without bad, no good.  Those of us married to the Western logical paradigm which has the law of excluded middle, something is either this OR that, this concept may seem troubling, even scandalous.   As Alan Watts points out in Watercourse Way, our dichotomized thinking has lead to idealism which imagines that good must made bigger and bigger until there is no bad left in the world.

As one whose path has followed that line of thought, it becomes clearer and clearer to me why Christianity surprised me with its intellectually sophisticated approach to reality.  Christianity linked up so well with my leftist politics because leftist politics are based on the linear view of time, a time that runs out and therefore seems to demand an ending; an ending which may be good or bad.  Yikes!  Better work for the good one. 

All over Kauai there are churches with signs: Jesus Is Coming Soon.  If that’s your paradigm, that the big guy is on his way back and watch out, then you have to work on yourself and on your society to make sure that good triumphs over evil.  This is not true only of conservative Christians; it is true of liberals, too.  This thinking made me sick.

How?  I began to see the world in black and white terms, with them over there and us over here.  Taoist thought helps me reintegrate myself, to find some of them here and some of us over there, until, gee, we all look like part of the same world.

My first intuition of this came in high school when I wrote a bad poem, The Test.  In it I questioned the nature of a god who only gives a person 7o years plus or minus to determine how eternity will be spent.  The math didn’t work for me.  Not long after that I knew that if I could describe one flower I can describe the whole universe.  Today I discovered that Lao-Tze said, “If I sit in the house, I have the whole universe available to me.”  Hints of this way of seeing the world.  But I couldn’t put it together.

So, I backed into it all by leaving Christianity, then becoming more and more Celtic.  When I found Unitarian-Universalism, I found Emerson.  His essay Nature demands that we find our own relationship with the gods today, rather than rely on the experience our ancestors.  Emerson and the Celtic embrace of cyclical time lead me further and further away from a progressive view of history, until it began to recede as the dominant view in my thinking.

When I began to start art history, Chinese and Japanese art captivated me.  In studying them, I began to search in the various schools of thought that inspired the aesthetics of these two cultures.  The art that grabbed me had Taoist influences.  Song dynasty landscapes.  Chan Buddhism teaware.  Zen Buddhist prints. Chan Buddhism comes from Buddhism’s collision with Taoism in China. 

As I do, I began to plow backwards, into Confucius and then more seriously into Taoism.  What had long attracted me finally began to occupy more and more of my thinking and, even more important, my heart.  Now I’m diving deep and it just may be I won’t come up at all this time.  At least not as the me I’ve come to know.

Oh, well, if you read this far, it’s your own fault. I’m on a tear here, I know.

Great Work, Travel

Its Prettiest 5.1 Million Year Old Face

Leave a comment

4:37 PM here.  81.  Sunny.  Clear.  Just another…

Kate and I just got back from a trip to Waimea Canyon.  Clear this time. 

 Along the way we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company Visitor Center and Museum.  Talk about underwhelming.  And not just because I shifted to tea a while back.

The video explained how they took a 3,400 acre sugarcane farm with 400 workers and transformed it into a coffee estate with the same acreage and only 57 workers.  The magic ingredient?  Mechanization.  They have designed mechanical pickers and pruners.  The pruners are necessary because the pickers can only pick coffee berries at 4+ feet and below.  With the mechanization they can harvest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.   This is, I got the impression, a good thing.  Fertilization, on Kauai’s rich volcanic soil, and irrigation, because Kauai’s rains come at an inconvenient time of year, winter, round out the why did I stop here in the first place list.

We also stopped at Waimea Plantation Cottages for lunch.   We stayed there in 1998 and Kate has not forgotten a significant fact.  NO air conditioning.  When asked if they were air conditioned, our waiter looked bemused, “No.  No AC.  You have to go to a hotel for that.  Or, you could stay in the cabins up in Kokee State Park.”  

