Ho'oulu ... sit, listen -- for years

"It is critical at this time to dig deeper into the well-spring of our own subjectivity. We are not 'dumbing down' methodology when we wish to sit and listen -- for years." - Ho'oulu: Our Time of Becoming by Manu Meyer

A'ohe pau e 'ike

There is no end to knowledge.

Once again na 'Ole Po have wrestled me down, and sorted through the many thoughts that have either clung tenaciously out of habit or found a place again and again because at every level it suits my culture. That grown knowing that is ancient/modern show up in my dreams, and redefine the drama that walks across my everyday. Last night as Mahina's rounding light hu (penetrated) through the small vardo window Pete and I retold our mo'oku'auhau our genealogy as a couple.

"We always tell it, and then it gets to this point. We tell it different." Pete lay beside me roused from near sleep by my voice. It takes him to that luminous place. The storyteller's voice. What happens when the 'ole moons, and in particular, the 'ole pau phase cycles around us is the story as much if not more than the teller wants to hear itself. With time, knowledge changes. What we have lived (our history) is faceted, seen from another angle. We tell the story as it has changed. Pete tells of out and back, and back and forth journey from the Mid-west.

"It's huaka'i," I said into the night. "A migration, leaving, getting 'out of Dodge' sort of thing." Looking at our history there is opportunity to learn how we/he/me evolve. Are we? As we talked into the night my reading and research which now includes Manulani Aluli Meyer's Ho'oulu folds, looking for places to seep into my gut, preparing me for the conversations I will have when our gathering place (Ho'omoku) welcomes makers of island.

Manu writes, "Relationship with place allows for gross knowing of all aspects of environment and allows for a stretching towards the rational and transcendental."  

'Ole kukahi and Jupiter

Re-telling our journey together as a couple, the facets that have added to our  huaka'i, both together and independently, is the conscious and daily noticing and recording of data -- real life observations, of wind, sky, bird activity, growing and blossoming. Key to the data is the shape and position of Mahina in relationship to our place on Earth. For eight years we have made note of time by things other than a refrigerator calendar. Like our ancestors in my backbones, we are descendants of seafarers and landlocked pagans. The process of softening the ground of our preconceptions -- the ground of our being, is a slow one. We resist change, even if we know it is. Summer comes. The Solstice is less than three anahulu away (3 Hawaiian weeks of 10 po).

We sit, and listen for years. Aging in place. We learn our place. History becomes a little less a mystery. We hu.(1. to rise or swell, as yeast or souring poi; to ferment, overlow, percolate, effervesce, boil over; to surge or rise to the surface, as emotion; rising, swelling; outburst, overflow. - Hawaiian Dictionary, Pukui and Elbert)

Amana ua noa.

I luna la i luna
Na manu o ka lewa
Upwards the birds of the heavens

I lalo la i lalo
Na pua o ka honua
Downwards the flowers of the earth

I uka la i uka
Na ulu la'au
Uplands the trees of the forest

I kai la i kai
Na i'a o ka moana
Seaward the fish of the ocean

Ha'ina mai ka puana
Ahe nai ke ao nei
Thus ends my song of the beauties of this world

-Mary Kawena Pukui

Reconciling opposites, and a fondness for ambiguity

"My mother's punitive God was the enemy of Coyote. Prankish, lecherous, accident-prone Coyote and his cousins, the unpredictable creators of the world in Native American stories, brough me a vision of this realm as never perfect, made through collaboration and squabbling." So wrote Rebecca Solnit in her article "Coyote".I came across the December 22, 2014 New Yorker Magazine article, drawn to the page of a FREE magazine Pete had brought home from the library.

The wonderful drawing of a rough and lean coyote with the sharpened end of a #2 pencil in his teeth (which I cannot duplicate here) pulled me into the words about the creature we can hear sometimes late in the night, or early in the morning. While JOTS and I are out on our trounces through the woods on the other side of the driveway I see signs of Coyote, sometimes his scat, or the reminder that he or she has preened and the hairball shreds disguise themselves. Because I don't walk very fast, the leavings are something I spot. I make note. Rarely do I see his paw prints, but I keep aware.

