I want to write more about Storms, and about resilience, and about what I noted last time : “the benefits of having a sense of purpose, and robust social connections.” This is also a piece about real estate and conservation and settler colonialism.1

Weeks ago, before the Storms, I was all worked up about the tension between my “regular” real estate practice and my conservation work.2 I felt like I was contorting myself to try to do both, and take care of all my other commitments with integrity and authenticity.

The Storms themselves - and the extra time I had for catching up on reading and thinking during them - brought clarity. As the aftermath of a storm generally does.

Let me take a step back then, to the Realtor© Code of Ethics, and what I wrote about it in this essay Speaking with Rocks. In the essay written a month ago, I focused on what it would look like to reverse the hierarchy implicit in the Code, which begins with the words “Under all is the land” and then enumerates the ways in which land serves people. I explained that in Native Hawaiian thinking, the human is servant to the land. Today I want to elaborate on the through line between the legal definition of real property as a bundle of rights (which is the framework we work with in real estate transactions), and the ethos of the conservation movement in the United States.

For the evolution of clarity in my own thinking, I want to credit something I read during the Storm by Jessica Hernandez, PhD in her 2022 book Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science. She writes in plain language:

Conservation is not a field that is free from subjectivity as it was a field founded by white people, in particular men, to practice their colonial notions toward nature, our environment, and Indigenous peoples.

The conservation “movement” in the United States had two origin stories, or threads of thought and values (what I meant by “ethos”). Both of them ignore the perspective of the people who were in intimate relationship with the land before anyone who looks like me had immigrated.

The first is embodied by “conservationist President” Theodore Roosevelt3 who put 230 million acres into the public domain - for “wise use” of “resources” like timber and water. He also said,

“The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages ... The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him ... it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.4

I inserted a divider in this text because I hope we all pause and take in the violence and pain of that statement.

The second thread of “conservation” - often termed “preservation” - is generally attributed to John Muir5. I think of it as The Nature Conservancy ethos. It sits a little better with me in that it recognizes the spiritual and intrinsic value of wild places. Yet, as I saw first hand from a boat on the back side of Molokaʻi two months ago - it similarly, if only slightly less violently, righteously disconnects Indigenous people from places that are not only their source of sustenance, but actually indivisible from their identity. Ownership or possession by someone (else) never severs their pilina or kuleana - their relationship or responsibility to that Place. But “preservation” often denies those relationships and responsibilities.

After the storm, I recognized that the conversation I am in among board and staff of Hawaiʻi Land Trust, the conversation we have as State Legacy Land Conservation Program commissioners, the conversation about what it looks like and means to center ʻāina, to center relationship between people and place - that is the inquiry I should be taking into my regular real estate practice for as long as I continue to engage in it.

And it has to go beyond inquiry, at least for me it does.

Here is another post I would like you to read when you have time. It is entitled Reconciliation Asks Us To Learn, Decolonization Asks Us To Change. At least read the title of it twice.

Back to Real Estate.

During the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, some (white) leaders within the real estate profession had genuine conversations with their (black and brown) colleagues and recognized the ways in which the profession still institutionalized discrimination against the “protected classes” they/we are bound to protect by the Code of Ethics and Fair Housing Act. The Code of Ethics was updated to explicitly extend and apply the same standards to others within the profession. Thatʻs a good step. But it does not address the displacement about which I am writing.

We (speaking here as a real estate professional) have yet to practice true reconciliation, let alone commit to change through decolonization, when it comes to the dislocation of people from place that allows us to facilitate the buying and selling of places. Maybe it is easier to recognize here in Hawaiʻi, where every day I look at title reports that trace ownership back to the first distribution of land into private ownership in the Great Mahele of 1848. I have made my peace with the reasoning of Kamehameha III in establishing a legal land framework to support the transition to a constitutional monarchy. I have learned about and acknowledge the injustices that followed, injustices perpetrated by settlers.

The question for me is how I engage in decolonization, in making change. In ʻāina protection and stewardship work, land back work, rematriation work, the pathway is clear. In my “regular real estate” work, we are still at the very beginnings of the reconciliation step, the awareness and acceptance of wrongs that were and are being done and our complicity in them.

And just in case you think I am acting out the saying we had in Colorado some 50 years ago, that the developer is the person buying the mountain condo this year and the conservationist is the person who bought last year, I am not shutting the door behind me. Good hearted, open minded people who bring resources to Hawaiʻi are welcome as part of the solution, part of the future. 6

As the editorial I cite in the footnote reminds us:

Hoʻokahi nō lā o ka malihini — “A stranger for only a day.” After the first day as a guest, one must help with work. (Hawaiian Proverb No. 1078).

How can we stop behaving as Strangers? How can we engage in Learning and Understanding? How can we go further and help with the Work of Healing?

Which brings me back around to civil defense. The Storms reminded me that a sense of purpose and robust social connections brought me happy tears on a daily basis through challenging days that became challenging weeks. Sometimes it is best to start with what is right in front of you.

Aloha no ʻo Kaʻū.

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Thank you, thank you again for taking interest in my writing and ruminations. And thank you for caring about Hawaiʻi nei.

As often happens, I sat down to write with a different topic in mind. Then my barely gathered thoughts were sidetracked by the interruption of a midday Hawaiʻi Civil Defense update.1 Curious, I scrolled back through their text messages to see how many consecutive days Civil Defense has sent me alerts. The streak started on Tuesday August 11th, which makes this Day Twelve. It is already becoming a part of my daily routine. I would prefer a routine without civil defense alerts. But I digress. What I want to say is I needed a few moments of levity in what has been a week of daily challenges. This is the result.

Todayʻs midday message was an update on the approach of Tropical Storm Moke.

When I hear the civil defense messages read on the radio, they tell us the stormʻs name is pronounced “mo-kay” but I can tell you if you are here in Hawaiʻi and you read the word M-O-K-E you think “moke” like rhyming with “joke.”2 Figuring I could add to my vocabulary in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, I went to the wehewehe.org online dictionary, which told me “no entries found.” What?? For real?? I tried another dictionary with the same result.

So will someone please tell the radio announcers and news weather persons and storm namers and the Governor that Mo-Kay is not coming after all?

And despite his name, Moke is actually turning out to be a weakling of a Tropical Storm, barely strengthening from that puny Tropical Depression Two-C before gradually weakening as he passes the islands this evening into tomorrow.

If you arenʻt from here, you probably did not get the joke in the previous paragraph, so let me explain. A “moke” is a big burly guy, someone you probably do not want to mess with.

But what about his big sister Lala, who caused so much devastation on our island, especially in the district of Kaʻū?3

I saw it written both ways, and it matters whether it was “lala” or “lālā”. The out loud announcers said lala, not elongating the aʻs. To be contrarian, the AI summary believes it was supposed to be written with the macron even though it does not appear that way on the official 2026 list of names:

Imagine it was supposed to be Lālā. This is a word that entered into my vocabulary as a branch, or tree limb or a “member” - nā lālā o ka papa could mean “board member” - a role in which I acted several times this week alone.

Lala - without the macron - for me has poetry, an intimation of complexity. The overall sense is a diagonal something (line or quilting pattern) or something (wind or surf) moving at a diagonal. Lala takes me on tangents, puts me in Poetry Brain.

Most likely, none of these words were chosen for their meanings, just for their first letters. First letters. That makes me want to write a poem just for the exercise of it, beginning each line with a name on the list. If I were really ambitious, a long poem. Four lists, four sections.

If I do that, stuck inside as I might be tomorrow, I promise I will publish my messy first draft here for your feedback.

I might not have learned how to write a decent poem in my short time on the River4, but I learned that really good prompts are a way of getting over yourself and learning to write poems. And I know that dedicated practice (with some qualified instruction and feedback!) is how we get good at anything.

“Good” at poetry sounds ambitious to me. But I like playing with it.

Moving lala, diagonally, on some tangent of gust-blown thought, this rumination also makes me think of another of the questions I took to the Canyon, the question of what I could learn there about Age.

You know all those lists of how to remain healthier as you age? Well, perhaps younger readers have not encountered them. This is a topic I have been interested in for a while, since my little sister gave me a book for my 50th birthday: The Secret Life of the GrownUp Brain. Donʻt buy the book. Iʻll tell you that the main finding is your best bet for brain health, the only thing supported by all the studies, is regular exercise. Exercise is not just for the brain; it does a lot for body health and mood as well, I find.

