Life is hard. Life is Beautiful. As precious and momentary as life is, I know the feeling of loss, in the midst of suffering and pain. On 8/8/23 Maui and her people suffered; Kula, Kihei, and Lahaina were set ablaze. Acres of land scorched, homes destroyed, lives taken, and Lahaina was burned to the ground.
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I do not look forward to the days where I will no longer hold the ones I love, although I know one day I will. It reminds me of the pale fragility of our lives, our very existence a simple composition of endings and absences. Here one day, then gone the next.
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So, what do we do now then? With the sudden overthrow, destabilized and broken? About not knowing what to do? I hear a dynamic invitation, something more than a static declaration of “we must rebuild better, for a better tomorrow”. I bear witness to the longing of grief to be met face-to-face. This one is an ancient stone that must be carried, bound up and secure, to be exposed to the elements and fulfill her wailing song as eyes well with tears. Grief is regenerative.
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Sustainability is the disguised primal cry of the modern self for permanence, and Regeneration is a composting of what was thought to be stable and permanent, into the ground of an imagination riddled with story.
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This is our attempt at bridging what was once in the past, to not be stuck there, to have its last haunting sequence, to be fed and watered, to be buried, to make space for the sprouting of something new and old. Here is what we can do now.
“Everything we love, we will lose.”
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
“I ka wa ma mua, ka wa ma hope”
The future is in the past, which roughly translates to “we look to the past as a guide to the future”
Can there be cultural identity when there is no cultural integrity? We lack the knowledge of what has come before us, so we are left with a world view that is limited in scope and depth. A perspective that has been hijacked by the authoritarian expansionist, groomed by a grand ballad to the imperial mind and the utopian future. We need more than to simply decolonize, we must reindiginize. When a space is cleared, we must be prepared to fill in, or we will face further erosion of our life ways. Looking to ancestors of recent memory and knowing the historical ecology of our places, brings us to an artistry of life that few can recognize or retain. Our kin mind, our communal mind, our indigenous mind, this is an expression of imagination and imagery. Looking to the past, to face our future. Read these books to build the foundation of ways to learn and know, about Hawaii, which is also the story of our people the world over.