Solnit's article continues to describe the stories of her mother's God's enemy, "Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Ohlone people say that Coyote was the first being, and that the world was created by him, and by Eagle and by Hummingbird, who laughs at Coyote's attempts to determine just where to impregnate his wife[...] As the California poet Gary Synder once said, "Old Doctor Coyote ...is not inclined to make a distinction between good and evil." Instead, he's full of contagious exuberance and great creative force...."These supple stories, "continues Solnit, "unalarmed by improvisation, failure, and sex, remind me of jazz. The creator in the Old Testament, however, is a classical musician whose score can be performed only one right way."

When I sat to write this morning, I had just just opened, and read, an email from a good pal. She was forwarding me some astrology.

"Many modern astronomers are allergic to astrology, but from my perspective there is no inherent conflict between the two fields. In the spirit of finding reconciliation between apparent opposites, I'm happy to say that you are now a virtual virtuoso in your ability to reconcile both apparent opposites and actual opposites. I invite you to use this aptitude with flair and daring." 

I'm in total appreciation and agreement that astronomy and astrology are twins. I believe the conflicts are organic. Siblings fight. Most of the quibble about 'science' is just, short-sightedness. My ancestors the Kanaka embraced the ambiguity and creative tension with many points of view . Or as one of my favorite teachers and practitioner of Hawaiian epistemology, Manu Meyers answers her detractors who become impatient when her stories seems getting off point, "It's all points."

My friend knows I'm preparing the ground, digging with my o'o (that digging stick) and braiding the many stories that make for an interesting story. Many stories. So many stories, so little time (at least this lifetime:) Just as I finished reading that email, Hummingbird flew through my open kitchen window, lingering and making that incredible music her wings are blessed with. Have you heard your music? While I struck the keys on this board, I heard her, turned to greet her, stopped writing. She was asking for a conversation! When she backed up, and flew into the woods, I followed.

"Where are you?" I asked when I was on the path between the Quonset and the Bath house. Looking, listening, and then finally hearing her voice, her music somewhere nearby. I felt the blessing. The wild knowing that it's all points. Out side this barely sheltering enclosure the wild and many potential meanings run, walk, hover and soar. Between paragraphs as I take a short break from the keyboard, pick up my car keys and drive into town where there are merchants who package food, stack eggplants, and service hungry humans hunting for a sandwich, I stop for what I hoped would be a semi-wild adventure in our local thrift store. Something is happening here. My button nose tuned by the visits of hummingbirds' wings and spiders flinging themselves off my windows, I feel the oddness of order in an old favorite activity. "Is this what's happening to thrift?" I ask the store manager. "I can't find any thing in here without the funk."

Our town is being sterilized, and there doesn't seem to be much to change that, at least in the short run. Rummaging through bins and tall stacks of odd lot second-hand is no longer good enough. Selling old to look like new seems to be the ordering of today. Display the old to look new. Before getting into more mischief, I knew it was time for me to return to the woods, and the oddity of my ordinary and artful life. Reconciling opposites? That's about it, and improvisation? Oh I do love an unexpected zig where it ought to zag.


Do you have a fondness for improvisation?

Slow to medium, slowed to medium: Pace for the long haul

"I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places. Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored. Making it tell the same tale over again makes it thin and whining; its scales begin to fall off; its fiery breath becomes a trickle of smoke. It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistant; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't transformed into food for the imagination...(read the entire quote the post "Dreaming Awake"on Terri Windling's blog Myth & Moor) - Patricia A. McKillip

An early winter snow turned to freeze in our Forest Lane World

This is a very different sort of winter. As if winter could be only one way. It makes me shiver to think I might put that thought out into the atmosphere where Lonomakua could rub it between his elemental palms and blow the mana'o the thought like so much fog into the world. Taking it from my tiny writer's hut and telling my secrets, I wonder what would become of such a piece of speculation.

