Ten days in Hawaii

Hawaii is often mistaken for paradise, but paradise to me is a place where I start thinking, 'could I have done anything else with my life?' and come to the conclusion, 'no', an indolent conclusion fanned by tradewinds and palm trees.

The environment here is both king and queen: the water in Hawaii wants me to be a fish, the air asks me to be a bird and so forth.

By the third day in Hawaii I come to that time in my life when politics no longer matters as it once mattered, and I can see that our social and politicial organization(s) are working about as well as they can work, given that we are human beings with giant flaws and disproportionate gifts.

I start reading a novel by a popular female novelist that I never would have read back home in San Francisco. She's a good writer, so good that I only have to read two-thirds of the book she's written, feeling perfectly capable myself of being able to supply the ending. 

The plumeria tree outside my window inspires me to begin writing a poem that begins with the words, 'The plumeria tree outside my window.' However, upon further reflection, I see it's not the tree that's inspiring me to write the poem, it's the blossoms of the plumeria tree, so perfectly made, so sweet smelling.

God, or whatever you want to call the life-force of all beings, isn't the greatest mystery: love is the greatest mystery.

One morning, a little fuzzy from champagne & sleep, I walk down to the kitchen and make coffee, slice a papaya in half. Everyone in the house--all the children and their children, all eight of them--is still asleep. I take my coffee and papaya and sit outside. The light looks touchable, so I reach out as if I can touch everything in it--the trees, the wind, the little birds hopping around, those beings for whom every day is the new year. I sit there alone until I hear one of the little kids, Grace I think, say "where's Grandpa?"

"Where's Grandpa?" I don't know, I have no idea, where is he? 

One of the joys of being in Hawaii, and I thank the time-change for, it being two hours earlier in Hawaii than it is in San Francisco, is that I'm able to watch the sunrise every morning here. It takes about an hour for the sun to fully arrive on the Kohala coast, starting in the east over Mauna Loa, a real-time demonstration of the patience I'd so like to have. While I watch the sunrise I can hear all the others in the house begin to rise, each one of them rising and stirring around in their own way, so that I begin to see the sunrise in a different light--that the number of sunrises corresponds directly to the number of people there are in the world.

I need my memory now more than ever; I depend on my memory now to back things up the way certain computer programs are said to be needed to back things up. So I write things down and then erase most of the things I've written so that what's left becomes all the memory I need.