Jade's Gong Bath

This past Friday, the day after the fall equinox, I went to a Gong Bath.  What you ask is a gong bath?  The advertising flyer invited the public to “Come bliss out to gentle Kundalini yoga, with transformative meditations, a symphony of gong, singing bowls, didgeridoo and tuning forks”.  It was titled “The Mothership, An Epic Equinox Offering a Magical Journey into the Primordial Sound Current.”

Currently, I am in the throes of grieving for my mother and finding each day a challenge. I practice daily yoga but this type of class was beyond the realm of my comfort zone.   As I read the flier I formed a mental picture of how it would be and thought, YES,  this might help me to temporarily move beyond the physical world and without the aid of drugs and alcohol.  I hoped it could release some of my pain and that after I’d feel less of the heaviness that was now ever-present and feel more at peace with her passing. 

I invited a friend because I didn’t feel brave enough to attend something like this for the first time on my own.  We arrived early to suss out the crowd and find spaces.  Some of the attendees wore yoga clothing but the majority of the crowd wore loose, bohemian drawstring pants, sarongs with blouses and caftans.   Already I felt I had entered another world. The fragrance of sandalwood and patchouli were in the air.  One couple arrived with yoga mats and a large blanket for two and then set up in a corner as if camping.  When I saw them and the beatific smiles on their faces, I knew we were about to experience something special and also that they must be regulars.

Our leader, Jade Rajbir Kaur, was dressed in white with a “tree of life” emblazoned t-shirt. She wore a head wrap that made her look regal.  The musicians, also in white, sat on either side of her on the stage looking ethereal and pure, completing the tableau.   The lighting was low and the stage was rimmed with white rope lights. Fittingly, it was dusk and the effect was perfect- otherworldly.  

The event began-it seemed more “event” than yoga class, with kundalini breathing exercises while seated with our legs crossed in front of us.  We progressed repeating Sanskrit blessings and did visualization exercises to welcome the fall and attract happiness and positivity to our lives.  We connected as a group by chanting and singing in rounds and it brought the experience to another level.

For the next section we were invited to relax and listen, laying on our mats, ironically in corpse pose (shavasana).  I took in all of the sounds and vibrations of the back-round music and instruments, trying to feel peace and visualizing the happy spirit of my mother hopefully hovering somewhere nearby.

Yes, I did bliss out a bit and felt a release while doing the chanting, but I also found myself wishing for additional yoga asanas and less time in shavasana.  But that’s just me.  I’m not evolved enough yet to keep my mind free of thoughts for long and need the physical poses with which to focus upon.

I will challenge myself go to more events like this and I hope Jade will continue to inspire and enliven Puna with her presence.  You can find Jade Rajbir Kaur's future events listed on her website 

The Radiant Lotus 

Namaste

Lau Lau

Our visionist leader Smiley Burrows

Today I joined the Green Lake Gardening crew in harvesting taro and making laulau.   Laulau (literally means leaf leaf in Hawaiian) is meat or fish and sometimes with hunks of sweet potato wrapped in taro leaves and baked in an umu.  I learned that umu is the Hawaiian method of cooking above ground using heated lava rocks and banana and ti leaves for steaming as opposed to the below ground imu that is used for cooking kalua pig at a luau.

This small group of Kapoho neighbors have been meeting regularly since November, when they planted their “lava flow” garden (see my earlier posts for details about the lava flow).  

Prepping taro leaves

This community garden is a step towards Kapoho’s sustainability in preparing for a future crisis in which we might become cut off from mainland or even inter-island food sources.   This  group has become a small community within the larger community of Kapoho.  I’ve known most of these people for years by acquaintance, walking their dogs or riding by my house on bikes, but after spending just a few hours bound together by a common goal, I felt a deeper connection to them and also euphoric.

The Green Lake and Green Mountain property is heaven on earth beautiful and Smiley’s husband Gerald gave us a gift by sharing his culture.  As I harvested taro leaves I was thinking of the stuffed cabbage I make from a recipe passed down to my mother by my Hungarian grandmother.   How cool it was to harvest the leaves we would be “stuffing” and cooking the little lau lau in an oven made of rocks and sticks also from the property.  Smiley, who has embraced the Hawaiian culture of her husband, had only made lau lau in this matter once herself and by repeating the process, can now pass the recipe and the process down to her children when they’re ready.

Mahalo Gerald and Smiley for bringing so much to our community!

Ono!

The Pagoda Hotel

A few weeks ago we flew to Oahu for my daughter’s ankle surgery.  On the Big Island there is a shortage of medical specialists, so our insurance company flew us to Honolulu.  

