The Turning Light

As I walk along this ocean path several times a week, I stop at familiar places. One is a beautiful bay where the water is so clear I can see almost to the bottom.

I regard the choppy ocean, the waves turning this way and that, their shifting surfaces creating a kaleidoscope of refractions. Beneath them, what appear to be fish gathered around an outcropping of bleached coral rock, a multitude assembling and dissolving with each passing wave.

In my ear, Barack Obama and Ta-Nehisi Coates are discussing James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a book that touched them both deeply during their formative years.

I find myself thinking about exceptionalism, freedom, and the possibility of a broader, deeper understanding of both. One that includes not just Black Americans, not just those who hold power, but people everywhere.

And as I watch the waves and their shifting patterns, somehow everything seems relevant to this particular pause in time.

I could claim to know more than I do, though perhaps whatever truth I might claim would be confined to my own perceptions.

We all inhabit planet Earth. Yet how many collective decisions, prejudices, and policies determine the daily lives of people we will never meet? How many of our actions and expectations are motivated by fears we might glimpse, or refuse to acknowledge? How often do we mistake the narrow boundaries of our own experience for the boundaries of reality itself?

And what becomes of freedom when we imagine it belongs more naturally to some than to others?

Despite what many of us have been taught in church about living forever, too few seem willing to embrace the darkness from which we all arose.

Not darkness as punishment or evil, but the great unknown. That mystery preceding our arrival, and awaiting us when our brief passage through this world is complete.

Whether in dreams or waking life, we remain confronted with the indisputable fact that we are here for a limited time. Its duration is unknown to us.

We do not possess that knowledge.

We could be taken at this very moment, vaporized out of the bodies we so confidently assume will carry us into tomorrow.

For some, this happens in a bombing while breastfeeding a child.

For others, death comes quietly, without warning or spectacle.

And what, really, separates us? Geography? Circumstance? The accident of birth? The stories we have been taught to believe about ourselves and one another?

Meanwhile, in this bay, the light turns and turns again.

In one moment, one particular quadrant is illuminated.

In the next, it appears as though it never existed.

Before the Evidence

I would knock on his door
and he would open it, always.

This was less premonition,
more simply knowing.

Over three decades of history,
and here’s the one person
who will never let me down.

Sometimes we do attune
to the other’s thoughts,
though it is hard to attribute this
to the supernatural.

More the connection between two souls
that coupled up like magnets
from early on.

I wish I had known.

But now I do.

Many look at us
with self-confessed envy.

As if this never required
years of tears,
silent frustration.
Rage, even.

Lock down, open up.

There was no easy resolution
in those early days.

But there was intuition
that it would not always be that way.

Communication.
Halting, but steady.

The qualities that bound us,
one to the other,
could not be predicted or planned.

But they could be cultivated over time,
like the plants in my own backyard.

All of those invasive roots,
tangling and twining below the surface,
and I don’t even try to plant
in that ground.

I have amended the soil,
dug it up, dug it out,
pulled the thorny weeds
that jab the fingers from every angle.

And now I must wait.

Meanwhile, I raise up a bed or two
in which to grow greens,
ginger, turmeric.

I don’t know what’s happening underground
with all the new microbial activity.

I cannot know
until the surface begins to demonstrate
the transformation happening
deep underneath.

But I have become patient
over the years.

I have learned to wait long enough
for redemption.

Chimera

A lion, a goat and a serpent.
Fire pouring from its mouth.
The ancients imagined such a creature
and called it a chimera.

Far beneath the surface of the ocean,
another chimaera moves through the darkness.
A strange-eyed, long-tailed fish,
sometimes called a ghost shark,
although it isn’t really a shark at all.

One breathes fire.
The other inhabits water.

Both carry a name bestowed by someone
attempting to describe what they encountered.

I wonder whether either creature
experiences itself as particularly strange.

Does the lion question the presence of the goat?
Does the serpent object to sharing a body
with something that breathes fire?
Or does the entire creature simply
go about the business of being alive?

Perhaps contradiction belongs less
to the creature than to the observer.

We are so fond of naming things.
Sorting them. Establishing what belongs
with what, what cannot possibly coexist,
what makes sense and what does not.

As though the naming were the knowing.

Water offers another possibility.

Stand above it and you see the sky reflected.
Look beneath the reflection and another world appears.
Enter it and everything changes.

The surface is familiar.
The depths have their own peculiar stillness.

But between them lies the passage.

Currents pull against the body.
Light shifts. Pressure increases.
Familiar bearings disappear.
What was readily understood from above
becomes something else entirely
when experienced from within.

And the body must negotiate every inch of the descent.

There is no arriving at the depths without passing through the water.

Perhaps this is where so much of living actually occurs.
Not in the certainty of what we believe we know,
nor in the eventual clarity of what we discover,
but in the unsettled territory between them.