This past week I did not get to the gym once, my most direct route being blocked by fallen trees. But I cleared fallen branches and debris from my property and my neighbors property; I slung cases of water into the backs of a hundred pickup trucks at a community ice and hot meal distribution; and spent an entire morning with four dozen volunteers at beloved Mahukona, now stewarded by Hawaiʻi Land Trust, laboring in the hot sun piling keawe limbs (lālā!) and sections of trunks as the chain saw wielders dismantled fallen trees.

My sore glutes and biceps and deltoids recognize the equivalent of doing dozens and dozens of deadlifts and medicine ball throws. My Garmin registers thousands of steps and hundreds of intensity minutes.

The other studies of how to age well also point to the benefits of having a sense of purpose, and robust social connections. Which was what I was planning to write about today and will indeed write about next week or the week after. The counterweight to those daily Civil Defense Alerts has been the daily aloha of my neighbors and community and extended circles of care. If you are reading this, know how much I love and appreciate you.

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I am writing today to the sound of relentlessly gusting wind, the onset of which woke me up around 2 am when the drizzle became driving rain against the eastern side of my house. Despite the wind and a night of strange dreams, Coach Garmin says I began the day with my Body Battery charged to 96 out of 100 - perhaps my highest score since I acquired this watch (which, by the way, I refuse to wear in bed at night).

That means that my blood pressure, pulse rate, HRV (still don’t understand that metric) - in effect - my parasympathetic nervous system is functioning at its best despite a barrage of Civil Defense Alerts over the past week.

• On Tuesday it was a wildland fire that closed “Saddle Road” aka the Daniel K Inouye Highway connecting the east and west sides of this island through the saddle between our volcanoes aka sacred mountains Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.

• That closure would have made it a longer drive if I had been inclined to respond on Wednesday to the next Civil Defense Alert by going over to see Episode 53 of the current Kilauea eruption.

• On Thursday we received the Hurricane Watch for Tropical Storm Lala, which was escalated to a Hurricane Warning on Friday.

After I removed the Flame Tree aka Royal Poinciana from in front of my home, I mourned the cardinals that disappeared from my yard, but rejoiced that the little yellow finches began perching on my bedroom and dining room window sills, peering in at me as I wake and work and caffeinate. With that tree gone, I have removed all of the invasive colonizer trees whose flying limbs or - god forbid - uprooted trunks would once have threatened structures on my property in a storm such as this. Perhaps that’s why I returned to a sound sleep.

Which brings me to what I want to write about, civil defense as a metaphor. Civil defense as a metaphor for defending civil society, the network of charitable and volunteer organizations and connections through which we take care of each other outside of the frameworks of capitalism and Government. Because the market system and the government seem to take increasingly poor care of most of the people I know and care about. Erase that. Given that business interests and government are conspiring to eliminate environmental protections and soul-restoring wild places and science-based medicine, for starters, they are taking increasingly poor care of all of us

All of us. Human and more-than-human relatives.

Bear with me as I take you on a detour. My regular readers understand how my mind works - best when it thinks sideways.

Since skies were still sunny in Kailua Kona on Friday, I kept my morning appointment meeting a client who flew in from O’ahu. Driving home midday, I turned on the radio to listen for hurricane watch/civil defense updates. I was amused to discover the disc jockey at KWXX, the self-declared feel good Island music station, had a sense of humor and was delivering a playlist of storm-oriented songs to which I happily sang along.

Riders of the Storm.

Like a Hurricane.

Against the Wind.

The one I could not stop thinking about, cannot stop thinking about: Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.1

First - my lingering case of Poetry Brain2 is staggered by these lyrics.

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?

I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’

But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Second - this was written 64 years ago. Have we accomplished nothing? Have we learned nothing? At the time the song was mostly read as a response to the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War; but “where the people are many and their hands are all empty” reads to me as where we are with the massive inequality in incomes and quality of life across the planet; “pellets of poison flooding the waters” a prophetic line that now reads as heralding eco-catastrophe.

In another verse Dylan writes “I met another man who was wounded with hatred” - need I even explain why this line makes me weep today as I contemplate Who Is In Charge?

But here’s thing. Here is why I move from memoir to the kind of essay I am writing with a sense of urgency today. The journey that began for me in childhood and is captured in the memoir portion of this Substack3 leads me to this as a time in my life where I must also “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it, And reflect it from the mountain so that all souls can see it.”

Consider this a Civil Defense Alert. Please take this threat seriously. It is urgently calling you to make preparations to defend your values of inclusion and decency, to protect your neighbors and friends and family and loved ones from possible harm.

The storm is upon us and it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

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One evening this week I flipped on Netflix after a long day of work. Sometimes watching an episode of a show is just the ticket to get my brain to let go of whatever is obsessing it. I was going to watch the latest season of Dark Winds1. Netflix served me up a trailer for the new limited series Pan Am 103 - along with a dose of PTSD.

It is not likely I will watch the show. But it did prompt me to repost one of my fundamental early essays, first published on December 13, 2022 - almost 34 years after the events described.

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The news this week of a decades-later arrest in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 derailed my plan to write sequentially about the unfolding of my Four Things I Always Wanted to Do. It told me I need to start with the story of how I fulfilled “trek in the Himalayas” with a trip to Tibet.

By to write about that trip, I need to write about intuition. About following the omens, watching for signs, listening to your Kūpuna, Ancestors, Spirit Guides, Guardian Angels, whatever name or names you choose to give to the guidance that is available to you. If you are not into “woo woo,” feel free to ignore. On the other hand, maybe thatʻs exactly why you should keep reading.

On December 21, 1988, following my intuition saved my life.

As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post, that year and the next I spent months living at the Hyde Park Hotel working on a big corporate acquisition. I was pretty comfortable by late December, having  become something of a pet guest with the staff. Our Morgan Guaranty Trust corporate rate entitled me to a cave of a room next to the elevator shaft; by this week in December I was nestled in a suite with four-poster bed and a balcony facing Harrodʻs Christmas decorations.

The previous week we could finally tell the press that RTZ and BP were in negotiations. The morning of December 21st, I checked out of the hotel, hugged Harry the doorman, and brought my carry on bag to the office, ready to fly home. I requested the secretary get me on a flight that evening. “Pan Am for the miles?”, she asked with a wink.

A thought popped into my head, accompanied by a distinctive tingling up my cervical spine, the one people must mean when they say the hair on the back of their neck stood up. I replied with that unbidden thought verbatim: “Around the holidays I prefer to fly on national airlines. Book the British Airways flight this time, thanks.”

When I landed at JFK hours later, my usual limo driver greeted me with a huge, uncharacteristic hug. “Merry Christmas to you too?”, I offered, confused. “Oh my god you donʻt know. Get in the car,” was his response. He went on to explain the dispatchers had been in a panic until they realized I was flying on British Airways; the scene at the Pan Am terminal was heartbreaking.

I shivered in the car. It was surely not the first time I had honored my intuition. But it was the first time I realized just how important doing so might be.

I believe all of us have access to guidance, all of us have intuitive capacity. As with any other human trait there is a spectrum of natural talent. As with any other human trait, it is also a skill you can improve with attention and practice.

I was born on the high end of the intuitive spectrum. It runs in my maternal line. When I got home and called my parents the night Pan Am 103 went down, they were unconcerned. They thought I was still in London as I had not let them know I was headed home. My maternal grandmother was equally unconcerned, for different reasons. My parents reported she had insisted I was indeed traveling home that night, just not on the Pan Am flight.

Grams knew. It was not the first or the last time she “knew”. She lived with us off and on when she was on the outs with Grandpa Dan, and then permanently after he died. Periodically she would mope around the house sighing dramatically. “Whatʻs wrong, Grams?” “I dreamt about my cousin.” She would just wait for the phone call or letter with the bad news she already knew. It always came.

And this stuff about following the omens. I am not talking about the trick of focus and perception, like when you are considering buying a red F-150 and suddenly you see red pickup trucks everywhere. (Actually I wrote that line in my head while I was driving. I do most of my writing in my head while Iʻm driving. Then I pulled into the little gas station in Hawi and guess what was at the other pump. And as soon as I thought, weird, usually all I see are the silver Tacomaʻs like my ex drove, sure enough a red Tacoma pulled in right behind the F-150. “Ok, ok,” I said to Them in my head, “now youʻre just messing with me.”)

The trip to Tibet in 1992 was the start of the big, over the top, cannot make shit up synchronicities in my life. I did not really learn about following the omens until 1993, but that is also a story wanting to be told. Getting trained to actively, confidently receive guidance started in 1994. And all of this continues in my life today.