THERE, in those three sentences is the start of what can happen when a writer, this one, takes a bit of information, in this case, famous fantasy writer Patricia A. McKillip's quotation and rub it against the sides of my imagination. Follow if you can ... This is a very different sort of winter. It is! In the real time of winters this one is my fifth in these woods. The Tall Trees around have grown even taller. Through the foggy moisture that is one of this winter's favorite dressing gowns the cedar blurs outside the Quonset. A breeze stirs and rakes the bamboo pole outside my rippling plastic window. The antennae making possible an ether-connection sways, but, the signal stays. Late January and some place nearby the temperature will reach 50 degrees. Near Spring? Not really, but the illusion could tempt the hearty ones into shorts and short-sleeves that only cover their biceps. Not me, oh no, I am layered with thermal top and two shirts, a hoodie and my worn but warm quilted coat. Snow and freeze came early this winter. Short but fierce for this environment. The fog has taken hold instead, Lonomakua the elemental God we name in my home islands is the Atmosphere in Winter. There or here, I recognize the game, the dance he plays with this Island Earth.

A twirling little girl climbed out my fingers to shake and shimmy while the snow and frost came

It makes me shake and shimmy to think about what might happen if I weave the reality of my experiences as a Hawaiian-Islands woman observing the interaction of Lono here, two thousand five hundred miles from the culture that has named him, with the fluidity of my imagination. That shiver is however, the first bite in the slow to medium process that I am coming to know more intimately as I live my art, live my kuleana as writer and storyteller over the long haul. As McKillip has written it is reality that feds the tales of imagination. It is the floating knowledge, mana'o lana as Manu Meyer translates the phrase that hovers in the atmosphere accessible to any, but, only a passing fog until someone eats the fog and transforms it into something sustaining. Food for the writer. Food for one reader. At this point, on this morning just before noon on this winter Saturday this writer has slowed to medium. Slowed the thinking or formation of floating knowledge long enough to consider eating it slowly, writing it medium, practicing the art of rubbing mana'o lana against the cave walls of my imagination.

I can feel the possibility of a mythic tale (I might grow it in some other place ... ), but, something grabs my fingers for a moment and I write ...

This is a different sort of winter. The fifth one for me, my man, my cat. We have come to know the woods, the trees, the creatures of the night, the winged ones who come and teach me how to speak their language. CAW. CAW. Gallump. As more and more trees are felled to make way for human occupation, they, the Ravens come to us more frequently. They track us. They follow the old turquoise Dodge truck, and swoop above the forest green Subaru. They watch us wherever we go, and talk to me when I climb from the driver's seat. I don't make up what they are saying to me. I imitate their language as best I can. I give me a C+ for mimicry. Sometimes a B+. They seem to like that I engage. We are outdoors so often. Few among the humans stay out side the roofed places. Raven come to know us. Are they losing tree top roosts with every tree fall? More than likely, given the pace at which the trees fall, not from wind but from saws, is not slow to medium.

This is a different sort of winter. The medicine stories begun two winters previous have rooted me sufficiently and I weather the new vulnerabilities triggered by the illness with the name MCS. I have no new story finished this winter. But. A space where the stories can be heated up and served to the real community where we live fuels me as I move slow to medium, or, in other cases I am slowed to medium because I forget that my natural pace at sixty-seven is a different sort of pace. It is a different sort of winter. Pausing to consider an ending the myth and the application of floating knowledge drums slowly in me. How many winters it has taken for me to recognize that I love the splits in the road, the possible ways words and tales might make themselves told ... over time. Fed well and often my imagination will remember the words and meanings of my Ancestors, and make sense of them in a different way. A way that accounts for the dozens of journeys I have taken in and out of the portal from the valley of my girlhood. Once was not enough to say, "Out I go. The pot too tight for me." Oh not, but then I was a girl a maiden fresh and firm-of-breast seeking new land.

