no 15

Have you accidentally looked into the sun or bright light, and then looked away, the image burned into your eyelids? That’s an afterimage.

I’m reflecting on the week behind me here in Kauai. Here's what I saw, heard, or sensed that stayed with me. Let’s begin.

Message from My Body: ​​Nothing Personal

Nature’s plenitude is visible. She’s given me a new understanding of color, fruit, and rest while on the island. She's as generous and giving as she is ruthless and indifferent. Ignore her, or believe humankind reigns supreme, and she’ll swiftly school you with a force and wrath unseen. When she’s done with her lesson, she’ll let it be known: it was nothing personal.

What I heard: Groundwater

Approximations

"The word aloha in Hawaiian means love."

Sitting in the audience, I was offered this definition of aloha at a storytelling event on my second evening on the island.

Some words never translate once they cross over to another culture. Translations are approximations, concept cousins from different cultures. I happily took the definition as if it were a book genre: what section of the bookstore would I find aloha, if it were a book?

While aloha exists concretely in the collective mind as an all-purpose/all-mighty greeting, it has might in ways we don't always entertain.

A Greater-Than-Human Love

I thought of my Australian auntie. I may have written about her in a past installment of Afterimage: a woman who loves fiercely as she does deeply. Love flows out of her like a tidal wave to shore. The magnitude of her love seemed greater than human. All these years, I wondered where it came from.

Being here on the island helped me understand.

Love here flows like groundwater. It starts somewhere deep inside the Earth. It invites everything it meets into its flow: nature, plant, animal, mineral. (Let's throw in cosmic.) When we come together, there's a reverence toward what we connect to, and humility to the force mirrored inside of us. In Love’s presence, we are buoyant. We connect. We rise.

My auntie knew this. Kauai is her ancestral home.

Aloha reminds me of the word yoga, and its etymology: to yoke. To join. It’s connection. Connection with the breath, to nature, and myself. It’s the connection between intention to action, and my connection to you.

If aloha is the groundwater of connection and being— our presence and humility, our beliefs and our willingness to understand, and our choices and actions impact its quality. Just like they do for water.

A question: How does the love that flows around you, through you, from you, and as you shape your material and physical world- the world you experience through the five senses? I want to know.