I plan to write about all of it. For now, suffice it to say this. For someone who is a science geek, business person, data-driven empiricist, the synchronicities had to be really big at first to get my attention. Perhaps I still get those sometimes just because I take such delight in the total weirdness when they happen. Wouldnʻt you rather keep giving presents to someone who jumps up and down, throws their arms around you and plants a big kiss on your cheek, than to someone who mutters “you shouldnʻt have” and stuffs the gift into a closet? Apparently “They” feel that way too.

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What was your first thought when you awoke this morning?

What was your first action this morning?

To be honest, my first thought was What time is it? It was still dark out. And stormy, which made it impossible to see the light of the moon, which I know to be transitioning down from its monthly fullness. I have been awaking around 5 am, to get in some writing before the busy-ness of my workday, without sacrificing the grounding habits with which I start the day.

Do you have a morning practice, even if one that is more aspirational than automatic?

When I thought about it, I have written many times about morning practice here.

• Gratitude. I recently shared that before leaving my bed1, I think of what I am grateful for right now, people I want to send blessings to, and any requests I have for myself for the day. This, for me, is the bare minimum practice even if I am leaping up to quickly shower and dress and drive an hour to the airport to make a 6 am flight.

• Poetry. On a more typical morning, I read a verse or two.

  There are books that have sat on my nightstands over many decades and moves. The copy of the Tao Te Ching given to me by my big brother/best man Carman2. Present Moment, Wonderful Moment by Thich Nhat Hanh, given to me at San Francisco airport meeting my friend Cynthia on my way to Tibet in 19923. My dear friend (Reverend) Carltonʻs Try My Jesus4 with interpretations of Bible verses that make sense to me.

  There are books of poetry, especially indigenous poets. For a while it was Richard Wagameseʻs Embers. Then Jess Houstyʻs Crushed Wild Mint. The curriculum for my April adventure in the Grand Canyon brought me more choices, some of which have lingered. Arthur Szeʻs Archipelago. Natalie Diazʻs Postcolonial Love Poem. Our poetry instructor on the Colorado River, Sherwin Bitsuiʻs books which still challenge me, Flood Song and Dissolve.5

Still in bed, I hear feral pigs squealing. They are not happy that fencing is going up, preventing them from taking a mud bath in the puddle forming beneath the downspout from my gutters, eventually locking them out of my orchards. I rise, step out onto the lanai outside my bedroom, and alert them to my noticing by banging on the large antique gong that lives on the lanai. The gong itself brings a smile to my face, its story one of friendship and genealogy, its origin in my life a benefit event for Hawaii Island Humane Society conjuring a feeling of kindness, the larger satisfaction that many of the objects with which I surround myself have stories that also serve as meditations on values and connections. I bow to it.

Whether I jump out of bed to warn away feral pigs or exit more softly, next I give myself some time with yoga practice, or a quick meditation, to bring my body and breath into awareness.

If I did not do these things, it would feel as icky as if I had not brushed my teeth or my hair before going out the door.

I have been thinking about the practice of gatha, the Sanskrit word for the short mindfulness verses used as you go about the activities of your daily life, the type of verses collected in Present Moment, Wonderful Moment. Even while I turn my writing time to making the first part of this Substack into a book-form memoir, I find I am deeply affected by this yearʻs immersion into Poetry Brain. And the best of the lingering effect is paying more attention, allowing myself a moment of wonder before I judge, having appreciation for the Life I create and explore.

Eight days in the glory of the Grand Canyon, with heart-pounding minutes traversing rapids and narrow trails, that was a good reset.

More importantly, today is also an exceptional day full of possibility. Possibility for love, for enlightenment, for making someone elseʻs day. The present, wonderful moment is everything.

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On Friday morning when I turned on my cell phone1 I received a text from a friend with a link to an article from that morning’s NY Times- about land acknowledgements. She said she could not read it without thinking of me. I know at least sometimes she reads these essays, and might have been remembering the one on Entitlement and Apologies or the one it references that I wrote from New York City in October 2024. I opened that essay with these sentences:

Aloha, not from the island of Moku o Keawe from which I usually write, but from the island of Manahatta, once home of the Lenape.

It feels so awkward to write those words. The land acknowledgement is a recent tradition, a phrase recited at the opening a conference or found on an organizationʻs “About Page,” naming the people whose land was stolen. As my newly found Voice urges me to speak from the unique and sometimes confused but not entirely incoherent perspective that is mine, I confess I am ambivalent about the practice of land acknowledgement. And yet I am here to retrace footsteps of my own past self and I canʻt help but be cognizant, as I am every day in my chosen home, that I walk on pathways walked by ancestors of people who live today, and who not by choice live elsewhere than where their ancestors walked.

I remain interested in the evolution of this “land acknowledgement” practice which speaks the Names given to a Place by People who have been forcibly severed from their Place, as if acknowledgement absolves the speaker of any other obligation. I remain interested in hearing from Native Americans about how they experience that practice, as I evolve in my own practices and understandings about living in a Place to which I have no ancestral ties. The title of the article says a lot: I’m Native American. Land Acknowledgements are Infuriating.

What struck me most in the article was related to a recurring theme here, to what I wrote just last week about ʻāina. Mr. Walker, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation writes:

Because the ritual still treats land as something that can be owned, it names the theft while leaving the idea of ownership untouched. Indigenous relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about reciprocity, care, responsibility. Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist, put it this way: “The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not ownership.”

I want to repeat this core concept - indigenous thinking about “land” - or in language that works better for me, “Place” - centers the relationship - not the human or group of humans in possession of “something”, nor the properties of the “thing” itself.

You know I believe there is no such thing as coincidence in my life, and when I read this article I was still in the throes of a Native Hawaiian Convention hangover. Not the kind of hangover that comes from drinking too much alcohol too late at night, but the good kind that comes from immersion in another world of thinking and behaving, the lasting effect on mind and body that makes it tough to step out of that puʻuhonua, that sanctuary and place of re-education. Each time I feel less and less like returning from an hour or a few days in that virtual Place.

To be clear, the most frequent message from those on the stage to those in the audience, an audience of over 2,000 attendees, was “You are capable, wildly talented and capable. The future depends on you. Step into leadership. Step into responsibility and accountability for what happens next. Because our culture is rich in the understandings where the solutions for what ails the world will be found.”

What do I hear, as someone in the audience who is not kanaka ʻōiwi, who is not Native Hawaiian, as someone whose genetics are those of the colonizers? What I hear is also a call to action. A call to be a partner in systemic change, real change, not to be satisfied with a performative acknowledgement that I use to absolve myself of guilt. When I respectfully join in protocol, even a daily act as simple as introducing myself by naming my place of origin and my chosen place (to which I made a commitment that requires me to give more than I take), I am not distancing myself from the People of Place nor from the pain of their displacement. I am committing to be present to that pain and to be in relationship, genuine relationship, relationship which can write new stories.

I do not speak for Place. I listen to Place. I do not speak for People of Place. I listen to People of Place. I humbly learn from and repeat their brilliant insights with full acknowledgement of the source of those insights. I wake up in gratitude every morning. Not for the white body which gives me inherent privilege, but for the relationships to which I am privileged to bear responsibility, the relationships to Places and People which I build in commitment to a healthier, saner future for us all.

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Journals, childhood diaries, preteen romantic novels co-authored with giggling girlfriends, I have written all of these. For decades I hauled them with me to all my adult homes. Then in 2005, the Swiss Guy and I moved into a Hawaiʻi sugar plantation era, single wall construction, 900 sq ft home in need of total renovation. The carport had built in shelves, and, newcomers that we were, we naively stacked on them the cardboard boxes in which our possessions had traveled with us from the Continent.

Months later, many many months later after an earthquake shifted the house 1/2 inch to the left among other unexpected setbacks, we began to unpack those boxes. Two boxes containing decades of my journals had become nests for rodents, the pages shredded and covered with poop. These were unsalvageable, headed for the dumpster unceremoniously and unread just in case they bore some virus capable of attacking our immune systems. Only one box, the one where a handful of notebooks and scrapbooks had been protected by an outer layer of carefully wrapped crystals and various wooden and ceramic containers, that single box survived. The box contained the record of my life from 1992 - 1997, the years of transformation that prompted the first 43 essays on this Substack.

Those are the journals and poems and scrapbooks to which I return now as I finally endeavor to enlarge and refine what I wrote here over the course of a year, in late 2022 and most of 2023, into a book-length memoir.1

Re-reading the notebook I started right after returning from Tibet, I found these sentences written on June 19, 1992. For the past couple of weeks this question, this thought, has been rolling in my mind gathering related thoughts. A single stone now heading towards a landslide…

I wrote that 34 years ago? was my first reaction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized a version of this thought or question has been a thread, a through line in my life. I wonder if the time has come to place it more centrally in my thinking and in my work. That is when the ground begins trembling in response.