We arrived at Honolulu International Airport in the early evening and took a taxi to the Pagoda Hotel which had been reserved and paid for by our insurance company.  Earlier in the week I had checked out the hotel’s website.  It looked like a boutique hotel comparable to the Ala Moana Hotel, where we’ve stayed a few times in the past, but with a definitely oriental motif and color scheme.  I also asked a few friends about the Pagoda.  Mostly they rolled their eyes knowing the type of hotels where we usually stay.  One even offered me the use of her Waikiki condo in case we couldn’t handle it at the Pagoda.

The hotel front and signage are retro, calling to mind Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  The lobby is smallish, unlike the expansive, impressive lobbies on the strip at Waikiki.  The furniture in both the lobby and rooms has nice style, is comfortable and has recently been updated but the bones of the hotel are shabby.  What sets the Pagoda hotel apart from your average 2-2.5 star hotel is the friendliness of the staff.  They really made us feel welcome.  When I spoke to the maid about a television problem, she directed us to another room on our floor, which when I peaked in, looked just like our room, but seemed to be an employee break room just like the one described in Paul Theroux’s “The Hotel Honolulu” that my husband ironically had given me to read on this trip.  At that point my daughter was laying in bed in a pain fog, having had her surgery earlier in the day.  Within 5 minutes the repairman, returned with me to our room and solved the problem, which was an issue with the remote batteries.  Because of the care we received from the staff, we began to feel at home in our room.  The shabbiness turned into coziness because we felt safe and cared for, which helped my daughter and I get through a really long day, which for her was the most painful of her young life.

The Hotel Honolulu is about a well known novelist with writer’s block, who arrives “to these mute islands humbled and broke again” to work as a manager of a 2 star hotel for his friend Buddy.  The hotel, as Theroux describes it, could be the Pagoda Hotel.   "We were the last small, old hotel in Honolulu.  The rooms were small, the elevator narrow, the lobby was tiny and the bar (the Momi's Paradise Lounge) was just a nook.”  I couldn’t find the bar at the Pagoda Hotel (even though there was a card in the room advertising it’s “happy hour” drinks).  I assume the bar they were speaking of was in the Floating Pagoda restaurant (which was not open at “happy hour” the days I was there) that is attached to the hotel.   The book is a series of vignettes about his staff, Buddy the hotel’s owner, his few friends outside of the hotel and his much younger Filipino wife and small daughter.   The hotel’s repeat visitors are also featured as main characters.  For me one of the best chapters is when the main character joins his staff in a game of Scrabble, thinking he will easily win because he thinks that as a intellectual and a writer he is so superior.  What he doesn't count on is that by their "local rules" all pidgin and Hawaiian slang words are legal.  He plays several games and finishes last or near last in every one.

On the last day after we checked out of our room, we spent 2 hours in the lobby waiting with our luggage.  We checked emails and surfed the internet to pass the time, but most entertaining was watching the hotel goings on and the interactions between the guests and the staff.  We created back stories for each group.  At one point we saw a uniformed security guard hurrying through the lobby following a male guest.   We noticed her uniform looked new and that the badge was ultra shiny.  Later we saw her speaking with what I took to be the hotel manager.  After some time I began reading the “Hotel Honolulu” again and realized we had ourselves “become” characters in the Hotel Pagoda.

By Jill Steele

In an Old Hawaiian Garden

This pic is on the cover one of my most beloved floral books.  It's an album of Hawaii's flowers called, "In an old Hawaiian Garden" with word pics by Don Blanding and floral pics by T.J. Mundorff.   Here is the first poem, which inspires me to get out into my own garden and also to share Hawaii's flowers with the world through my Hawaiian Flower business.

"There are no days throughout the year
 without some sort of flowers here
In sweet profusion, uncontrolled.
If all their many names were told
You'd weary of the endless list.
No color, tint or shape is missed
In Nature's wondrous gift to me.

I hope that I can make you see
This sun-lit, moon-witched, rainbow place
Of Beauty.  Just a little space
Quite filled with flowers, vines and trees.
Walled in with stone, the haunt of bees
And butterflies and lunar moths.
When you are passing will you pause.
Or--if you will--you will drop in and see
The garden that belongs to me.
By Don Blanding

Madame Pele 2

The lava is less than 500 feet from our beloved town of Pahoa.  The national media has descended to record this moment in history.  Our little village is now world famous. With each media outfit scrambling to get a great "scoop", there is a tendency towards sensationalizing an already exciting event.  The world is getting a different view than we who are closer to the source.  Friends and family have panicked after seeing closeups of burning, bubbling hot lava on national television, imagining lava rivers fast approaching our home, when in reality, the type of lava flow we are experiencing is a slow process.  Even though our home is 8 miles away from Pahoa, our lives will be affected profoundly when the lava crosses the highway.  We’re still not sure which of our 2 grocery stores will remain open or if we will be able to easily access any of these stores without taking lengthy detours.   The lava will be the dividing force.  New districts will be formed by Pele.  Some of my daughter’s friends are already transferring schools, moving in with friends and relatives in order to be closer to these schools. 

