The Spirit of Aloha 🌴🌞
I’m writing to you from Kauai, “The Garden Isle” of the Hawaiian Islands.
I’m blessed to be able to spend over a month here, and this will be the last trip in what has been an unprecedented year of travel for me (some of it personal, some work-related).
To land in a place of such beauty and bounty is a welcome gift. It’s sweet to experience the feelings of summer at the end of October, while, at home, the trees have lost their leaves, surrendered to wind and rain, the air is chill, and the skies darken early.
I’ve traveled to Kauai many times, mostly to visit my great aunt, who chose to retire here, and lately because she asked me to be her personal representative after she died, and so there’s a quality of “home” I can lean into thanks to good local friends and the gentleness and abundance of the land and sea.
Yet I am far from home, and I feel it. I’m in the home of my late aunt—her presence is everywhere—yet it’s my job to dismantle it so its energies can transform into other energies. I'm tending to practicalities like packing, painting, and accounting, and I’m working too, teaching, editing, and coaching. In a couple of weeks, I'll be teaching a class and offering consults at the Kauai Writers Conference, an opportunity I've been looking forward to for months. So this time in Hawaii is meaningful on many levels, and I'm allowing myself to settle into the aloha spirit.
Did you know there’s a law on the books here called the Aloha Spirit Law? Statute §5-7.5) reads like this:
“‘Aloha Spirit’ refers to the coordination of the mind and heart within each person. It brings each person to the self. Each person must think and emote good feelings to others. In the contemplation and presence of the life force, "Aloha", the following unuhi laula loa may be used:
"Akahai", meaning kindness to be expressed with tenderness;
"Lokahi", meaning unity, to be expressed with harmony;
"Oluolu", meaning agreeable, to be expressed with pleasantness;
"Haahaa", meaning humility, to be expressed with modesty;
"Ahonui", meaning patience, to be expressed with perseverance.”
Tender kindness, harmonious unity, agreeable pleasantness, modest humility, persevering patience… Words to live and write by, don’t you think?
The law goes on to say:
“These are traits of character that express the charm, warmth and sincerity of Hawaii's people. It was the working philosophy of native Hawaiians and was presented as a gift to the people of Hawaii. "Aloha" is more than a word of greeting or farewell or a salutation. "Aloha" means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return. "Aloha" is the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence. "Aloha" means to hear what is not said, to see what cannot be seen and to know the unknowable.”
As I soak up the gifts of aloha—and share them too—I'm letting myself feel at home here for awhile. I listen for what’s not said, try to soften my gaze to see what can’t be seen, and allow the unknowable to have place, if not a name, in my heart.
“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and walking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear, I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can fell the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
~ Mark Twain ~(From: Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands: Hawaii in the 1860s)