A few weeks ago I was privileged to be part of a gathering on Molokaʻi, at which we were grounded again and again by “Aunty Zhan” - Zhantell Dudoit Lindo who is CEO of Molokaʻi Heritage Trust- asking how we can let ʻāina speak for itself2 instead of presuming to speak for ʻāina. Since then I have spent many hours contemplating this as a practical question. Not just as a poetic construct - although poetry is one doorway into the conversation - but as a practice. How is it possible to speak about the future of a particular Place or “property” or “parcel” in language that gives agency to the voice of that Place? How can we institutionalize that practice?

This has become a visceral question for me.

I know how angry and hurt I can feel when someone who doesnʻt really know me presumes to speak for me. I also know I can feel held, seen, cherished, when someone who does truly know me gives voice to my Truth. It is especially a gift when someone close does this for me when I might not be seeing it myself. But I already granted those someones the right to become intimate with my Truth. I entrusted it and myself to them. And they accepted responsibility for holding me and it with care.

Have you heard the saying “nothing about us without us?” It stems from political discourse, but was popularized in a new context in the late 1990s by South African disability-rights activists. I have been hearing it in different contexts lately, taken up by any marginalized group whose voices are not being heard in decision making that affects them.

What if we take up that mantra as we think about ʻāina? My work in real estate, even in my conservation and legacy lands practice, is by definition about transactions. Even if transactions are conducted in a relationship context. The Realtor Code of Ethics begins with the words “Under all is the land” - and elaborates principles of how “land” is of key importance - critical importance - through the ways in which it serves people and human institutions. Then it specifies how to behave with respect to clients and customers; other professionals; and the general public. The relationships that are protected are exclusively between humans. Land matters because it is instrumental to human wellbeing; the Code of Ethics fails to define my/our ethical obligations to it.

That hierarchy is reversed in Hawaiian thinking. “He aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauwa ke kanaka.”

The land is chief, the person is its servant. Even before I learned this proverb, when I was the listing agent for a large, special tract of land and prospective buyers asked what I would personally do with the land if it were mine, my answer was always “I would ask the land what it wants.” That answer just came out as true for me, because at multiple levels that place was speaking to me each time I visited. It feels urgent to have that answer become more than a suggestion. It should be an ethical obligation.

How do we do ask land what it wants in practical terms, in ways any of us humans can master? I believe it is no different than in our human to human interactions. We come to understand the perspective of another through deep, open listening in intimate relationship, through friendship or kinship. We begin with an attitude of aloha, of compassionate inclusive awareness, through a “knowing” of one another that begins as, or becomes, something intuitive, nonverbal. I practice this with my horses. It is related to the practice of kilo, observation. This kind of observation is not just scientific or analytical. It is a whole-person, body-mind-spirit multisensory open-minded careful listening practice that eventually becomes a kind of communication and communion.

If you have been reading here for a while, you will know I keep returning to the distinction between “real property” as a bundle of (human) legal rights, and ʻāina as a bundle of relationships and responsibilities that includes place and humans and other beings and natural forces3. By definition when I think ʻāina instead of land, I am thinking about these human and other-than, more-than human beings in connection and in actual conversation. Conversation, not the western scientific or “land use” or Realtor Code of Ethics approach in which land or environment is something for which we humans can measure properties and then decide or know what that land is “good for.” It is also different than the conventional “conservationist” approach which can become another way of separating people of Place from the places that are essential to their identity and wholeness.

In 1992 I traveled through Tibet with Vijali, a spiritual teacher/artist/activist who sculpts in conversation with the stone she carves. I witnessed it. I experienced it. I let the cave and its elements co-create the portion for which I had responsibility. I had deep, physical learning experiences in Places that held centuries of wisdom. Wisdom which they - the physical places - made available to those who came seeking.

In 2026 I traveled through a section of the Grand Canyon asking its deep time to help me understand the passage of time and aging. As I rested my body against its hard surfaces, slept enfolded by its high walls, trusted its solidity beneath my hiking boots and bare feet, the rocks and sand offered answers.

There is nothing crazy about the idea of being in conversation with rocks and sand, with the land beneath our feet and with the canyon walls and mountains towering above our heads, and with the rivers that animate them. How to be a better listener to ʻāina is a big enough question for me to continue to explore for the rest of my days. More importantly, how to listen to the voice of ʻaina is an urgent question because ʻāina holds answers that we humans need urgently, and cannot discover on our own.

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This week, however, I spent my writing time on another project, so this Sunday morning I woke up feeling guilty instead.

What follows is more a first-draft essay than the usual one I polished, five minutes here and ten minutes there, throughout the week.

Mahalo for reading with me.

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Something happened last weekend. After months of reading memoir to study form and especially unconventional ones, and after weeks of sketching out different ways of turning the first 43 essays here into a book-style memoir, last week a structure fell into place and I spent eight hours a day for two days copying and pasting and typing. By Sunday evening, Part One was complete.

The first section of three I knew would be the easy one. For the middle one I would have a lot of new material to write. And the third would be, will be, whatever it wanted to be and end wherever it felt ready.

I pulled out my journals and poems from the time of the middle section, which starts in the June of 1992 and ends at the end of 1994. I got up each morning at 5 am, and after my usual routine, my yoga and green drink and brewing of coffee, I devoted an hour to the memoir.

Before closing my eyes at night, I read a chapter or two of another woman’s memoir. Some nights I re-read the previous chapter, to prolong the narrative tension and bathe in the rich prose. I know where it is headed, because the book cover and the review that took me to it already revealed it. I just can’t bear to get there yet. This memoir is making me rethinking voice and pacing in mine. But mostly it is bringing me to tears and making me wonder why I never got serious about writing poetry.1

I have shared this before. Aside from a handful of childhood poems, I only wrote poetry in 1992 as a way of processing the losses in my life. Breaking up with the man I thought would be my future after my first marriage. The death of my beloved grandmother. A growing sense that it was time to leave or at least really shake up my career on Wall Street and find my way back to a more spiritually grounded life.

I never edited any of these poems, although in my journals I have others that were half written, or written and scratched over many times. These were the ones that just came out fully formed, stream of consciousness, and asked to be accepted as they were.

The middle section of my memoir begins with my return to New York City after five weeks of travel in Asia. I took my entire year’s vacation weeks all at once, and told the Bank I would not discuss my next assignment until I returned. The month of June 1992 was a transitional space, as the external Universe rearranged itself around my rearranged inner self, still integrating intense experiences in Tibet.

Just as, over the course of May and June 2026, I subjected all of you to my interior monologue and somewhat edited poems as I integrated my intense experience in the Grand Canyon and began rearranging my outer life to correspond to the new shape of my interior.

This is the poem I wrote in June 1992.

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Which has me thinking about 4th of July weekends and the other big anniversary celebrations…

All the World Cup reporting I read and hear is a trigger for me as the 4th of July weekend approaches. A memory trigger for sure, with a wild mix of emotion (no trauma) attached. I donʻt remember as much coverage in the United States in 1994. But then again, maybe I was only reading and listening to the coverage from Brazil since not that many people in the U.S. seemed interested in “soccer.” Imagine a World Cup in the U.S. pre-Ted Lasso, even before American girls discovered the sport as one at which they could excel.

As I wrote in this 2023 essay My Love Affair With Brazil Continues, my boyfriend during the summer of 1994 was a Brazilian journalist - who traveled with the Brazilian futbol team every four years writing social commentary for a national newspaper. On the eve of the match in which the United States played Brazil at Stanford, his column playfully explored how we as a couple were navigating this completely unforeseen circumstance. Incredibly, the U.S. team (not nearly as good as this yearʻs roster) advanced to the Round of Sixteen, and even more inexplicably, were playing Brazil on the 4th of July. Divided loyalties!

Pretty specific memory: World Cup in the United States, Fourth of July. The mix of emotion this memory brings? In the 1994 memory: excitement, amusement, wonder. But in todayʻs reflection, tainted by lingering confusion, a slight sting of betrayal.

I have been pondering the truth that a writer of memoir is not the same person who went through the events about which they write. When I wrote about this memory three years ago, I was still really angry and disappointed at the way in which Nelson portrayed our love story in his 2020 memoir-in-essay. As I reflect today with a bit more distance, the 1994 Bola Divida essay was virtually made of whole cloth, at least as much as the 26 year later essay in Da Cu Pra Lua. The only difference was the affectionate tone of the 1994 essay implying something genuine between us. I wonʻt dignify the essay in the 2020 book with a description of how “Annie” was portrayed. Suffice it to say the only bit of respect shown was not using my real name. And maybe I can take some solace in the fact that there were plenty of women who passed through Nelsonʻs life who didnʻt make the cut at all. I guess that counts for something.