This is a different sort of winter when I view the journey that began when first I remembered the feel of the letter A, or felt the surface of lined newsprint against my palm, relishing my Big Chief red notebook from the shelf of the Rexall Drug Store in Aina Haina. I was eight or ten, an age many girls were being initiated into their kuleana. Did I, could I have known, those were my early winter initiations as writer? No. I did not. But from this vantage point, I can say to that little brownie with eyes that really need glasses for a brighter future, "There will be different sorts of winters in your future. Keep practicing, Titi. Keep that fire burning there is more to come. Promise me?" I am glad I have kept practicing, pacing for the long haul. Mythic and fiction or a stab at noticing how the weaving and the feeding of a story could ramble like this.

What sort of winter is it for you? I'd love to hear your version of pacing for the long haul.






 

Continue to do the practice ... Indigenous practices are those that endure over time: Manu Meyer in Aotearoa (New Zealand)

Mana Moana: Pasifika rising

e iho ana o luna
e pii ana o lalo
e hui ana na moku
e ku ana ka paia

that which is above will come down
that which is below will rise
the island nations will gather
and animate the world


Another related post that might interest you dear Readers is this story of my Kumu Aunty Betty Kawohiokalani Jenkins. The post originally entitled "Ke ala a ke ku'uku'u: "path of the spider" speaks of how spiders spin their webs; how knowledge has passed to me ... the practices of Makua o'o.

Aloha

 Aloha is the intelligence with which we meet life.

Olana A‘i, Kumu Hula

"I love that[referring to Kumu Olana A'i's quote]. And so I'm here today to discuss the alternative ways of knowing. Because I no longer say "Hawaiian ways of knowing" anymore. Because people just relegate that to the margins. "Ways of knowing," as if it's a quaint, anthropologic way of describing something outside of us.
No, it's "epistemology." This is the philosophy of knowledge. This is the belief of knowledge, production and exchange. What is important about knowledge.
So the truth of knowledge is very profound. And it starts with our sensual development. Where did you grow up? How did you grow up?...
You know, when people believe that literacy is the highest form of intellect, I beg to differ, beg to differ. You know. Poor thing, you cannot read. Yeah, in a modernity sense, you've got to read. But don't tell me I'm stupid if I no can read.

Understand your own shackling of colonialism, that would put literacy as the highest form of intellect, and not aloha..." Manu Meyer

I woke this morning with the feeling of ha'aha'a humility. It was not so much that I thought it as much as I felt it. It's 23 degrees outside and though our vardo is cozy and toasty warm with heat, the Quonset Hut, where I am now, is just barely warm. So I am layered up from toe to throat. Discomfort will do that, bring me to humility, knowing that shelter keeps me safe enough when Nature turns on the taps -- freezing, firing, blowing, rising the waters. In addition to the effects of winter something else serves up the value, the feeling of ha'aha'a for me. Back on the islands I hear the voices of my family in Waimanalo talk about the strengthening bonds of aloha. Time and situations are bringing generations together in everyday ways: a ride to the North Shore to share time, catch the surf, read a book; hanging out for Thanksgiving sitting and laying around on the floor after eating; asking for and getting a massage a'e style (treading with the feet); playing ukulele.

Far from the place where those things are happening my heart longs to be there too. The cold amplifies the longing. I put more clothes on. In my dreams Pluto transits my Capricorn Moon and bits of rubble I can pretend aren't there in the light of day come in no logical progress; that is the nature of Moon Tattoos. The cold, the longing, the humility of experiencing life over time is a practice of meeting life. Manu Meyer reminds me that distance challenges me to remember my core values and sort through the 'colonial' beliefs that linger, hide and tempt me to be blind or deaf to Aloha all around and inside.

