It is impossible to travel as ‘Iokepa and I do – from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, from Washington State to Washington, D.C. – and not notice the differences. I am not speaking about mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, prairies, and deserts. It’s the human differences – the face of a place. I’m speaking of the angles and planes of the human face – and I am speaking of the human temperament of a place. They aredifferent. We are at this moment among the cool, reserved New England faces. They are lovely and angular and they are comforting to me.
For the past two weeks I’ve been blaming the heat. And yes, it’s been a record-setting 100 degrees in inner-city Baltimore, with an unconscionable level of humidity. But yesterday I realized, that is not it – not my problem at all. Allow me to explain. My oldest brother is a professional man. He was the apple of my father’s eye. My next brother, the self-proclaimed “middle child,” tried harder. He took over the family business and cared for our aging father every day of his life.
Exactly two years before the Camry met its fate, we crossed the width of the continent in that black Toyota with the gold wheels in four weeks. On that particular crossing: we had dinner with a saintly, eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest in Portland, Oregon; we had high tea with a Japanese Buddhist. We stayed in the home of the eldest of eight siblings in a Mormon family that traces its roots to the earliest church founders. In Missouri, we broke bread and bared souls with a Unity minister – a woman whose heart is as open as the roads we traversed across Nebraska.
At the end of almost every Return Voyage gathering in these past years, well-intentioned folks have asked ‘Iokepa: “What can I do to help?”
He answers: “When you hear that things are changing on the Hawaiian Islands – and you will – I ask that you offer a prayer for the Hawaiian people.”
This is the story of trust, faith, and the powerful support that accrues when we agree to use our unique gifts, our best natures, and take the path ofgreatest good--to fulfill our life's purpose. Every one of us has one. Our task, really, is to find it--and then, fearlessly, to live it. For thirteen years now, 'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has actively reclaimed his aboriginal Hawaiian history, language and culture. He has (at his ancestors' insistence) carried not a scrap of paper that might confuse his native identity with an American one. That has meant, of course, he carries no American driver's license, uses no social security number.
For every memorable year of my adult lifetime, I have had just one recurring and terrifying nightmare. In that dream, I am running for my life from a rapidly approaching, formidable wall of water that I cannot outrun. I am absolutely certain that it will overtake me. Ironically, for every memorable year of my adult lifetime, in all of my many domestic and foreign homes, I have never lived anywhere near that possibility. I never once lived on the edge of an ocean – until I met ‘Iokepa, and moved my life to these Hawaiian Islands.
The very first American Court House erected on the Island of Kaua’i was built in 1837, with complete awareness and intention on the top of the bulldozed ruins of what was the oldest heiau on this Island.
Heiau were (and those that remain are) sacred stone enclosures for Native Hawaiian ritual and spiritual practice, prayer and ceremony. Every heiau was built in alignment with the planets and the stars – with an ancient people’s sophisticated awareness of the night sky. Each heiau sat within full view of the ocean horizon.
It’s Thanksgiving Day; ‘Iokepa is threatened with jail. The challenge of Return Voyage, always and only moved by ancestral guidance, intensifies. In the long, deep, ubiquitous story of freedom denied, of national identity obliterated, of oppression institutionalized – there have been wars waged, anger and violence righteously uncorked against oppressors.
This is the insistent (seldom kindly spoken) challenge that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Īmaikalani hears whenever he dares to speak of the future of the Native Hawaiian people – or of their nation. The implied conclusion is: these people would not know what to do with their sovereignty. The implied assertion: deny them that choice. ‘Iokepa answers the question in a larger way.
We live in a noisy world. We have coming at us in any given moment: telephones that no longer sit quietly next to our bed or on our office desks (they now follow our every step into movie theaters, churches, and romantic dinners with our lover); mail that no longer comes once a day on the eagerly awaited footsteps of our postman (now it beeps its electronic announcement night, day, and every moment between); news that no longer slaps at our doorstep at dawn or arrives from Walter Cronkite’s lips at dusk (it comes at us 24/7 from so many contrary and irritating voices that it’s hard to know whom to trust).