I hope I have been kinder in these Substack memories. That doesnʻt mean a single person about whom I write would remember the events as I do. My life reads like fiction; and often fiction or poetry tells a truer story about human relationships than any biography or memoir could.

I will spent time with my horses on Saturday, and that brings a different sadness. My heart horse Zara was born on the 4th of July and we always celebrated with carrots or watermelon for her. She crossed the Rainbow Bridge almost two years ago, not long after her 28th birthday, and I still think of her every day.1 She will always be part of my 4th of July, maybe the best memory.

To end on a lighter note, this Semiquincentennial (who even remembers that is what it is called or can pronounce it?) quasi-celebration also takes me on a trip down the proverbial Memory Lane. A trip all the way back to the summer of 1974.

Way back to the summer of 1974, when a summer job with the federal government was a pretty sweet gig for a college student. Mine was with the Denver office of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC). It paid enough for me to rent a studio apartment in a highrise downtown, close enough to walk to work. Independence of a different sort, choosing not to live with my parents that summer. After all, I would be graduating in a year and fending for myself for the rest of my life!

There were only two other people working in the office: the local administrator for the ARBC and his older, wiser secretary. Americaʻs 200th Anniversary celebrations were largely locally planned - and in Colorado the year 1976 was also the 100th anniversary of statehood, so in planning the Centennial-Bicentennial events our office had to be uniquely connected to offices in the State of Colorado and City and County of Denver governments 2.

At the time,1974 felt like the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius; in retrospect my memory of 1974 feels like an early Norman Rockwell painting of small town life and patriotic unity. Later Norman Rockwellʻs paintings show iconic images of social justice - of the Civil Rights movement and the struggle for womenʻs rights. Both Norman Rockwell-esque images are true and both themes were present as we planned for the Centennial and Bicentennial3. Painting USPS mailboxes with red, white and blue images was uncontroversial - and so was our emerging environmental consciousness and desire to protect our mountains and outdoorsy lifestyle.4

This year, Colorado still plans to commemorate with an amazing, diverse range of programs. And the Celebrating America 250 - Colorado 150 landing page on the Colorado Tourism website includes a land acknowledgement at the bottom:

In the spirit of healing and education, the Colorado Tourism Office acknowledges the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the 51 contemporary tribes with historic ties to the land currently known as Colorado. We recognize and honor these indigenous peoples as the original inhabitants of this land.

Meanwhile over at the bottom of the landing page of America250 one finds a long, very long, roster of corporate sponsors.

This was meant to be a lighter reflection, but in truth I find it painful that in national celebrations, and in current federal rhetoric, the spirit of environmentalism, cohesion, and inclusion that was foreground in planning efforts I worked with for the Centennial and Bicentennial in 1976 is not just absent. It is explicitly not welcome.

It has even become dangerous to speak of the right of citizens to object to the actions of those in power. And so I will assign myself as daily reading this weekend, the document we celebrate after 250 yeasrs. It is known as the Declaration of Independence.5 Have you read it? Recently? Do you remember, for example, the lines about laws of naturalization for foreigners and about judges dependent on his will alone? And there is more…

Shall we read it together?

Apology withdrawn. Most likely with less polishing I am writing something truer. And I need to drop a truth bomb on myself with all of you as my witnesses.

Often I need to write something to figure out what I am thinking. Today I feel like I need to write about real estate, because most of my waking hours this week were consumed by my real estate practice. And it has been awhile since I wrote here about real estate1. I began to write this Substack because it felt urgent to get down certain stories before I forgot what happened thirty years ago, a decade before I started in real estate. This Substack was about writing my memoir, not at all about real estate. The essays that followed were rarely about real estate.

I am taking the long route to get there, but what I really mean to say is that if I were writing for my audience of subscribers instead of for myself, writing to please an audience and grow a business, I would be writing regularly, even mostly, about real estate. The majority of my subscribers, and even some of my most avid readers, are people I work with or folks who came by way of a real estate conference or workshop at which my friend Matthew Ferrara2 presented. Hello you guys!

Matthew Ferrara encouraged me to write and even though he was at our Hawaiʻi Life retreat at Kokeʻe back in 2019 or so to help us write better real estate bios and listing descriptions, I am certain he did not care whether or not I was writing about real estate. Any more than he makes his photography about real estate. Matthew calls himself a Philosopher, Photographer, and Speaker. His audience happens to be mainly real estate people.

On my bio I show up with two labels: Realtor-Broker and Director - Conservation and Legacy Lands, already setting up my internal and external conflict. I find it harder to imagine those two things living comfortably in one person (unlike Philosopher, Photographer, and Speaker which in my mind make total sense as a package).

Iʻm good, way better than average, at the Realtor-Broker piece. I am passionate to the point of obsessive about Conservation and Legacy Lands. My technical skills at facilitating “conservation” transactions are rare. But what I have really acquired of value through “doing the transactions” is a self-transformation that goes way beyond transactional knowledge. It is that transformation that demands of me a more radical contribution.

As I have written before, real estate or “real property “is a different narrative about the relationship between people and place than the narrative about which I am passionate.3

So why do I have to keep convincing myself it is ok to let go of being the former and spend 100% of the time and energy I have left doing the things I am passionate about? I may have thirty years left to contribute. I should be writing, and I should be using that writing, among other practices, to protect, restore, and re-story the connections between People and Place.

I was being coy last week, when I wrote about JUMPING, about the way in which I was stuck…that was the poetic way of saying this. A year ago I declared I am ready to let go of my regular real estate practice. And then a year later I made the same declaration as if it were a new idea to me. Coming home from the Grand Canyon, I made lists, made flowcharts, put up sticky flip chart pages on my wall of all the steps to take to do the things I want to do and stop doing the things I am done doing.

And then the proverbial shit hit the fan. This week I was inundated with writing -offers and counter offers. With referrals for new listings, and with new buyer clients.

All while devoting time I had committed to our operationalizing our Kohala Community Land Trust, time I needed to integrate and follow up on commitments made last week at a gathering on Molokaʻi.

I was on overtime and on overwhelm. I looked around me, looked at my colleaguesʻ current travel and other commitments, and had no choice but to jump in rather than step aside. And that brought a fresh realization. The biggest thing that was holding me back was an action step that was nowhere on my flip charts. I couldnʻt let go of my “regular” real estate practice until I had someone in whose hands I could confidently leave it! Over time I have mentored many agents, but possibly too successfully. I need a successor who is enough younger to have a runway ahead of them; with competence to deal with my sophisticated clients and complex listings; and with enough capacity to take on the volume.

Whichever narrative I chose to operate within, I have to do it with integrity.

So you heard me; I have you all as my witnesses. I am committed to letting go of my real estate practice… with integrity. Now I know what was holding me back, and what I need to do to leap forward. Which was not what I thought it was; which is why I was Stuck.

My present as well as my future is a JUMP into the alternative narrative, the one that I acknowledged last week “can save Places and People.”

Iʻll be working that out through these essays in the weeks and months to come. I hope most of you will continue to read along.

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As a side note, Iʻm experimenting with formats for turning the first 43 of these Substack posts into a book-length memoir. Do you have a favorite memoir? Does it have a conventional or experimental form? Heroʻs Journey? Heroineʻs Journey? Please let me know in the comments!

Are you all tired of me writing about my Grand Canyon 2026 Freeflow Institute experience?

Two months later there is so much about my eight days on the River that I have not yet unpacked. Honestly, I have barely opened the mental suitcase or the emotional backpack. My actual Osprey Kyte backpack still sits on the lanai where I removed its sandy contents safely on the outside of the sliding doors to my bedroom. Next to it sits the bright orange weight vest with which I trained, its color a reminder of the orange life jacket that was provided to me for my time on the River.

What a metaphor that is! I left what was weighing me down on the lanai outside my bedroom door, traded it for a personal flotation device.

I know one reason I went to the Canyon, a reason I did not understand until I came out of the Canyon, was that I was STUCK. All the big declarations I made a year ago after I came back from my horse course and my 1,000 Words of Summer 20251 - all those big declarations were the same things I was saying to my friends, a few days after emerging from the Canyon, in Old Town Scottsdale over craft margaritas.

Luckily they looked at me lovingly - and then called me on my bullshit.