Which reminds me that when Kate needed meds late in the evening, I asked the concierge whether there was a 24-hour pharmacy.  She looked at me with another bemused expression and said, “This is Hawai’i.” 

Waimea Canyon had its on prettiest 5.1 million year old face today.  Red cliffs, sinuous streams and water falls so thin they get buffeted by the wind.  We drove on to the Kalalau lookout, near the end of the road, got out and went over to the railing which looks down into the Kalalau valley.  Ancient Hawai’ians lived there and in the 60’s and 70’s so did back-to-the-land types.  The state moved them out a while ago.

Spectacular doesn’t described this lookout.  Knife edged walls of eroded stone creat a u-shaped valley with a beach and ocean view at the northern end and a steep 2,000 foot cliff face at the southern.  The lookout is atop this cliff so the view shows the valley below and the Pacific stretched out to the horizon.  It is in this valley where much of the Jurassic Park movies were filmed.

We’re back now for the evening and night, then we check out tomorrow morning.

Great Work, Travel

Long Boarders Paddling in the Bay

Leave a comment

Kate and I went into Lihue the back way.   A remnant of a volcanic cone stood between us and the ocean. The road wound back and forth, over one lane bridges and beside small farmsteads with NO TRESPASSING signs.  Can you imagine living in a place where folks felt like they could just walk onto your land? 

Even 15 years ago when Kate and I came here the first time there was the beginning of the ohana (family) movement.  It has blossomed and resulted recently in some big gains for indigenous Hawai’ians.  It also fuels, and is fed by, a not too subtle hostility to haoles (strangers).   The beach sign at the County Park here had several slogans, Go Home!, Give back our land! written on it.

I feel in turns sympathetic, even empathetic, and annoyed.  Empathetic from a justice perspective, knowing how we annexed Hawai’i and how our treatment of the indigenous people here has mirrored the despicable record on the mainland.  Annoyed because I have begun to see the earth as our mutual responsiblity and therefore all land and water as inherently the domain of all.  I too can love these islands, this ocean and cannot be denied these sentiments because of my geographic origin or the color of my skin.

Over dinner Kate and I watched long boarders paddling around in the bay (in Lihue) and paddlers pushing outrigger canoes, four of them, down the beach head and into the bay.  Our waitress said they hold competitions on the weekends from Hanalei to Lihue to Waimea, a long way. Not so long, though, when you consider it was in outrigger canoes that the first Polynesians found the Hawai’ian islands.  An amazing feat when you consider the vastness of the ocean and that there were no road signs in the water.

Lunar eclipse hidden by clouds. 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

Liminal Zones

Leave a comment

Sunny.  Blue.  Temp perfect.  Relaxed.

Cyber gremlins here, as on Maui.  Not only is this connection expensive, it’s episodic and occasionally slow.  OK.  Done wit dat.

Last night the moon was nearly full and Orion stood high in the sky with her.  The moon was bright, but in the way only the moon can be, nacreous and gentle, not harsh and brilliant like the other great light in the sky.

A large chunk of black lava provided a seat as the ocean pounded in at high tide, wave after wave after wave.  This ceaseless, persistent character of the ocean erodes the land, our habitat to make room for more salt water.  A graphic of the sea mounts and islands in the Hawai’an chain, all the way out to Kure, some 1600 miles from Hawai’i shows them growing smaller and smaller until, after Nihau, most of the former islands are now sea mounts with nothing above the surface.

Liminal zones have always fascinated me and the shore, where ocean and land meet is no exception.  Being a light skinned Northern European the daytime beach holds no interest for me, but the night time beach is ideal.  There I can meditate on the convergence of these two great elements, water and earth, and watch a third, the sky, at the same time.  At night there are few to no people and little heat.  A moment made for me.

This morning we went to Koloa and took Kate to the doctor. She does not like to go to the doctor, go figure.  Anyhow the local guy agreed with her that she has a sinus infection, faxed a prescription to Long’s Pharmacy and off we went to Lihue for the drugs.  We got them and drove back to the Hyatt where I dropped Kate off for her lectures.

