Timing, deliver and values: Kakaako, kanikapili, pineapple and plantation

"... Tell the truth simply. But don’t go out of your way to explain all the details. Being true to yourself, being authentic as opposed to purely selfish, means improving your actions by bringing your plans into alignment with your values...Take the high road, but have more than one road on tap. Remember, you don’t owe anyone an interaction. Do it on your own terms in your own time. Choose the timing for yourself. You can deliver what is needed if you do it the way that works for you and your values." - Weekly Forecast, Satori

 I've been away (from Hawaii) for so long the memories I have of places of my kid times will be forgotten if we don't pa'a (stick them) down, roll them into mele or entangle them in the technology of today. Like braids or the ku'i of lei bits of memories string together and when I find them? The present is as sweet, or sweeter than it was when first I lived them.

Trimmers in the Cannery "Getty Images"

My first job, still in high school, was in the line at the Del Monte Pineapple Cannery on Iwilei Road in the Kakaako District on the island of O'ahu. I was a trimmer. My best friend was a canner. I trimmed the imperfections from the pineapples that moved quickly on a conveyor belt. We used a wicked knife with a prong on the opposite end of the blade that squeezed when you turned your wrist, flipped it, pinching hole of blemishes and 'eyes' left by the machinery. My friend scooped up small stacks of cut fruit to fit into cans. Without much effort I can smell steaming pineapple; and don't have much appetite for the fruit today.

The musical video above include Hawaiian musicians who are a few years younger than I. Their connection and consistency as Island people, born raised and still present blows through me. The sense of their values are strong. I feel the mana'o of their art, and their kuleana (responsibility) seems just right.

The sunshine and breeze here. The reality of rabbits and a tiny home on wheels could not be more different. But. I wonder what Robert (Cazimero), Jerry (Santos) and Kumu Hina do when they are not making music in the public? And would they need an explanation, or want one, if the kanikapila (the music making) was happening on the campground? Silly wondering really. How would the two realities ever cross.

I listened to the banter Jerry Santos layered into the prologue of his set with Robert Cazimero. He spoke of the importance of the gatherings like the one in Kakaako. Telling of times past in that same place. It can happen this timeless characteristic. In music, in art. In hula. In story.

When those men, Jerry Santos and Robert Cazimero were young men going to school, it was that same high school my best friend and I attended as well. Unknown to one another, our lives would unfurl as they have and the pineapple memory that turns me off, has a tendril that makes room for me to long for those times anyway.

Hawaii has a complex and entangled history that includes the plantation in almost any of us born in the islands. My Daddy was a boy raised in Waimanalo and Kaneohe during the plantation days. His stories of being a kalohe (rascal) kid taking the ono roast pork off the graves at Chinese New Year, or lifting watermelon and riding down the sloughs that irrigated the fields. These memories are blurry now, but they connect me with my father's life after his father died. Manuela Boy ... a wandering child. A beach boy. He would bump into a city girl, a Hawaiian-Chinese wahine who should have been married to a nice haole boy. But fate had a delivery system different than that.

I had reasons to wander from my birth islands, there were views of life to be experienced, and my son would be born because I wandered. He is there, where I was born, and I am where he was born. Crossing realities.

Earlier today two boxes and a post office box filled with mail was delivered to our campground home grounds. We are being served by a the keiki, the young people, who are able-bodied, compassionate and intelligent. A clearly communicated list of foods and basic necessities lists what Pete and I need for a week. This consequence of the Virus 2020 has created an unexpected delivery system: we spend less than half of what we did when we shopped for ourselves, and a young person practices values that will serve him over time.

Our values are in flux. With less control on actually choosing what we want or need, the responsibility is shared; we have to trust more. There's a gap that opens. We can't always see what happens when that happens. Someone else, the young shopper, makes a decision and acts. He delivers what we asked for but. But, we do not control each moment of the process.

The flow. In or out. A long long time ago I was a girl trimming fruit of imperfections before the fruit was canned and sold to some shopper near or far. Tonight I write a story that weaves in and through a place I would barely remember if I saw it.

In spite of great distance and pandemic virus, the strength of Nature's predisposition to thrive is unstoppable. It is arrogant to believe human ways are the only way. Elemental forces and the power of the 'unseen', or unnoticed; the fungus and the mushrooms that make up dirt and a forest floor. They are involved in a delivery system and comfort with long, long, long time that puts human enterprise and scale to shame, or in its place.

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?" - The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Howenhaupt Tsing

 Life is an incredible story. What evidence do you have to say, 'Ya'?


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