I needed the Colorado River and a week of writing poetry because I was STUCK. I needed to allow some Big and Wild Thing to FLOW through me, to carry me in its FLOW. That was the real reason I went. To get unstuck.

One thing you donʻt want to do on the River is get STUCK. You donʻt want to be ejected from your raft or dory or ducky to “swim” and find yourself with a foot or article of clothing wedged into a rock, worse yet if you happen to be face down into the River when that happens. No matter what happens in the turbulence, no matter how scared you feel, you still have to TRUST the FLOW. You have to TRUST your guides and companions. You have to keep facing upward towards the sky full of possibility.

WHY AM I WRITING IN ALL CAPS?

For our first poetry exercise on the River, we folded our journal page so it was divided down the middle to shorten phrases, sometimes in uncomfortable places, as we kept writing while words were fed to us during our writing. The prompt for this writing was the starting phrase “When we stand here we want to jump...”

The second part of the exercise was to take time later in the day to arrange the words we had written onto the rhythm of the Canyon walls, its layers and sediments and rockfalls. Every time I wrote JUMP in this second version, it was in ALL CAPS. What, I wonder, was my subconscious telling me, our first full day on the River, our first day of poetry? What was my subconscious telling me in answer to the reminder that morning to consider again why we were here, in the Canyon, on the River?

Here is what it looks like this in my journal:

—-

Prompted before our recent one-month reunion zoom call to look through our journals and find nuggets or seeds or words that sparkle, I chose these words from JUMP.

That flow will flow can flow beyond the me
The me and the life that trembles me into the
Canyon into the flow
Into the life and the grief
And the forgiving and the
Sun blooming in the Canyon
In my life and in the JUMP

Sometimes you have to JUMP, take a leap of faith, before you find the support you need. You have to Trust.

I look at a photo taken from one of the rafts, looking toward the dory in which I was seated while our Trip Leader West gave us last instructions - and a last chance to leave.

What did I feel and sense at the moment that photo was snapped? Not outright fear but definitely nervousness. I did not know these Guides and now I was 100% in their hands for the next eight days. I barely knew the other participants, two calls and the first nightʻs short gathering. Our meshing was quick, but had not yet had an opportunity to weave itself. The River and the Weather were welcoming at that moment, but we had been warned again and again that we could expect anything, from dehydrating desert heat to bitter winter cold.

I had faith I would survive and that it was the job of these Guides to ensure that.

They also reminded us that the River is No Joke. People die on this River. Every year People Die On The River.

I think: River will be River in the days and centuries ahead, despite our best efforts as humans, controlling humans, to decide on Her behalf. I also think: as men always try to decide on behalf of the ferociously strong women who appear to go with the flow until the moment they Rage - or merely go Dry.

Who knew that Dry was the more dangerous choice.

But that lesson was still ahead.

Sitting on the dory, I realize that for the next eight days, the River and its Guides have more say than I will, all I can do is let go and Trust. I was as prepared as I would ever be, given that the time for preparation lay in the past and an ocean away. A (P)pacific (O)ocean in the past, a River of stillness and raging rapids in the future. Once we pass under the Bridge, there is no turning back. Only a different kind of future Return.

So what from the Freeflow Grand Canyon experience has resisted post-river fadeaway? What did I find when I JUMPED?

For me, it is this. Treating my writing as valuable, important, as a main reason for being here. For being Here. Wherever “Here” is, in this case, Existing. Knowing that writing is a way of knowing, feeling that writing is a way of feeling, of feeling my way into what I feel and know. Knowing and Feeling that writing is non-negotiable in my life. That writing can save Places and People. That writing will always be bound up with my love for that River and Canyon. That Poetry, even not done well, is an essential language. That I am deeply in love with that essential language.

That writing is part of my Purpose.

And thatʻs why I am not yet done with unpacking eight days of writing Poetry and becoming Unstuck on the Colorado River.

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Poetry Brain Virus keeps insisting on seeing the Salad as a Poem. PBV is not saying that I should write a poem about the salad. PBV wants me to accept the fact that a Poem could take the form of Salad. So instead of writing a poem of words about a salad, Iʻm writing words about the Poem In the Form of Salad. I’m writing Memoir In the Form of Salad.

I consume a lot of salads. I make them at home almost nightly. I order them in airport restaurants. If you asked me what one single food I would choose to eat for the rest of my life I would cheat and say “salad” which covers an expanse of possibilities. The word salad conjures Thai with thin slices of rare beef and Niçoise with fresh tuna and the Nutty Cheesy Salad I ordered almost every Friday night at a Fern Bar in Denver back when Fern Bars were a thing.

I love chopped salads and composed salads and even on occasion a classic wedge salad with a big hunk of Iceberg head lettuce drenched in blue cheese dressing.1

Among all the salads, I can count the number of absolutely memorable ones I have had in my life on the fingers of one hand, not counting my thumb as a finger. Finding number four this week is a big deal indeed. Especially one that was also a Poem.

These are the salads.

Memorable Salad #1. 1977. My first frisée aux lardons on my first trip to France with my first husband. One day we took a wrong turn and arrived at our destination late and I was tired and hangry but believing I was not hungry insisted I just wanted une salade. The white-aproned server in the bistro chose for me, knowing that what I really needed was the comfort of warm, crispy pork fat balanced by a sharp vinaigrette, the cloud of still-crisp frisee dripping a halo of yellow strands from the yoke of a poached egg. THAT was a salad.

Memorable Salad #2. 1997. Twenty years later, in the company of the man soon to become my second husband, the salad of revelation was nüsslisalat, an obvious cousin of the salad of firsts. Crisp bits of bacon, garlicky crouton, the eggs hard boiled and finely chopped. The base this time that wonderful fall green known as mâche in French, lambs lettuce or corn salad (huh?) in English. Honestly, I remember the first bite of everything I ate that November weekend of the missed train and the Swiss Guy- and am grateful that my affection for nüsslisalat survived our divorce2.

The third of my most memorable salads happened in between the first two memorable salads - and in between the marriages - as so many memoir-worthy moments did.

Salad #3. 1992. Back before the zombie version of “Caesar salad” became ubiquitous, in the first year of my time in Brazil3, I had the Caesar salad against which every Caesar salad is to be compared. Brazil was not somewhere one dared drink tap water or order any salad of uncooked greens in a restaurant. Except in one very elite restaurant in São Paulo, where the water in the glass was deemed safe and the Caesar salad had a “must order” reputation.

The waiter rolled a cart to our table, on it a large wooden bowl flanked by smaller bowls of ingredients. His movements were knowing, unhurried, designed to build anticipation. A pungent garlic clove halved cleanly with a sharp knife, each half rubbed slowly, one at a time, against the sides of the bowl. The air filled next with the fishy undertone of crushed anchovies, the freshness of a squeezed lemon. A few grains of salt trickled down from the pinch held between his slowly rotating thumb and finger. The sharp crack of an egg, a thin stream of golden olive oil poured from a pitcher held higher than necessary, the rhythm of the whisk a bit tilted, playful but insistent, like the swinging highest pitched surdo joining into a samba beat.

Torn lettuce thrown from a bowl with an almost careless motion, a hunk of Parmesan grated onto a plate, its salty fragrance drifting like a high note over all the earthly bass tones as the performance crescendoed with a final flourish of vigorous tossing before a mound of artfully adorned simple romaine was lifted onto each waiting plate.

No Caesar salad since can compete with the one of memory.

Which brings me to last night. To the Poem in the Form of a Salad. The only dish everyone was still talking about twenty-four hours after dinner was served at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel’s 60th Anniversary Gala. A dish that at first glance was…messy. Confusing.

The Second Course listed on the Anniversary Menu in our Gala program book was described as an “Island Beet & Tomato ‘Haku’ Lei”.

Often, I hear people refer to a lei worn on the head as a “haku lei” when what they mean is a “lei po’o.” The haku style of lei making refers to the technique of braiding onto a backing with the flowers facing outward - and this is what you can see attempted in the deconstructed “salad”: a lei haku4 using leaves of kale and lettuce as the backing, the vegetables arranged like flowers on top.5

The menu offered a cogent explanation. However, no one at our table of enthusiastic conversations had studied the menu before the salad course arrived in its unexpected, lei-inspired, poetic form.

A good poem sometimes shocks before it delights.

Around the table creases appeared between eyebrows, smiles brightened faces as carrots carved into the Mauna Kea Resort logo6 were lifted and examined, forks hesitated before tentatively stabbing into a juicy strawberry or ripe cherry tomato or ball of avocado bliss. Closed eyes, sighs, lei-draped couples turning to each other to mime an open mouthed “wow!”