Cornell

The mango tree is finally healing after its radical pruning nearly a year ago.

But I wonder about the root system. How far does it reach beyond the canopy that remains? What is going on under there?

Above ground, I can see where the cuts were made. I can witness new growth. Underneath, I have no idea what has been affected, what has withered, what is still reaching out to sustain the canopy that is now absent.

We are so enamored of picking and harvesting what we can see. The ripest fruit we have been taught to desire from the beginning of time.

Now. Now. Now. The giant maw of yearning that can never be quenched.

Pluck what is visible, tantalizing, the object of desire.

How much of another life disappears in the taking?

The best and the brightest, almost born wearing crowns. Even so, a woman has less agency in a crowd of kings.

The ground collapses, the fish all die, the woman is left with a lifetime of scars.

But full speed ahead, and damn the consequences. They are not part of the curriculum.

Drill baby, drill.

We keep insisting on extracting beyond the capacity of the entire system, ignoring what we choose not to see. Those structures that nourish and sustain. The inner processes of the plant. The inner life of the human. All that goes on beneath the surface while we carelessly snatch at what we want.

This morning I am looking at the mango tree.
Nearly a year, and I am calling it healed
because of what is evident.

I have no expectation of fruit.

Enlightenment Pending

One after another, after another!
Enough, already!

Danger ahead! Danger behind!
And I thought myself done by now.
Weren’t we supposed to have some ease
into old age?

Apparently still learning.
Apparently still growing.
And I thought I was all grown up.
Maybe enlightened by now.

What a joke!

Still, I’m lucky.
No health problems,
a happy home, humor
holding things together
instead of whining and worry.

I knew a couple like that,
whining into death.
He was dissatisfied with his lot.
He blamed her, but you know
how that goes.
Always the other person.

If they’d both taken responsibility
years ago,
how different those final years
might have been.

City Slickers

You can’t remain asleep
in the presence of something you genuinely
recognize as beautiful.

Beauty enlarges us, and that can be uncomfortable
for some people.

Discomfort has a way of stripping away
our best-laid defenses.
And if we’re attached to our armor,
very little will convince us to set it down.

This may be more true than I would like to believe.

Over the years, I’ve taken friends to some of the most exquisite places
in every part of the world I’ve called home.

Once, two friends from Asia came to visit.
He was a Daoist elder.
She was his new wife, a young woman accustomed to city life.

I hadn’t realized how brave it was of them
to travel so far,
to our small town,
our small plantation home,
on an island in the middle of the Pacific.

They slept through the night,
while overhead, stars blazed across a seemingly endless sky.

But for all they knew,
there was nothing remarkable enough
to warrant stepping outside.

The house was familiar enough.
The darkness beyond it, perhaps not.

Morning came, and he asked,
as he was the one who spoke English,
if I could direct them to The City.

I offered to do one better.
Though they had their own rental car,
I would take them myself.

We arrived on Aliʻi Drive,
a place I’d scarcely visited,
never to stroll, to shop, or to eat.

To me, it was rather like visiting a carnival.

Where would you like to go first? I asked.

Oh, they were happy just walking.
No destination in mind.
No particular desire to shop.

They simply wanted to be among the throngs of people
I do my level best to avoid,
here and everywhere else.

I finally asked him why.

He explained that his wife
just wanted to feel something familiar
in this strange, exotic place.

And there it was.

What I had hoped to share with them
was precisely what she needed to escape.

The quiet. The darkness.
The extravagant indifference of a sky
that had no need of our attention.

She wanted people, pavement,
the reassuring bustle of commerce.
A world she knew how to inhabit.

I couldn’t fault her for wanting that.

But I wondered how often we travel
to the ends of the earth
only to search for what we’ve left behind.

How much beauty passes before our eyes
while we are busy looking
for something we already know?

The Still Point

I used to mistake the wind for the workings of my mind.

The whirlwind I first felt as a child. Gusts kicking up bits of leaves, paper, feathers, dust, and debris. That is what my thoughts seemed composed of.

It is hard to settle a mind like that, always caught in a vortex of movement.

Which suited me back then. It suited the speed I was being urged to accommodate, rather than the reverse. Rather than imagining, in my wildest dreams, that I could affect the speed of the world.

But I have learned that I can.

And that I do.

Every time my mind becomes an anchor rather than another element in the storm.

To take the time to ponder the smallest nuances in a landscape, the tiniest movements in an ocean of movement. This has become, not my work exactly, but my practice.

I don’t need mantras or teachers. I don’t crave sitting in groups of others to quell my jumping nerves.

I need only give myself permission to pay attention to nothing.

Nothing becomes my default. Nothing becomes my set point.

And like the cosmos outside me, planets orbiting in a space too vast to contemplate – and why try? – I allow myself to create from the blackness, from the void, from this place the world is fond of calling nothing.

Where nothing is.