Now I’m just kicked back, after getting the server to recognize me again.  Later.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

Liminal Zones

Leave a comment

Sunny.  Blue.  Temp perfect.  Relaxed.

Cyber gremlins here, as on Maui.  Not only is this connection expensive, it’s episodic and occasionally slow.  OK.  Done wit dat.

Last night the moon was nearly full and Orion stood high in the sky with her.  The moon was bright, but in the way only the moon can be, nacreous and gentle, not harsh and brilliant like the other great light in the sky.

A large chunk of black lava provided a seat as the ocean pounded in at high tide, wave after wave after wave.  This ceaseless, persistent character of the ocean erodes the land, our habitat to make room for more salt water.  A graphic of the sea mounts and islands in the Hawai’an chain, all the way out to Kure, some 1600 miles from Hawai’i shows them growing smaller and smaller until, after Nihau, most of the former islands are now sea mounts with nothing above the surface.

Liminal zones have always fascinated me and the shore, where ocean and land meet is no exception.  Being a light skinned Northern European the daytime beach holds no interest for me, but the night time beach is ideal.  There I can meditate on the convergence of these two great elements, water and earth, and watch a third, the sky, at the same time.  At night there are few to no people and little heat.  A moment made for me.

This morning we went to Koloa and took Kate to the doctor. She does not like to go to the doctor, go figure.  Anyhow the local guy agreed with her that she has a sinus infection, faxed a prescription to Long’s Pharmacy and off we went to Lihue for the drugs.  We got them and drove back to the Hyatt where I dropped Kate off for her lectures.

Now I’m just kicked back, after getting the server to recognize me again.  Later.

Garden, Great Work, Travel

Meeting Luke, the Clydesdale

Leave a comment

We had Kashi cereal and papaya for breakfast this morning.  They no longer stock the refrigerator with absurdly expensive items and wait for appetite to increase their income, so we loaded it with stuff we want.  Much better.

Outside Lihue we went into a shopping center and bought some supplies:  water, Zicam (for me) and yogurt.   Headed north we passed the airport and found Wailua where we turned mauka (toward the mountains) and headed up to Opeeka’a Falls.   We ate our yogurt there and discussed the day.  Kate decided we should head back toward Poipu beach and stop at the Gaylord Plantation.

Way over-priced.  Some nice stuff, but boy they did see us coming.  We bought nothing, but did meet Luke, a Clydesdale who was on carriage duty.  What a great animal.  Gentle, soulful, big.  He reminded me, a lot, of our Irish Wolfhounds. He’s way too big to fit in the suitcase.  Darn it.

Lunch was take-out eaten at a pavilion overlooking a long, bare expanse of Pacific.  It was high-tide so the waves lapped up further and further.  Several Bantie roosters shared the pavilion with us.  After lunch a couple of young Hawaiian girls came along and picked up the roosters who seemed to like being carried, their red-wattled heads going this way and that.

While hunting for shells, I slipped into the water and went on, only in ankle deep water.   Found a couple of gorgeous shells, a cowrie, brown with speckles, and a spiral shell with little horns along the spirals.  A bit of beach glass worn smooth by the waves and a nice piece of drift wood.  Beach combing, for some reason, can occupy me for hours on end.  I love trudging along, looking down, finding this or that.

After lunch we went to the visitor center of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, http://www.ntbg.org/ .  We will tour Allerton Gardens next Saturday.  They were the royal gardens when Hawai’i was a monarchy.   Around the visitor center are several garden beds with various local and endemic plants:  sugar cane, plumeria, bougenvillea, Sumatran cherry, banana, many palms.  Of the plants native to Hawai’i over 80% are endemic and all of these are under pressure from encroaching environmental change.   Most of the plants we associate with Hawai’i like palms, ginger, plumeria are not native and they have tended to crowd out the local species.