Just before we settled into sleep last night Pete put down the novel he's reading Havana Bay a spy, investigator story set at the turn of the century (1999) in Cuba. Cuba. A very large island nation. Out of favor with the US. Independent in a very different way today when its people and its economy no longer traded with the US. The novel and the details of everyday experiences I hear Pete describe while he reads the espionage brings up conversation about Cuban wooden box drums -- Pete built two for drummer friend who traveled to Cuba in late 1990. We talk also about the size of Cuba confused by the use of the metric system as I am, we're not sure whether the island nation is 1,000 miles long. Cuba is 42,426 sq miles (109,884 km²). I recall the videos I've watched about Cuba's reclamation period "the special period" post embargo. 

"We live in a vanilla society," Pete said just before he turned the lamp off. I was between wake and sleep, and grunted. But knew what we was saying. He added, "Well, you of all people know that!" It's true. I miss the other flavors. The discomforts we experience living from vardo for two are more than most experience in the Pacific Northwest. But we all take for granted the grandness of our normal conditions. 

I need to express some of these things whether clear or meaningful to others, who can tell. What is important is for me to know that at the core of being human loving and caring for one another and for critters like the wandering cat who would love to be inside is part of everything. Carry my stick, wrap up when cold, massage the message with fingers or feet and feel the love.

What is myth(ic)?

"These are mythic times...The challenge is to not see [the] trilogy of body, mind and spirit/ manaoio, manaolana, and aloha as a linear sequence, rather as an event
happening simultaneously and holographically"

-Manulani Aluli Meyer

A myth is a guide; it tells us what we must do to live more intensely. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our lives it will remain as incomprehensible as a board game which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play
-Karen Anderson

 "Myth in Hawaiian is defined as  "Mo'olelo ... story, tale, tradition, legend, journal record, article succession"
-Hawaiian Dictionary, Pukui and Ebert

 "As our storytellers continue to draw upon past knowledge, including looking to the animal world and to tribal storytellers for guidance, we grow in strength. We reshape our ancestors' stories for our children, so that these tales will, like our people, our spirits, endure."
- Carolyn Dunn

The water of Kane -- wai -- wealth and precious of all resources falls thick and abundant. The rain fills our rain barrel, and at the sink the last of our water bottles is filled with drinking water filtered and ready for a new day. I sit to write this morning, as Hina moves into the phases of thanksgiving. Tonight will be Kane Moon. One of the two nights especially important to give thanks to the gods, our guardians our 'aumakua  who give us life.

Hahai no ka ua i ka ulula'au
Rains always follow the forest.
The rains are attracted to forest trees
Knowing this, Hawaiians hewed only the trees that were needed
-'Olelo No'eau Hawaiian Proverbs

Can you smell rain coming? Link here for some beautiful photos and description of The Smell of Rain 

I'm preparing and gathering content for the workshop "These are Mythic Times" that starts in two weeks. Several different sources contribute to the process of this myth makers workshop and as teacher and epidemiologist Manu Meyer has suggested in the quote that opens this post, it does me well to see the process holographically.  Holographic is a fancy word for what Hawaiians would say is kaona ... "hidden meaning in Hawaiian poetry; concealed reference; hidden meaning." The process and the method for teaching this workshop start with appreciating the means of myth. To my way of thinking, myth is a recipe whose time has never gone out of fashion but might have become a recipe that has been taken for idle and impractical delusion. "Fairy tales" implying flights of fancy with no place in the real world. In all enduring cultures across time the proverbs, poetry, stories teach us through images and words that layer meanings so a child can understand and be given hope; and later a teen can see her heroic nature through a morphing pubescent hall of mirrors; later, a striving adult reads the same story and seeing the mirror cracked or a faceless woman seeking something 'else'; and even later still when time has worn lines in mango fresh flesh still the heart of a child feels the joy in breasts that sag like yesterday's water ballons.

The stories that began with The Safety Pin Cafe and continue now with The Joy Weed Journal are a holographic journey of people, culture and opportunities. These characters were born from my imagination but are I believe, a collective mirror and at the same time a familiar place where other stories -- your stories -- can grow or morph or become personally mythic.