Where nothing arises.

Yet is the genesis of everything.

It is the place potential resides, including my own, including yours.

It is the anchor, the still point from which galaxies are born.

I love to linger there.

Sorry, Sorry

Sorry, she said, and sorry she repeated. Not once, but multiple times.

She was pulling out of a parking spot, and I was looking to pull in. A big smile on her kind face as she explained, apologetically, that the spot was reserved. Which, once she pulled out, I could see for myself. A big sign.

Another spot was clearly available, but before I could pull into it, a little woman came rushing out.

“So sorry, so sorry! We need to bring a patient out, and we need a space for the wheelchair.”

“No problem!” I said. “No need to be sorry!”

What a world!

If you read enough social media, you might begin to believe that the human race is made of cruelty and little else. And you would be partly right.

There are days I’m so cynical, I surprise myself.

But then how do I account for this morning? Kindness spilling out, overflowing, reinforcing itself. One person extending it to another, who extends it to another. No grand gestures, no declarations. Just ordinary human beings taking care not to inconvenience one another.

I’m on a journey today.

Dentist and skin doctor, an hour or so from home.

I scheduled them both on the same day, because once I’ve got to drive 45 minutes, I might as well go the extra 30. Interesting logic.

It’s a pretty drive. Ocean sparkling in the distance, turquoise jewels conveying themselves into places within me that I cannot even track.

But by day’s end, I am beyond exhausted. Too many people, too many choices, too much chaos. Too much speed.

The island has changed enormously in tempo since we returned, post-Covid. Everyone seems to be in a rush now. No time, no time.

Tailgating is relatively new here, and it has become pervasive. I have to account for extra time to get from here to there, because I have to pull over multiple times to let the speeders pass.

I wonder what everyone is rushing toward. Or away from.

Come to Hawai‘i? Why not leave your mainland habits behind? Isn’t that part of the meaning of vacation?

And yet, in a parking lot this morning, two women were falling all over themselves apologizing for the smallest inconvenience. Neither had done anything wrong. Both were simply thinking of someone else.

On the highway, people seem determined to get ahead of one another. In the parking lot, two women were making room.

Perhaps that’s why their kindness stays with me.

Not because it was extraordinary.

Because it shouldn’t be.

Into the Night

The sweet sleep of night
beckons us, children of starlight,
into its welcome, inky embrace.

We do not resist, and go willingly into that unknown world of dreams.

Like small bats tucked into little pukas in the craggy walls of a cool cave, we settle in and in, until that feeling of security overtakes us and we can release ourselves, entering that strange dimension where anything can happen, and does.

We won’t know until morning
where we’ve been, and even then, it’s just a guess, snippets of memories.

And like smoke, they vanish, like a million bats emerging all at once from Carlsbad Caverns, blending into ebony until they become indistinguishable from one another, from the medium into which they penetrate.

Who can say where they go?
Who can know the mystery of echolocation except they, themselves?

Swooping out over the landscape, in search of sustenance. The tiny insects they collect in numbers too vast to count.

And we have no idea, nor probably ever will, despite our science.

They fly so confidently, navigating their way intentionally, as we sleep and dream, encountering the unexpected surprises of the night.

The Song Lives On

Walking around the house this morning,
rolling the lyrics of Neil Young’s Southern Man
around in my head,
I’m struck by how surreal it seems
that six decades after the civil rights movement
and Martin Luther King Jr.,
the themes remain eerily familiar.

Some people are still so full of hatred
toward other human beings
for something as arbitrary as the color of their skin.

As if any of us could alter our shade
with a snap of the fingers.

As if any of us would want to!

There is such exquisite beauty in diversity.

Can you imagine a world populated by pine trees,
and only pine trees?
No flowering trees, no broad leaves,
no astonishing variety of form and color.

Imagine even those solitary trees
rooted in poisoned ground,
the corruption invisible above the surface,
the roots already rotting.

What a diminished world that would be.

I witnessed the legislation of the 1960s.
And with it came enormous progress.

Perhaps the hopeful among us
mistook a beginning for an ending.

And isn’t that a startling conclusion,
decades later?

We changed the laws.
We mistook that for changing the hearts
that made those laws necessary.

But hatred does not need to be reinvented.
It only needs to be inherited.

Passed from one generation to another,
through words casually spoken,
beliefs seldom questioned,
fears accepted as truth.

And so the old poison survives,
even when the world around it changes.

In the end,
which doubtless is the beginning
of something else,
we are left confronting
the persistence of this ancient affliction.

It is easy to simply label it ignorance.
And perhaps that is partly true.

But it is not the whole story.

Are fear, sexual jealousy, possessiveness,
racial mythology, and religious justification
simply elaborate inventions
humans devise to excuse domination and cruelty?

Is this really endemic to our basic nature?

Or do we simply invent the danger,
then congratulate ourselves
for defending against it?