Looking, seeing; Listening, hearing; Loving, loving

 

I was up and onto the trails that surround Camp Bamboo the other morning, the sounds of birds calling the sun or the sun calling on them the cool beginning of a new day just the refreshment I needed.

I love these people! I love this land!

 Across the way and over the ocean my people took themselves onto the trail that crosses the sides of the Ko'olau Range on O'ahu. Looking with them I see my mo'opuna in the arms of his parent. I look through his eyes. I look through their eyes.

"Back in the kitchen, the woman was hungry for food. She would need to cook it and that was good, she loved to cook. Thick stalks of leeks would be a nice start. How lucky she felt to be living in a community that grew beautiful food. The roaming life she lived made growing her own food tricky. Growing connections with others who did grow food was as valuable a talent and thank the goddesses she managed that." - a story telling itself along side

Our bellies filled with a pan of leek and sausage breakfast with carrots, left-over broccoli and potatoes the rest of the day fills as the sun lights up my face through the window in the vardo's door. Sliding between the language that describes the 'real' life we live and the one where "I" becomes "the woman" a slight but important other voice makes words a medicine of the experiences.

While I write my new electric tea kettle works too. The sweet, short and stout ceramic pot is painted with Victorian roses, a pale pinkish-salmon petaled rose. I bought it because of the roses and then because it would be handy to have hot water in small amounts, quickly. Quickly is something that doesn't happen much in this lifestyle. Most chores are a many-stepped routine. 

" Once I was so small I could barely see over the top of the back seat of the black Cadillac my father bought with his Indian oil money. He polished and tuned his car daily. I wanted to see everything.

This was around the time I acquired language, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. It changed even the way I looked at the sun." - This is how Joy Harjo, the United States' poet laureate, muscian, writer, poet and woman of the Muscove/Creek Nation begins her memoir Crazy Brave.

A tower of books climbs from the tile floor to the table beside the futon. Thanks in great part to the generosity of the editor, writer, artist and blogger Terri Windling who shares hours of research and her years as an editor and mentor to new and established writers on her blog Myth & Moor, I learn about books and writers I would otherwise not know. My stack of books often come from Windling's reviews and recommendations. 

I listen for the language of other writers, and when I read language that touches the heart-break or kindles the splinters igniting fear into action? I feel the heat of being loved enough to be moved. I feel loving.

Art needs to be seen, heard and loved.

While out on the trail the sun, ka la, was just rising above the tree line. From the pocket of a door in our kitchen I could see him and chanted him into the sky. Believing as I remember he, the sun, is counting on me to beam that spark of sun within me, out to that burning oh-so-brilliant star who fiils my heart. Back in the forest ka la was yet to shine. I stopped under the arms of the Tall Ones waited, and called to him again.

 Joy Harjo Southwest Roots Shelter in Place Sessions, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2020. My favorite piece of the session "Rabbit Invents the Saxophone" is the final number. 

While Pete spent part of the afternoon playing in the mud at our soon-to-be-place, I listened to Joy Harjo tell her tales and play her sax. The session was funky and surprising. I looked for the young girl, young woman, beaten girl, young mother who filled pages in the memoir. I found the many places she was on her way to being crazy brave. 

Harjo continued to pull on my heart in Crazy Brave, "Like my father, I was not fully pressed into the place and time into which I was born. I remember my spirit rising up to follow a path of moonlight, looking over my shoulder to see my pajama-clad body in my crib, and, as I grew older, in my army cot. Even before birth, as my spirit prepared to enter my developing body, it wandered great distances from my mother and father... When I started Indian school in Santa Fe in 1967, I was fresh from escaping the emotional winter of my childhood. I had been set free...We were all "skins" traveling together in an age of metamorphosis, facing the same traumas from colonization and dehumanization. We were direct evidence of the struggle of our ancestors." 

Sometimes it is helpful to make spaces for the many versions of our self to have a story to tell. 

Sometimes the story wanders far and up, or down, and away from the story that began when the sack filled with our personal oceans flowed. My first breath held, unsure. My lungs not quite ready to inhale where my remnant gills had been so facile.

Sometimes the language of another rubs my fixity and a puka is made for breathing another way, another time, another story. 

Sometimes that story and mine mingle and are lost together for a time.- another part of the story entwining alongside.

And lastly, my friend Maile, in Paris, sent me a love message "From Pele" she said. A picture worth a million words, an eon of story.

The flow of the lake around a small island, south of the inlet zone, formed a heart-shaped outline in the western portion of the lava lake in Halema‘uma‘u at Kīlauea Volcano's summit. USGS photo by M. Patrick. Kilauea Eruption Update for Saturday, February 14, 2021