I've been a writer my entire life, a professional writer since I left college at twenty-two, and an author since I was forty. In that time, I have naturally watched my writing evolve: from eighteen years of salaried newspaper and magazine journalism to the less financially predictable, but ultimately more emotionally satisfying occupation of writing books. Sometimes those books have been well-published, turned into feature films, sold around the globe in translation; sometimes not. Writing for myself on occasion meant writing only for myself. But that was the nature of the beast.
We’d been invited to a Friday evening Shabbat dinner at the home of a Portland Jewish family. It had all the trappings of the ritually kosher home I grew up in. We lit the candles and said the familiar, traditional Sabbath blessings in Hebrew. Our host, an accomplished professional woman and the mother of three, held her hands over the heads of her teenage sons and prayed that they would grow to be men in the likeness of their forefathers: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
‘Iokepa and I return to our Islands. But before we step off the airplane, we take ourselves to task. We remind ourselves that ends never justify means, and that our only hope of influence is by living example – our observable behavior. For many months and even more car miles, we drove the American continental freeways. But we spoke out, always, on behalf of this place and these people.
‘Iokepa and I read a New York Times editorial page column, and sucked in our collective breath. We were aghast that the editorial writer could have so completely missed the mark. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood, the Times writer began: “The 50th state turns 50 on Friday, and the strange thing is how wildly and jubilantly the islands aren’t celebrating.” The writer explained the lack of celebration: “The reasons are sad but obvious… Tourism is in the tank.”
When 'Iokepa and I completed our ten year preparation--what the Grandmothers called, our grooming, what I call our immersion into the authentic, aboriginal Hawaiian culture - That language, history, and the reality of experience of 'Iokepa's brethren - we were asked to take what we had learned on those tropical beaches to the people of the world, and to begin in the continental United States. That was two years ago. We landed in Seattle; our next stop was Portland. Portland was also the city where I had, for some years, reared two teenage sons, written professionally, and taught writing workshops.
Our dear friends, Diane and Bill, were married thirty-some years ago by a Presbyterian minister in Indianapolis. It was in all ways a family-sanctioned, conventional, and presumably very lovely wedding. Over these many years the couple's spiritual practices unavoidably evolved. From a stalwart adherent of the traditional Episcopal church in Virginia, Diane studied, searched, and found her way to ordination as a Universal Worship minister herself.
I live in a place that is rich in tropical flora, volcanic mountains, lavish waterfalls, and beaches. It sits--this most isolated archipelago on the planet--in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Paradoxically, I live also, ina place where the detritus of the continental United States floats to shore--literally and figuratively. Our beaches are strewn with the enormous, floating timber cut from the old-growth forests of the American Northwest. Our campgrounds are brimming with the continent's social misfits: Castoffs from several states' welfare systems--after the obligation to serve them has expired.
There is an other Islandreality than the one that 'Iokepa lives to speak. Anyone who has sat in a Return Voyage gathering, or has casually perused this website, or has shared a conversation with 'Iokepa over the past years, knows this: He cherishes the authentic wisdom within his kanaka maoli culture. He lives to convey that aboriginal wisdom to the world--and to awaken all peoples to the strength and possibilities within their own indigenous cultures.
‘Iokepa and I lived on Hawaiian public beaches for years. We slept on the reclining seats of a seriously aging 1991 Camry when there wasn’t gas enough to get us to the tent. Picnic tables were our dining room furniture; outside showers were our bathtubs; filthy public toilets were our dressing rooms and more.
'Iokepa Hanalei 'Imaikalani has often instructed me. "European and American sugar cane barons laid claim, almost two hundred years ago now, to the land that my people stewarded for thirteen thousand years. They claimed ownership of a land that, we knew, only the Creator could own.