Tonight there is a large welcome dinner for the crowd here to study infectious diseases. I’m invited. Oh, boy. 

Later.

Family, Great Work, Travel

Opah, Mahimahi, Ron Baton and Star Fruit

Leave a comment

Today Molokai, across the channel, stands clear and tall, well, sort of tall.  No clouds to shroud its ancient volcanoes.  The ocean is calm and no breeze stirs the palms.  Blue, blue, blue Hawai’i.

As has happened 61 times for me, the planet has moved on in its orbit, past the spot that marks February 14th.   Today Kate and I bid aloha to Maui and aloha to Kauai.  I’ll write next from the Hyatt Resort on the south shore of Kauai.  On the 24th I’ll move to Da Fish Shack when Kate leaves for home; it’s on the north shore.

Last night Kate and I made our way to Mama’s Fish House, where, to my surprise, they now recognize us as repeat customers.  I say made our way because Kate drove and I navigated using the %$@!! navigator in my phone.  Which got us thoroughly lost.  When I drive, my inner navigator works fine, I’ve found Mama’s several times, but as a passenger I got thrown off and relying on technology didn’t help.  Sigh.

We did, however, make it.  It was Valentine’s Day so Mama’s had a full house.  The bay on which Mama’s sits is the best wind surfing in the world (or so they claim) and the waves and wind were monster yesterday.  Must of have been good.  We arrived after dark. We have seen the windsurfers, propelling themselves on surfboards fixed with sails, leaping from wave to wave.  Very balletic and colorful.

Mama’s is a polished island wood structure with walls made of drift wood and flotsam, the occasional old door and whatever struck the owner’s whimsy.  Inside, it has rattan light shades and tables covered with blue cloth decorated with white ginger leaves.  They have expanded by 100% since I’ve been there, but managed to retain the intimate South Sea ambience.

We had an Island meal of opah, mahimahi, lauau pork, seared banana, ron baton lychee nut, star fruit and a surprising fresh coconut.  Quite a birthday treat.  The waiter brought out my macadamia nut crisp with six candles, special ones Kate brought, the flames burned the color of the candle.   A happy birthday.

On the way back we ran into a road construction project that cost us 30 minutes at a time when we were both pretty sleepy.  Not fun.  Looked to me like they were laying fiber optic cable.

Final, and sad, note.  Maui has grown too much.  It is too crowded, too built up and  not as much fun.  The road construction was only the last inconvenience created by this development during our trip.  I will be glad to get to Kauai.

Aloha.

Great Work, Memories, Politics

Is It a Time to Advance or Retreat?

Leave a comment

27  66%  18%  1mph ENE bar29.95 falls windchill26  Imbolc

            Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

A strange, sometimes troubling struggle has broken out in the responsible section of my Self.  The sometimes subtle, sometimes hammer blow obvious skirmishes have me puzzled about what actions to take, if any.  The formal study of Daoism I began a couple of weeks ago has begun to push me in a way that I hope will resolve this matter, or at least give me a way to handle it.

The struggle is over politics.  As I’ve written elsewhere politics defined my life during my late teens, 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.  That is to say, by my junior year in high school I was a political animal, a politician and an activist.  President of my high school class for my freshman, junior and senior years, a favorite teacher pushed the Little United Nations Assembly of Indiana to accept me as the presiding officer for the 1965 Little United Nations.  The year before I represented the Republic of Chad.  In the fall of 1965 we protested the CIA recruiters on the campus of Wabash and I never looked back. 

Draft eligible and permanently active from that point forward I got involved in civil rights, student rights and anti-war politics. I was a student senator for three years at Ball State, then ran an unsuccessful campaign for president of the student body.  I helped organize and lead anti-draft and anti-war rallies, marches and teach-ins. 

In seminary I pushed the seminary on anti-war politics, became an early feminist and began a ten year involvement with anti-racism training.