I’ve never been more in awe of nature than these last few months.  I’ve learned that even with careful preparation strategies, an act of nature cannot be prevented.  There is a man in Pahoa who has erected a barrier in the form of a berm of dirt to divert the lava.  We shall see in the next days and weeks what becomes as a result of that.  In doing so, he may have alienated his neighbors, who may be adversely affected as a direct result of the lava being diverted.

I’ve learned the true meaning of “go with the flow”.  We are trying to live up to this motto and not be frantic and stressed (like I have been on a few days very recently).  When people ask, “What are you going to do”,  I say “We’ll just have to wait and see”.  

 My daughter’s school, the Hawaii Academy of Arts and Sciences (HAAS) has been contingency planning for over a month.  The school is being divided into north and south campuses, the locations as yet undecided.  We’re hoping it will be smooth transition if and when it becomes necessary.   
A group of students, with two dedicated teacher advisors, have created a website and a Facebook page called Hope for HAAS. These kids, who have grown up using social media to communicate with each other, are now using it as a tool to shout out to the world about their school possibly being destroyed by lava.  The Facebook page, with 3,713 followers to date, has generated the recognition of media organizations all over the world. They have been interviewed on NBC's Hawaii News Now, CNN, have been written about in TIME Magazine and were interviewed on Radio Australia.  It has been very exciting to watch all of this evolve.  It has taken away some of the kids'  fear of the changes Pele may bring about for them personally, while empowering and strengthening their ties to their school. The Hope for HAAS group has shown the world and hopefully the Hawaii Department of Education, that public charter schools are worth funding. Currently charter schools are underfunded, receiving about half the amount per child enrolled compared with what public schools receive.    
The Hope for HAAS student group has made the best of a difficult situation, a valuable life lesson to learn at any age.  

by Jill Steele

*photos courtesy of USGS.gov and Hope for HAAS

Kapoho Community Sustainability Meeting

Yesterday we met to discuss the future of Kapoho as a community.  The meeting was positive and full of hope for a sustainable lower Puna.  

    Sustainability is one of those words that is used so much lately it is losing its power-until you think of what it really means.  Sustainability, as defined by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is “based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. Sustainability creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony, that permit fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations.  Sustainability is important to making sure that we have and will continue to have, the water, materials, and resources to protect human health and our environment.”  

     About 50 people attended the meeting, held at Green Lake and listened to Smiley Burrows, Margarita “Dayday” Hopkins and Graham Ellis speak encouragingly about what could be the future of Lower Puna.   

Green Lake, currently the home of the Friday Fruit Market will become much more to the residents of Kapoho and the surrounding area.  The USDA has approved the land for a commercial cow and dairy venture.  Burrows said, “We all have to think about what we do best and that is what we need to provide to the community. We’re really going to have to come together deeper than ever.”  She asked the audience to communicate their needs as far as food and vegetables because she wants the community to participate in the process. Establishing a food co-op was mentioned by residents to bring in items that cannot be produced in the area.  

Graham Ellis, a community development pioneer for over 30 years, is the chairman of Hawaii Sustainable Community Alliance as well as Hawaii's Volcano Circus and the founder of Bellyacres Eco-village.  He has been working with various groups along the red road trying to figure out solutions for the longterm.  “If we are going to get help from the government, we’re more likely to get it if we’re united, not as separate groups.”  He said that Kalani Retreat is opening a food store that will stock items as well as take co-op style orders for bulk items.

Margarita “Dayday” Hopkins, an employee of the County Department of Research and Development for  24 years,  spoke about the necessity to build a community in Kapoho to suit our needs.  She said, “ It is high time to start planning (before the lava flow crosses the highway).  You will be the ones to show the world what sustainability is.”  She advised the group to look at developing countries for examples of where to start.  

The next step for the Kapoho community will be to organize committees for various agricultural projects.  All of us who have been living in this remote part of Puna have had to travel long distances weekly just to feed ourselves and provide for our basic needs.  