• For one month, the pages of an internet "cafe and cottage" will open to you taste and see myth in the making. 
• We will read and eat the story and fill our bowls with those things of value to you; things you crave and things you know have sustained you over time. 
• You will come and recognize your Guardians your 'aumakua; naming them will give you what is best for you now.
• The myth and the private journal writings of The Joy Weed Journal will engage you in thinking, seeing, and rigorously exploring how a Border Witch -- one who criss-crosses cultures, ages, and places can be a real and approachable companion in your mythic life.
• Above all the process and the activity of myth-making is a verb that leads to respecting yourself.

Here's a class act that is timeless to me. A bit choppy video but the message comes right on through, "Respect Yourself" by the Staples Singers, 1972

THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

The Workshop "These are mythic times" starts Monday, April 22, 2013
Cost: $45
Interested? email me at mokihanacalizarATgmailDOTcom for details or to pay with a personal check.

CLICK HERE to buy using PayPal, at The Hedge Shop ... my newly opened on-line store.

Thank you so much, hope to see you in the workshop!
Mokihana

More Manu, Manapua Man, Mana for a New Moon, March 11, 2013

The powerful and watery energy of all those heavenly bodies in the sign of Pisces has really tripped up my earthy mountain goat genes (I have plenty of Capricorn). Trying, trying, trying too hard to climb mountains and hammer out goals with all that water is at best difficult, at worst, deadly. Satori posted a wonderful horoscope for today's New Moon in Pisces, with these two lines a life jacket for a struggling goat. Read the whole post ... go here.

"...The more you’re able to fog out the extraneous worries and concerns the more you’re able to channel the bliss. It is there to experience..."

For awhile now, I've been tapping into the channel of real depth and assurance that Manulani Aluli Meyer offers. This fifth daughter of the Aluli Meyer family makes room for me to re-translate and make sense of life. I post links and videos of Manu's lifework-- her kuleana--. She's unafraid, and fully awake to the depth of her responsibility and this inspires me to keep balancing my load like the Manapua Man. It's a New Moon and a moon on which to set new intentions for the coming Malama (month). I keep my astrologers' advice in hand:

1. Elsa P. in her latest newsletter reminds me, "If you are worried about the Saturn in Scorpio transit, here is a list of 8 common mistakes you should avoid. [the list is edited ... link here  go to the sidebar and  subscribe to her newsletters and get the scoop from her first-hand]

7. Stubborn refusal to acknowledge core transformation is necessary

 8. Thinking #7 should be easy or painless"

2. Satori's advice for a good region to plant new seed this New Moon is, "Midday the Moon conjuncts the Sun, the new moon. This is a great time for goal setting and emotional intention. In Pisces, this tends to work best if you tap into compassion and connectedness..."

And last, another scoop of Manu Mana. This is a quote from a keynote address entitled, " Our Collective Remembering: Five (K)new Ideas for World Transformation delivered in 2009.

" Here is the whole focus of this welcoming talk for your conference.  It is our thinking that changes everything, but it is our actions where they are expressed.  Why not see the holographic idea and be inspired to think through your own quality of consciousness – and then to respond appropriately?  Why not see our connection through difference?  It is the Hawaiian understanding found in auamo kuleana: collective production through individual excellence.  Why again do we not actively deconstruct our hidden assumptions of society that holds us hostage to uniformity, money and shallow forms of relating?

 Read the summary of Manulani Alulli Meyer's keynote address here.


My intention for the New Moon made this morning is to made use of the life I have as Makua O'o and re-translate the definition. Re-define Makua O'o for modernity as Meyer's would say, taking it deeper and spreading it for these mythic times in which we live. I've started to conceive a new workshop called "These Mythic Times" ... coming in April to celebrate Earth Day, 2013. Interested? Stay tuned for more information.

Diving into Epistemology ... more mana'o from Manu Meyer

I'm diving here. I need this now more than ever.

These are mythic times ...

I am spending time writing here where I make connection with my roots and am inspired by Manu Meyer.

See you there. Mokihana