Menu now consulted, heads nodded at the explanation of “lei.” Another nod to cultural heritage among many woven into the evening’s program.

A good poem works on multiple levels.

I had already settled on a different interpretation as I studied the plate with wonder. For me the poetry of its arrangement conjured a white-sand beach littered with seaweed and seashells and the blossoms of nearby flowering trees after a storm. The long white asymmetrical dish on which it was presented appeared in my mind as the iconic crescent of Kauna’oa Beach where the setting sun was turning the sky pink and orange just behind the stage we faced.

According to the now-consulted menu, we still had a choice of Kona Peppercorn-Braised Island Grass-Fed Beef Short Ribs or Pan-Roasted Crispy-Skin Kona Kanpachi to come. And a Bittersweet Honoka’a Chocolate Crunch Cake to finish.

There would be Fireworks and Dancing and more dancing at the After Party and then whispered invitations to the Speakeasy.

But after that epic night, the next day our dreams were of The Salad. And in my dreams, all the future Salad Poems I might compose in tribute to the original.

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Today you get what I wrote in 2023. It feels a bit dated, the Pandemic feels a long time ago. I am winding down my “regular” real estate practice and doing less of the kind of driving I wrote about three years ago. But the advice to dig deep until you find something you did not want to know about yourself - I feel that is a worthwhile annual exercise for writers - and for pretty much anyone who wants to continue to grow and evolve.

If there is anyone else you would like to tell about what you’ve been reading here, please feel free to share this link to everything that I have written on Substack.

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When asked what I “do,” I sometimes reply, “I drive for a living.” Itʻs a joke of course. Neither Uber nor Lyft has drivers in rural Kohala. Itʻs a joke that I find funny/not funny because my day job as a real estate broker requires me to do a lot of driving, and I have become rather cranky about it in the past three years.

My pandemic story is not that different than the stories of many other people I know in Hawaiʻi. People I loved were lost to the virus. People I love lost people they loved to the virus, their dominoes of grief collapsing onto mine. Children I love struggled, cut off from their routines and from live play with their friends. Adults I love found themselves without jobs. But the Hawaiʻi that I love thrived.

Hawaiʻi without the millions of tourists that on an annual basis form a transient population exceeding the number of residents more than four times over, that Hawaiʻi was a marvel, a throwback of vitality and aloha. From six feet apart we relished the emptiness of beaches and the free time to reclaim our place on them. We savored the calm of rural streets where drivers slow to look each other in the eyes as they pass, throwing a shaka or even a hula-gestured kiss with nary an impatient tourist honking to object. Entrepreneurship flourished, as did our solidarity and the ways our communities have of caring collectively for their own.

On the evening before the first day of pandemic lockdown I turned off the alarm on my bedside clock and stopped worrying about tight schedules and drive time to appointments and showings.

The next morning I picked up a writing project I began in 2002.

I read. I wrote. I edited. I hired two different editors to give me their critical opinions on my writing and its marketability. I rediscovered my passion for writing.

Now that the pandemic is officially cancelled, I once again ferry maskless families from home to home, from condo to condo, from Keauhou to Kawaihae. I put my 4-Runner in 4-Wheel Low and bump along trails through steeply sloping pastures, getting out in my jeans and boots to bushwhack through buffalo grass and windbreaks of ironwood trees in search of a fluttering of pink plastic tape marking staked corners of a large parcel of land for sale. Then I change into colorful, skimpy “resort wear” and drive to oceanfront restaurants to network with lenders and treat potential clients and current clients and past clients to lunch or cocktails.

And even as I track thousands of miles each month on my mileage app, during those rare peaceful unhurried times I am alone in the car, I find myself switching off the sounds of KEWE 97.9 FM whose broadcast floats across the ʻAlenuihāhā Channel from Maui, so I can listen better to whatever is writing itself in my head. A real estate blog post for the Hawaiʻi Life website. A long email response to a client or community member. The next installment of this memoir on Substack. The incessant and sometimes tiresome internal narration of my day to day life, my grudges and grumbles, my dreams and crushes, my perceived or real problems and their imagined solutions.

I am obsessed with words. I talk too much, listen too little. I think a lot about how words shape our worlds, how the structure of language allows some to see what others canʻt - and prevents most of us from seeing what some can.

The more I write, the more I obsess about writing well. Who has time for social media or television when there are so many amazing writers on Substack? Each brilliantly worded essay I read inspires me to want to be That Damn Good.

To challenge myself to get better at writing, to find new words and new ways of using words, I decided to participate in the fifth year of #1000wordsofsummer, a project that last year was joined by more than 15,000 writers committing to write 1,000 words a day for fourteen days, honing their craft together.

I have something I want to write about, a new topic I am eager to explore. In the longer days of summer, I rise early and have that extra hour of sunlight during which I can make a start on a thousand words or so if I just keep my fingers typing. But to commit to write 1,000 word a day about a different topic means I will need to push the pause button on They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir for a couple of weeks.

It is possible that I will share some of that writing here, either during the two weeks or at the end. Meanwhile, I need the freedom to explore this new topic without anyone looking over my shoulder to read it. Recently Substack Reads turned me on to a conversation between two young writers, Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez. This quotation is what inspired me to dig into my new topic at a level that I am not (yet) ready to share:

I want to believe I have a great book in me. I have no idea whether what I am writing here, or what I will write between June 17 and June 30, 2023, will become that great book. All I can do is sit down at my desk every day and write until my inner judge, critic and censor finally look away and I spill the beans to myself. Then I can decide if I am ready to share it with you.

I will be back. A hui hou dear readers. Please read some really good writing somewhere today. And tomorrow. And the day after that.

Beth

Memories flooded my brain this week. Specifically, memories of May 25, 1998, and of the Memorial Day Monday two years prior to that. I have yet to tell the story of May 25, 1998 in these pages. And that story seems to have something to tell me about my recent transformational journey. So here we go!

Now. Monday morning, May 25, 2026. I pick up the phone to call the Reverend Rosetta Dubois-Gadson, a phone call prompted by news of a family memberʻs passing and by these anniversaries. This Memorial Day marked the 30th anniversary of Rosettaʻs son/my brother Craigʻs Homegoing celebration.1 Craig would have been 65 now. The thought of Craig being 65 seems impossible; I canʻt be that old.

The conversation with Rosetta was not one of sadness, however. It was filled with laughter, wisdom, and love. Laughter at the joy of hearing each otherʻs voices. Louder laughter as our conversation veered into ever more outrageous territory (ventures into outrageous territory being a perk of the wisdom and freedom that comes with Age).

Thirty-some years ago, our 18-year age gap - and the smaller five-year gap between me and Rosettaʻs son - placed us in more of a mother-daughter relationship. Now that age gap has become inconsequential. As Rosetta reminded me again this week, the moment we met we knew that God (whom she refers to as “She”) put us in each otherʻs path to be Sisters.

During our call a neighbor knocked on her door and let themselves in. “As-salamu alaykum,” Rosetta the AME minister greeted them, to my silent delight. “Can I call you to come back in a few minutes?”, she continued, “Iʻm on the phone with my friend Beth. I married her 28 years ago.” They must have looked perplexed. “What I mean is I officiated at her wedding!” she laughed.

Twenty-eight years ago on Memorial Day Monday, Rosetta and I entered Central Park from Fifth Avenue through an unpredicted and dense fog, wearing bright ceremonial dresses, carrying bouquets of spring flowers and fragrant lei. A morning of torrential rains and lingering showers had driven sunbathers and skateboarders out of the Park, despite it being a holiday, the unofficial first day of summer in New York City. The sound of a flute drew us securely through the misty Ramble to the bottom of its waterfall.

No one had asked Premik to play. He simply showed up with his flute for our last minute wedding in the Park. Best Man Carman Moore had composed a processional and a recessional, but those would be played via boombox once the wedding party arrived. Meanwhile Premik serenaded the gathered crowd, waiting as the Groom (aka Swiss Guy2) and Best Man Carman3 approached from the West, and the women of the wedding party walked with me from the East.

The scene put me in mind of The Magic Flute. Or at least some level of it, the level that resonated with the story in my mind of a Marriage Arranged in Switzerland.4 Love at first sight guided by external forces, trials for the lovebirds to overcome on their spiritual journey through a magical land between the Sun and the Moon.

Indifferent weather Gods, the Fates, Craig haunting me to destroy my minimal and hastily applied makeup - some combination of forces conjured up a mystical sacred space in the middle of Central Park on a day it should have been filled with thousands of people reveling in the first sunshine of summer.

