Ain’t No Rehearsal

Sitting on my lanai,
sipping a fresh espresso I made for myself,
watching a parasailer hoisting up over the ocean
into a milky blue morning sky.

This is my life.
I ain’t rehearsing no more.

Sweet Dreams, Baby

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Dream

In My Waking Dream I wrote: “And yet, at any point in my life before 2011, if you had said to me, you are going to be a writer, living in Hawai’i, next to the ocean, I would have been delighted but I would not have believed you.”

It was in 2011 that I arrived in Hawai’i from Wyoming, via Santa Cruz, with all my possessions whittled to fit in one duffel. The date was 1 June, 2011, and that night, my first night, I dreamed this.

I’m sailing down a road – it’s sort of like an autobahn – at great speed on what feels like (I don’t see it, I’m just sitting on it) a bicycle. I see a car approaching from the opposite direction, also at tremendous speed.

Something feels off to me and I don’t know what it is until I do. The car hurtling towards me, I realize, is on the wrong side of the road. It’s on my side.

Everything’s at missile speed, yet it is with a great sense of slowness (and quiet) that I understand it’s me; I’m the one who is on the wrong side, the left side. In my dream I’ve naturally reverted, without thinking, to my British driving side upbringing. That is the side I learned on.

So. It is I who should be on the other side of the road. But it’s too late now. Oh, it’s far too late.

There is a sense of an enormous flood of adrenaline, a tsunami of it, crash and wash through my entire body. It is pure and visceral and transparent and light. It is fear. It is fear so incredibly pure that it doesn’t even feel like fear. No fear I’ve ever known.

We approach collision. I swerve to one side, the driver in the car swerves to one side also, but alas it’s to the same side. We do this three more times, each time unerringly remaining on course for a major head-on smash. I remember my last thought before we do: ‘This is it. I’m dead.’

And then I am.

There is no pain. There is no fear. There is no thing.

After the impact, which I know happened yet didn’t feel, hear or experience, I soar, like ether. I feel my spirit, as if a wisp of smoke, drifting up and away and merging, disappearing into everything.

Each time I think of this dream, each time I remember it, I feel the same sensation of being clear, see-through, transparent, weightless, empty. Like I’ve died while I’m still living.

-1 JUNE, 2011

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My Waking Dream

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Dream

I am a writer
living in Hawai’i
next to the ocean.

When I was eleven, and first came to Hawai’i, I felt like I exhaled for the first time in my life. There was an intense feeling of relaxation and comfort, of belonging. Something felt right in my being, elementally, and I never forgot the feeling.

From that point on, my dream was to live in Hawai’i. It has never changed. It never wavered.

I don’t have a similar incident I can point to when I realized that I loved the ocean, loved it like I was in love with it, needing it close by. Always. My forever companion.

Much later – or maybe much earlier and I just wasn’t aware of it – I knew I was a writer. It is who I am. Fundamentally.

And yet, at any point in my life before 2011, if you had said to me, you are going to be a writer, living in Hawai’i, next to the ocean, I would have been delighted but I would not have believed you. Not really. Not deep down.

Most of us who have dreams are convinced, deep down where it matters most, that they won’t come true. Because they’re just that, dreams – pretty fantasies we use to escape our less desirable realities.

Yet, today:
I am a writer
living in Hawai’i
next to the ocean.

And you know what it feels like? Besides the joy and the bliss and the ecstasy and the everyday happiness? It feels like, not that I have arrived, but that I am beginning.

Press  THIS AMAZING LIFE

Him

Me
love you
long time.*

Press  PLAY

*Seen in a store, words in white on blue wooden board.

Surviving Your Own Life

How do you survive your own life?

When I came across this question during a Ted talks segment, it got me thinking. How have I made it this far, how have any of us? How have we all survived our lives up until here, to this point. To now?

Slowly but suddenly, I thought about what I had written on 02.02.2010.

You will never experience anything
that you are incapable of experiencing.*

*Gigi Jaatinen, Ruminations, 2011.

In The Lobby

“You must be a beach bum,” he said, smiling, “with a tan like that!”
I say, “I am.”

I make this declaration after the subtlest of hesitations, for complimentary observations of my darkening skin never cease to surprise me.

The Ilikai Lobby

The End Of History

Time mutinied and ran wild.

