Category Archives: Great Work

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Travel

The True Radicals of Today Are Conservatives

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7:45AM.  Bright sun.  Blue water.  Breeze off the ocean.  Mourning doves coo.

The mourning doves have had it goin’ on the last week.  Males walk up to a female, bow, stomp their feet, then spread their tail feathers.  Oh, yeah.  I saw that move before.

Last post from Da Fish Shack.  My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.  Just 12 hours until my jet plane.  Da Fish Shack check-out is 10AM and my flight doesn’t leave until 8:15 PM so I have time to do some more sightseeing, shop, visit the museum in Lihue, have lunch and dinner.

One point of comparison I forgot between Da Fish Shack and the Hyatt was showers.  At the Hyatt the shower was an ordinary shower in a tub, found in most hotels.  Here at Da Fish Shack showers are al fresco although with appropriate screening.  Kate suggested I use flip-flops when I used the shower.  Although I would not want to take showers outside at home, here in Hawai’i’s wonderful climate, it provides a note of adventure to a routine task.  You can hear the surf and feel the wind all over.

On driving back last Sunday night to Da Fish Shack after supper in Wailua, I turned on NPR.  Guess who was on?  Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion.  Right here on route 56 headed north toward Princeville and Hanalei.  This morning I read the NYT while I ate breakfast.  Lead story in travel?  Skiing on the Gunflint Trail.  

Something I’ve started rolling around.  It appears to me that the true radicals of today are conservatives.  No, not the George Buckley, Russell Kirkland variety or the neo-con versions that got us into this damned war, but conservatives who focus their conservative tendencies on species and eco-systems, on cultures and life ways.  These eco-conservatives are in fact conservative over against enlightenment liberals,  free-market economists and raging bull capitalists of multi-national corporate organizations.

In tandem with this thought, which still percolates, is another.   Rather than the nexus of evil, the world’s faith traditions are vast resources that represent the human heart and mind at its most integrated, its most daring and its most compassionate.  Yes, the religious institutions that accrete around these faith traditions often become like the coral reef, rigid and sharp, but the faith traditions themselves preserve the world’s oldest stories and humankind’s most radical dreams. 

When anti-religion dogmatists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens rail against these institutions, all they are doing is raising the enlightenment flag of REASON.  Well, here’s the big news guys, REASON is not all there is.  In fact, reason works its magic by dividing and parsing, by reducing the world to manageable portions, to forumlas and laws.  Not a bad thing as far it goes, but turn the process on its head and move out toward the whole, toward life and the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. 

These things are.  And, they were before science and reasons and they will be after science and reason has passed away.  They do not need to consult either Newton or Einstein to go the speed of light or engage gravity.  It is this whole, the buzzing, blooming whole that is most precious and it will not be dissected because there are too many variables, too many data points moving in too many disparate directions.

And so forth.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

The Tao and the Islands

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7:41AM  Cool breeze.  Overcast. Calm ocean, no surf. 

Last full day in Hawai’i.  Time has passed more slowly for me than usual.  Often, I go on vacation and the next thing I know I’m back on the plane headed home.  This trip a variety of circumstances have slowed things down, among them Kate’s illness and my decision to get the full resort experience at the Hyatt.

When I arrived last Saturday at Da Fish Shack, I was already on Island time.  Having a place this close to the ocean did, as I’d hoped, attune me to its rhythms.  Surf comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out night and day. 

Nighttime breezes off the ocean cool the land to perfect sleeping weather and mountain breezes move the air during the heat of the day.  The slow warming of the day gives way to pleasant, dark nights with no traffic and no metro glow to dull the view of the stars.

Last night I realized the true character of this little place.  It’s a Hawai’ian hermitage, a small cell on the ocean where the soul can come for a rest and rejuvenation. 

The immediacy of ocean, mountain and lush plant life call out for malama ‘aina.  It’s not surprising that the first Hawai’ians heard the call.  Our home in Andover gives me the same sense of connection to the land, a place where Kate and I have, over years of gardening, become na kama’aina. 

The Tao almost becomes visible here on Kauai.  That is, the ebb and flow of the cosmos, its inevitable course, has so much evidence on this ancient island, already long eroded and heading toward a new life as an atoll, then its permanent one as a seamount. 

 Here in Hawai’i land emerges from the ocean with hot rock and vitality.  Rain and the ocean combine with the wind to create soil.  On the soil plants take hold, sending out roots which further fracture the lava, creating more soil.  The island moves off the hotspot and this erosive process takes over as the primary shaper of the land. (excluding bulldozers and cement) As furthest along in this process of the main high islands, Kauai has the feel of a hermit, ravaged by time and wrinkled, yet bearer of the earth’s wisdom. 

A few weeks here is only enough to catch a glimpse of the message Kauai has for us as we hurtle forward in our terraforming experiment.  The message may be, whatever happens, the earth herself will survive.

Great Work, Travel

Malama ‘Aina

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.