This first meeting determined that we all have a willingness to stay in lower Puna. We have pledged to support each other and the new businesses that may grow as a result of Pele’s latest eruption, so that we can evolve as a sustainable community.

by Jill Steele

Madame Pele

Dark volcanic smoke plume from lava behind Pahoa town.

First a hurricane and now weeks later, we are preparing for a lava flow.
We live on the island of Hawaii, the only island with an active volcano.  We moved here 21 years ago.  Back then our good friend Peggy Forgues, the "turtle lady" of Kapoho would tell us stories of the 1960 eruption and lava flow which destroyed the village of Kapoho, but miraculously stopped short of destroying the lighthouse at Cape Kumukahi.  The stories seemed to us like folklore.  Surely there wouldn't be an eruption and flow that would disrupt our lives. We were young and optimistic.  We bought our home in Kapoho without looking back.  We have loved our lives here in rural Hawaii.  Quiet, perfect, peaceful days spent by the ocean with no need to get into the car.  Just nature.

    Now, just a short time after Hurricane Iselle and its aftermath, another potential devastation approaches.  We residents of the Puna district are waiting and watching the approaching lava.   It is almost always on our minds.   We are checking in with friends here and on the mainland and checking our Facebook pages for new posts from various lava preparedness group pages we have joined.  

        Breakouts have occurred along the leading edge of the flow.
photo by Bruce Omori

Puna has come together as a  real time and virtual community as never before.   There are so many details to consider (i.e. food,  alternate housing, schools, jobs,  transportation,  health care, electricity, gas, propane, phones and internet) and it feels good to have the support of these groups if only for the advice and sympathy we share.
There are weekly informational meetings held in the local high school cafeteria by government agencies.  Local politicians, such as Mayor Billy Kenoi and Pahoa Councilman, Greggor Ilagan are usually present to answer questions.  At one recent meeting Mr. Ilagan took the time to introduce me to someone that could help me with starting a food co-op in my community.   
    Announcements on the lava's progress are broadcasted daily by the Hawaii County Civil defense, 

Packed informational lava meeting at the Pahoa H.S. cafeteria.

who fly over the lava flow in helicopters.  When the lava crosses the highway, lower Puna will be isolated from Hilo, an island into itself.   The local government is scrambling to provide infrastructure  in the form of 2 one lane dirt roads to take the place of our mostly 2 lane paved highway that connects us to Hilo town.
We wake each morning wondering how far the lava will advance and what path it will take.  We are told that it is as wide as a football field.  
The lava is projected, as it looks now, to flow through our beloved town of Pahoa.  
      The town was originally built to support  the early industries of sugar cane (Olaa Sugar Company) and lumber (Pahoa Lumber Company).  In its current incarnation, Pahoa is the home of many interesting boutiques and some of the best restaurants on the entire island.  It has retained its character through the preservation of its original wooden boardwalk sidewalks.  
Tiffany Edwards Hunt, who's family owns Jeff Hunt Surfboards in Pahoa, and who is running for City Council in our upcoming election, posted on Facebook recently, asking residents to come out and support local merchants and celebrate our town, while it is still alive.
You can see this happening, even a few weeks later.  On a recent Tuesday night driving through Pahoa, the normally quiet town was bustling, with packed restaurants and cars parked up and down the street.  There was electricity in the air.  

Sunset view of lava plume from Pahoa skatepark.
photo by Smiley Burrows

       Two Pahoa schools  (the Montessori Country School and the Kamehameha Preschool) have already closed their doors and two more (Pahoa High School and HAAS) will follow when the lava gets closer and the air quality becomes dangerous.   The students of these sc hools will most likely be bused to Kea’au High School, traditionally a rival of Pahoa High School.  The much beloved Montessori School has closed after 31 years of service last month due to low enrollment. Many parents withdrew their children in anticipation of the lava crossing and blocking the highway.  Many of the children we know started their education at Montessori.  We've cheered the school each year at our local Pahoa Holiday Parades.  It is unthinkable that there might not be a parade this year.

      My daughter's school HAAS (Hawaii Academy of Arts and Sciences Public Charter School) is potentially in the lava's path, if the flow continues along the same direction.  The students have started a website, Hope For HAAS to raise funds to rebuild the campus if the school is destroyed. 

      As of now we "Punatics" have accepted that the lava may come and our lives may change. We are continually building up our stock of emergency groceries and other staples. We cannot really know what it will be like and what choices we will make but we can appreciate the "now" (which is what we who do yoga are always trying to achieve), enjoy our special town and the ease of our lives.