Perhaps Nowhere Else

Even he may not have realized it—
for none of us quite know
the time of our demise—
but he did not live much longer.

He sits, a placid, contented look
on an ageless face, lush white hair
brushed back from those chiseled
Polynesian cheekbones.

I was glad to see him
when we returned to this island
after four years away.

He owned and occupied
a tiny gallery here in our community
for decades.

One could enter
and become immediately overwhelmed
at the sheer volume of curios
in residence.

I knew these objects were for sale,
but hesitated, every time,
in taking anything away.

They all seemed to find their place
amongst one another.

And perhaps nowhere else.

Hooks carved from genuine ivory.
Stone.
Creations in cloth, tapa.

Maybe you can still find these things
somewhere in Hilo,
but I do not know
of such a place.

It was magical.

And such magic,
at least on earth,
never quite seems to last.

Just Outside Myself

What is this ghostly sense of dread
that follows me some days,
sometimes,
not always.

Just enough to let me know
there is unfinished business
within myself.

I try to untangle it
from the knot it precipitates.

I don’t like that it makes me feel
just outside myself,
as if a visitor
to my own inner life.

The devil at my heels
does not propel me
into or away from
anything of interest.
Of value.

And so I wait,

I, who witnesses wonder
nearly every day.

I will wait
until the muddy waters clarify.
Or simply settle.

Until the questions become,
once again,
simple self-inquiry.

Not self reproach.

Bone

I rate my existence
midway between root, bone and creature.

I do not seek liberation in any Hereafter.
Rather, I search for it in forests, oceans,
landscapes –

places I have been somewhat forced
to traverse in a body designed more for rugby
than the long-distance runner.

My bicycle was once my favorite means of conveyance,
easily carrying me fifty miles a week,
wind moving over my skin
at a pace more native to my spirit.

But the vagaries of a life constrained
by the foibles of finite time
have forced me into other modes of locomotion.

And so I walk.

The bones of my hips and legs,
less certain now than in my youth,
are nevertheless unquestionably
more solid on the ground.

Even when traversing that ground feels like labor.
Even when I remember the joy of moving faster.

Yet how can my bones meet the bones
of the planet if I am forever outpacing her?

I think of the shiny round bugs
I regularly encounter along the trail,
their tiny armored bodies making their way
at what appears to me a crawl.

Perhaps to them
I am the one hurtling overhead.

Perhaps there is no pace
at which the earth can finally be known.

Only this continual slowing,
this placing of one substantial foot
before the other,

my bones carried for a little while
over hers.

After

My quiet mornings beside the Pacific don’t mean the world is at peace. It means peace is occurring within me, if even just within my own mind’s eye, even in moments such as these. The calm before the storm.

In the midst of a hurricane, my body cannot discover equilibrium. I stagger, hands on walls, door jambs, furniture. Like a drunkard on a ship, careening from one end to another, my sea legs failing me.

This, too, is occurring.

My body, striving for balance. In a small clutch of houses, crisscrossed with wires, electric poles, landscapes of trees, shrubs. I cannot settle; my core still spins.

The sky is lighter toward the sea, but the most predominant thought is that we are here in the middle of a vast ocean, on a spit of land, while weather systems have their way with us.

Observing the radar map of Hurricane Lala, it seems impossible how tiny we are. The massive storm whirls, spreading out. We are snagged into its vortex, the eye passing along our island’s shore. Technically, it does not make landfall.

Tell that to those in Na‘alehu. Punalu‘u.

Tell that to insureds throughout the island, who are summarily being denied claims based on a momentary label of Category 1 hurricane, quickly downgraded to a tropical storm. But hurricane it is, and oh, unless you have Very Expensive hurricane insurance—often exceeding $6,000 a year in excess of regular coverage—well. Out of luck.

As houses are swept off their foundations and into the sea, rescue crews scan the ocean for survivors. Roads are torn apart, a graveyard broken open by floodwaters, coffins askew, bones of loved ones tossed out into the fray. Families feel their continuity shredded. We are all without tether in this storm’s midst.

Days later, the generator hums. We count our blessings. Lights at night, even briefly. Refrigerator still remains cool enough. A promise from the power company for restoration in two days. Days beyond that, mostly. Then, tentatively, internet.

No grid, no Wi-Fi seem petty in the face of greater alterations for too many.

Where do we live, inside what faulty container, that allows us to orient in a reality too profound to comprehend?

And so we pray. Not so much for ourselves, but for those affected more deeply. Isolated, roads torn asunder. No drinking water. Homes lost to them.

And still other newcomers to this island demand internet access, and Now!

They begin accusing the governor, the county, the power company, the internet providers. Anybody and anything that might mitigate their own discomfort.

Inconceivable.

Hurricane Lala

Aloha folks:

Hawaii Island has been hit badly by hurricane Lala, a category one hurricane that swept over the big island of Hawaii where we live.

Earthquakes and volcanoes are nothing compared to this thing! Our community experienced the highest winds at 91 miles an hour. A total of 42 inches of rain fell Island wide, some got less but you’d never know it.