It was 14 May 1987, when at the stroke of ten o’clock, ten masked and armed soldiers burst into Fiji’s parliamentary chambers. Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Ligamamada Rabuka, wearing a suit and sulu*, stood up in the public gallery, and said, “Sit down everybody … this is a military takeover.”

He is polite enough to apologize for any inconvenience.

An ambitious third-ranked army officer, Rabuka looks on as Dr Timoci Bavadra, Fiji’s first commoner prime minister and the twenty six members of his government are ordered out of parliament. They are forced at gunpoint into waiting trucks and then driven to nearby army barracks.

It was 14 May 1987 – 108 years to the day when the first shipload of indentured laborers from India arrived in Fiji.**

As the democratically elected government of Fiji is overthrown, its members hostages, nothing in the country is ever the same again. Not for any of us. Not ever.

___
*Similar to a sarong or pareau, sulu is part of Fiji’s traditional clothing.
**Jaatinen, Gigi, Winter in the Tropics: Contradictions, Questions and Tensions Surrounding the Fiji Coup. Masters Thesis. Canberra: Department of International Relations, Australian National University.

Guard wearing sulu at the Governor General’s residence

The Embodied Consciousness

Be conscious in your body.
-04 May, 2013

My Everything God

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.
The obedient must be slaves.
—Henry David Thoreau

My father and I fared better as friends, especially when he was a young father and I was a little girl. This was our golden era, when I was the apple of his eye and he was my everything god.

As we both grew older, our father and daughter friendship floundered and teetered, often expiring for short and vastly long periods. We never did find that elusive fulcrum, for I was always a person who did not like being told what to do and my father was always a person who liked being obeyed.

Dedicated to Sigmund H.

Lightly Abnormal

I’m in the car with my mother, gazing out the side window when she says, “Do you think Sanjay made a mistake doing Psychology?”

Sanjay, my nephew and her grandson, was studying accounting when he realized he was more interested in psychology. He switched degrees. Now a recent graduate, he has been unable to find work in his field. At least so far, it’s only been a few months.

“Mum,” I say, “when you’re doing what makes you happy, it’s never a mistake.”

My answer displeases my mother. She purses her lips and doesn’t say anything more. I knew it wasn’t the reply she’d wanted. But I find it discomfiting to utter things that are, to me, delusional in order to please someone else.

Anyway, it’s all moot now. Sanjay took a hiatus from his potential bliss and enrolled in a graduate business accounting program. It’s a means to an end, of course, to a job he will most likely be unhappy in.

Expediency is the overriding theme in most people’s lives, it seems to me, so why should I expect something different from my family’s next generation. In my imagination, I begin to chuckle – I should get Sanj a polyester suit, point him to the nearest cliff, and say, “Adieu, my dear lemming.”

That Is Like This Now

I felt hurt so deeply for so long by so many people
that
when love began to seep in and overcome
all that
slowly and comprehensively
until my heart lightened
glowed golden and warm
(I could feel it)
that
I began to truly love
every one and every thing
indiscriminately.
~

When I began to feel love
inside
and directed my feeling towards others
towards all things
past and present and future,
I felt gratitude,
for I felt the difference
in a knowing way
of what had become
of what I had been.

Safe From Harm

I was looking
to see if you were looking back at me
to see me looking back at you.

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This World, My Life

The best way for me to be in quiet continuous joy is to heed the ways family, friends, and the people in this world of my life, have loved me; not all the ways they haven’t.

Swim To Happiness

I honor the time of darkness in my life, for it led me to this:
“If your ship doesn’t come in,
swim out to it.”

So I did.

I been swimmin’ and swimmin’ (sometimes in circles),
and now I be chillin’ and kickin’ it with friends
in my happy place, Hawai’i.

Saturday, April 20, 2013
Waikiki

Mindfulness

Mindfulness
everywhere,
at all times.

Sitting, lying, standing, walking,
mindfulness
at all times,
everywhere.

Norway. This is Kjeragbolten: a boulder wedged between two rock faces that are two metres apart. It is believed that the boulder got stuck there during the last ice age. Today, even though it hangs more than half a mile (1000m) above the water below and has no hand rail or safety net, it is a popular place to get your picture taken. Would you risk it for a photo? The sheep doesn’t seem too bothered.
-Milky Way Scientists