While working at Community Involvement Programs as their janitor and weekend counselor, I lived in the Stevens Square Neighborhood.  There I got involved in neighborhood level politics, leading an effort to push General Mills out of the community and organizing the Stevens Square Neighborhood Association.  Made a lot of friends and few enemies.  It was fun.  This was the 1970’s. 

In 1978 the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area hired me to work on the West Bank as a community minister.  I got involved in community based economic development, building affordable housing, organizing against unemployment and for broader community involvement in the management of philanthropy. 

In 1984 I left the West Bank and took over urban missions for the Presbytery which expanded the arena of action.  In various ways I was still at it when I met Kate in 1988. 

Over all this time I had a very active hand in DFL politics working at the precinct, congressional and state levels.  Then I left the Presbytery in  1991.  Not long after that Kate and I moved to Andover.

Since then my political work has shrunk to near nothing.  I send the occasional e-mail, make a phone call, show up (sometimes) at the precinct caucus, but I’m part of no ongoing, organized effort to make or change policy.  The whole climate change issue is fraught with political issues of real import, many of them.  I’m interested, especially in water related issues and Lake Superior.   Yet I do almost nothing.

The 1960’s was a “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” era.  My political superego came into maturity in those times and this notion became a benchmark for my own assessment of responsible behavior. 

Thus, the struggle.  I wonder, sometimes, where this guy went, this political guy. It’s like he crawled under a rock, but that’s not so.  No, this is a struggle that has moved back and forth in my mind since the move to Andover.

Now the Daoist studies I’ve engaged propose a way of addressing it.  Daoism suggests that there are times to retreat and times to advance, times which call for more yang, times which call for more yin.  The wise man, Daoism says, adjusts his inner life to what it calls the temporary conditions, the way the Tao manifests itself.  This area of Daoist studies has my attention right now.  I’ll keep you informed because this struggle is not productive and it’s not over.

          

Great Work, Politics

Gulf Streams Stops

Leave a comment

-3  44% 17% 1mph WSW bar30.24 rises windchill-5  Winter

                 Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

The day continues cold.  We reached -15.8 this morning at 6:24AM.  Since then, we’ve gained about twelve degrees. The windchill all day has been brutal. 

Kate finished cushions for the window seat in the kitchen.  I put Hilo on it while it was on Kate’s worktable to see if she would like it.  She seemed nervous.

This week I’ve slept like a rock.  An odd phrase, but apt in the nothing till morning meaning I intend here.    

Yesterday I finished Fifty Degrees, the second in Kim Stanley Robinson’s eco-thriller/near future sci-fi trilogy which begins with Forty Days of Rain and ends with Sixty Days and Counting. His Mars trilogy is better as science fiction; it’s wonderful; but, this trilogy strikes closer to home and imagines a time period when we pass some of the tipping points talked about in the news these days.  The Gulf Stream stops because the thermohaline barrier breaches.  Weather patterns swing wildly from one extreme to the other.  The West Anarctic Ice Shelf begins to leave land and drift into the ocean, causing several centimeters of sea level rise. 

The book imagines a loose team of scientists, policy wonks and politicians who in their various spheres create solutions and fight to realize them before the worst becomes worse.  There is also some Buddhist material, too.  The characters are interesting and make the books worth reading, as was true of the Mars trilogy.  Robinson imagines, however, a science  triumphant, even dominant which I find suspicious.  It was industrialists and technocrats who got us in this mess, with our individual complicity, and to imagine that rationalism, their primary tool, will dig us out seems suspect at the core.

The facet of it that rings true to me is the paradigmatically American approach of, keep trying until solutions come.  That the scientific will play a necessary and perhaps even lead role I don’t question.  I just don’t want an approach that leaves aside the many individual decision makers, those of us in our cars and at home with our dishwashers.  This is science-fiction, not political-fiction, or a novel of manners (though it has some aspects of this genre), so the focus is congruent, yet I want to see us stretch all the way out for solutions.