It tore off roofs. It devastated the communities of Na’alehu, Punalu’u and Waiohinu. Pahala and Wood Valley are completely isolated. A road coming in or out no longer exists. There are chasms so big they can’t be crossed. The island is mobilized trying to get resources to people trapped in these places. Homes have been washed into the ocean. Air patrols are searching for bodies.

But as always, Hawai’i takes care of her own. Those less affected help those still in the thick of it. Which is a good thing, given the current state of the government in Washington. I doubt they will offer any assistance whatsoever, as this administration has gutted FEMA. So we are not holding our breath.

I will get back to my regularly schedule blog posts as soon as we get our electricity restored. Chris and I have driven through our community, and I’ve never been in a war zone but the first thing that leaps to mind is it looks like a war zone or a bomb went off. Power poles dropped into roadways, trees everywhere, powerlines down huge cables that we have no choice but to drive over to get from here to there. Luckily they are not live. But still.

Wishing you all well, count your blessings! Climate change is real.

🙏Bela

Sky Monkeys

I am, in stillness, walking in the quiet of early morning.

So it is that I am necessarily startled by the hacking of overhead blades,
ferrying people across the miles that I find myself,
one step at a time,
exploring.

The din and chop slice through silence,
no less jarring than a knife disrupting flesh.

I have never commandeered one of these contraptions
in order to sweep over this beloved land.

I have never thought the money required was worth the gamble.

The noise, for one thing.
And God forbid somebody should try to narrate a place to me
that I myself have scoured, one foot placed in front of the other, over twenty years.

I will make my own observations, my own deductions,
my own conclusions, if any might be made.

I can’t insist you do the same.

I would only ask: how does one come to know the land in this way?

Or maybe this is not the goal
in a society trained on rapid consumption on all fronts.

To imagine we can comprehend a place from the sky
as we might with feet on the ground
dismisses the slow perusal of the walker.

I would always feel as though
my observations were coming up short.

Landscapers

What do we need from landscapes?
For surely the landscapes do not need us.

Rather, we seek them out.

What does one derive from the woods of New England,
as opposed to the stark, spare deserts of the Southwest?

What of the warm, full-bodied breath
of land and sea in the South Pacific?

What draws humans to these places?

Are we simply a species trained on frontiers,
like greyhounds fixed on a robot rabbit –
seeking out the unfamiliar,
compelled toward what we consider other?

And in the end, once the urge to roam has been satiated,
do we not simply discover a preference
for one set of conditions over another?

No Contract

It’s hard to imagine that I can call
up a scene from 40 years ago,
to the same forest,
the same lady’s slippers,
the highbush blueberries,
the old aluminum boat flipped
upside down,
the rotting boat slip.

Somehow, the loons,
paddling their webbed feet
around in that mirror-clear water,
fuzzy babies trailing behind them,
dragonflies flitting overhead.

Impossible to believe that
if I go back there, if I could
go back to that place,
the loons won’t remember me.

How many generations
of babies survived the onslaught
of people wealthy enough
to build that road
into deep woods, across the lake
where nobody ever imagined
there could even be a road.

But money talks,
at least in that town,
and longtime nesting areas
in marshes were filled,
and in they came,
building houses into the face
of the mountain,
bringing noisy motorboats,
aluminum docks,
brightly colored blowup toys
that ended up somewhere
on the water.

But we had our own impact.
A modest house, sure.
A yard, barn. Horse arena.
The garden with willows
woven into an archway.

There was love. Care.
Now, likely shambles.

It is easy now, all these years later,
to forget, day to day,
as if I must have misremembered
that time and place
which I alone forfeited
to my future.

And now, some forty years later,
I keep discovering that reality
has declined
to sign a contract with me.

This Old House

If you could, with X-ray vision, see beneath the layers,
under the new paint and trim –

a green as bright as eucalyptus buds,
a white like sun-bleached beach stones—

you would find what we have:

the old rot,
termite-eaten boards
of a 1930s plantation house,

wrapped in a collage of siding,
a carpenter’s leftovers,
likely meant to keep
renovation costs down.

All of it now
sheathed in new cladding,
textured to mimic real wood,
yet built to last,
impervious
to termites’ teeth

and, if cared for,
to the mold and rot
endemic to Hawaiʻi Island.

Appearances mislead.

But sometimes
that is exactly
what we hope for.

In the Presence of Wolves

What if the wolf, or any other creature
that humans have hunted and tortured nearly
to extinction –
what if the wolf has chosen to exist,
to be itself,
much as I have chosen to be myself,
despite a deep and profound,
pervasive loneliness at the core?

What if the wolf, knowing of the agony
humans had in mind for it,
the joy they took in tormenting an intelligent,
perceptive, masterful, and beautiful creature
until its last rough and ragged breath –

What if the wolf knew this instinctively,
as if this was
an agreement this noble creature made,
in order to reflect back to its persecutors
the weight of the actions they, themselves,
had perpetrated?

I understand how humans compartmentalize,
even push into the bowels of forgetting
something impossible to digest and evacuate.

Something sits inside the gut
and works and works.
Works its way, as if by osmosis,
through the intestinal walls
and into the entire organism.

Sometimes themes erupt into dreams,
despite a person’s waking life and fantasies,
despite the human drive toward selective forgetting.

But what we commit
also commits itself to us,
individually as well as collectively,
in ways both profound and unforgiving.