Backing up…My plan was to just get married at City Hall, since the Swiss Guyʻs fiancé visa gave us a tight deadline. I picked out the cutest cream leather mini dress to wear. When at the last minute Carman and the Swiss Guy came up with the Central Park plan, I was reluctant.

Still, they were sooo excited and I relented. They assured me they would handle the planning. My only jobs were to pick outfits for bride and groom, and find someone to officiate. I dressed us in colors belonging to Oxum, acknowledging her presence in the tumbling waters. Rosetta readily agreed to marry us.

In the end, nothing went as “planned” but all seemed to be “arranged.” We entered the marital state via a mini-journey through a scene set with mystical images - a waterfall tumbling down boulders, a mist-filled forest, the haunting sounds of a Magic Flute, lithe dancers from faraway places. Our witnesses formed a circle of unlikely characters, some standing, some perched on rocks, their wedding-fancy dress comically accessorized with rubber boots and umbrellas. Given the impossibility of the picnic planned for a wedding reception, we brought the food and rain-soaked guests home with us, crowded joyously into our unadorned, unprepared, ordinary life in a still-gritty, ungentrified Meatpacking District loft.

Forward to today. Iʻm thinking about my descent into the Grand Canyon, flowing and floating on and across the Mighty Colorado River with its ability to upset and defy plans. Ushered into the midnight of my birthday by the only wild rainstorm of the trip, tent flapping as if to take flight on the wind. Arriving at the Confluence on my birthday, moved as if the place and its story were a signpost. The day following brought the trial of an arduous climb and the vulnerable emotions conjured in leaving the sacred space of the depths to pass through a liminal space of transition back to the ordinary world.

Like my wedding day, this also will live in memory as a seemingly “arranged” journey through a scene set with mystical, unfathomable images.

In form - there were all the elements of a classic Heroʻs Journey.

The end of a Heroʻs Journey is not a conquest, a trophy held high, an individual victory. Much like my wedding in Central Park, a Heroʻs return marks the beginning of a new life, but not an individual new life. The Hero returns with a gift acquired through their trials on the journey, a gift meant to be shared with their community. The point of the Heroʻs Journey is a healing of the collective through the breaking, breakthrough, and healing of an individual.

Iʻm still unpacking the gifts I was given in my time on the River and on the ascent to the Rim World. How blessed I was by the Guides and Companions with whom I shared River Time. How blessed I was to have community, family, travel across oceans and continents to welcome me back, to discern the gifts of service I have to share.

Ora Iê Iê Ô!"

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Last week I posted a poem with “Switchbacks” in the title which may or may not hark back to certain topics. This week, I am reposting the post I published in April, the day before I left for the Grand Canyon. That post ends with a suggestion we check back in when I returned. I checked back in with the post this week and realized my subconscious had done something remarkable. Here we go…

I had strong hopes and intentions, even to the point of ambitions, for my Freeflow Grand Canyon course/adventure.

I also had some less weighty, more playful hopes and intentions. Like seeing the night sky full of stars from a really different point on the planet. Like wearing my late motherʻs squash blossom necklace at my post-adventure birthday party, a piece I rarely have occasion to wear in Hawaiʻi. Like seeing cactus bloom in the desert for the first time in many years.

Thatʻs why I chose the photo you will find near the bottom of my reposted essay below. An essay and a photo that were not in my conscious mind when, for the second poetry exercise we were assigned, we were asked to write a persona poem, to pick something from the natural world around us and explore what it is saying.

The example we were given was Salt Song, a poem by Arthur Sze. A poem in one of the volumes we were assigned for pre-course reading. A poem I recognized, having re-read it several times because salt is culturally important in Hawaiʻi. In the workshop that day on the River, I was intrigued - but not surprised - to hear how salt is of similar importance in Diné culture.

That day I saw the first flowering cactus of the trip. I wanted to know what Cactus Flower had to say to me. As I thought about the poem, I also wanted to reference Salt Song in some way. I was struck by the intimacy of voice in that poem, the way Salt is talking directly to an individual person, inviting that person into a physical, sensual experience of it. A strong image from what I had learned about Salt that day in the Canyon also found its way into my scribbled first draft. That image contained the essence of the message Cactus Flower had for me, everything I needed to understand about the process I had already set in motion for rejoining the Rim World.

Here is my current edited version of that poem. If you want to also re-read the pre-trip essay, you can keep reading below it.

CACTUS FLOWER 

You came looking for me
across the big salty water flying
across the land of city lights
blossoming without season.

You came looking for me
across the steaming cracks bouncing
across hot black asphalt river
spilling into horizon.

You came looking for me
across the cold rapids breaking 
across the cool green river flats 
trembling along warm bleached sand.

You came looking for me 
in the desert. Parched.
Parched as if the spike of my defenses 
stands between you and what you seek.

Bend close.
Look at me.

My spines protect a tender core
	birthing buds of pink joy 
	emerging and
	unfurling between us

I see you here.
Bend close.

Bend until you hear 
 	the round first laugh of my blossom
	calling you near
	to wonder at the improbable beauty
of who we together unfolding are.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A REPOSTING OF WHAT I PUBLISHED ON APRIL 5, 2026, THE DAY BEFORE I LEFT FOR THE GRAND CANYON. BOLDFACE ADDED.

Back “in the day” - meaning in my 20s when my first husband and I were summiting Coloradoʻs Fourteeners; and in my 30s where this Memoir began with my travel to the Himalayas, back in that day I knew nothing of VO2 max or HRV. The very basic metric I knew was to count heartbeats for 15 seconds as they ticked by on my very first Casio digital watch, and multiple by four. I measured the level of my training by heartbeat and feel. Trusting - as I did when I first found myself at 18,000 feet above sea level at Shoto Terdrom - that the body would respond and become stronger.1

I found trusting my body harder at almost-70 than it was in my 20s and 30s. Instead, I put my trust in the training programs designed by ChatGPT and Coach Bill - and found myself in a bit of a panic during what were supposed to be my final weeks of hardest training. Two rounds of Kona low storms brought dangerous conditions, with government emergency management officials (and fallen trees and power poles) mandating that I stay off the roads. Stuck at home, my brain was spinning. I was falling short on my training goals! I felt like a slug, like my energy levels were as low as the storm system.

The feedback from others, including my trainer, was pretty much the opposite of my panicky self-perception. “Why are you worried? You know youʻve got this! You have more energy than much younger people do - and you have the mental toughness that is what it will come down to at the top of that trail.”

I have already written about how important it is to get external assessments from trusted, competent partners (human or horse), because thatʻs how our self-assessment sharpens, how our self-judgments become a more rounded, grounded picture.2 I also needed to focus less on proving something to my Garmin watch, and more on what my actual body knows. I easily cover distances and elevation changes that challenged me five months ago. I can touch my deltoid or my quadricep and feel the strength those muscles have gained.

Gradually I find myself getting more and more okay with “whatever the weather and the days and my body allow will be enough.” Acceptance.

Thatʻs on the physical conditioning side. Then there was the curriculum. I have been anxious about my level of preparation for the mental component of the journey ahead.

There were a lot of books on the lists from Freeflow Institute and from the writing instructor. Some prose and a lot of poetry. I typically read prose quickly - and in the case of The Emerald Mile, I went back and read it a second time as soon as I finished. I wanted to absorb the history of the Colorado River and what I will see next week, todayʻs Colorado River as she passes through the Grand Canyon.

I also read many of the poems in the assigned books multiple times. I re-read the poems that resonated the most. I re-read the poems that challenged me the most. After I read the anthology of Diné writing to get history and context for the poems, I read some of them for a third or fourth time.

Then I got a grip.

Have you ever learned a new language by immersion?3 There is no way to prepare for it; you just show up. Here was another opportunity to let go and trust. Immersing myself in the books will be no substitute for living the journey. Just as I had to let go of trying to understand what I will experience in advance of being in the Canyon, of being on its calm and ferocious river during a crisp spring day, and under its bright stars on a waning moon night, I had to let go of becoming a poet through a couple of months of reading. I can declare myself a dignified beginner4 and entrust myself to a skillful teacher.

Having come to some degree of Acceptance for the state of my body and mind - I came to wonder the most important question. What about my Spirit?

Am I ready for this journey spiritually, existentially?

Sigh.

There are so many milestones Iʻm feeling. Turning 70. The deaths of a couple of ex-lovers in the past 12 months and re-assessing what our stories meant and mean to me. Observing cycles and gaining new perspectives on events told in this memoir like the World Cup being hosted in the U.S.A5. And the installation of a new Archbishop of Canterbury6.

And so much water! Rains. Floods. Rivers. Tears.

My hope is that by embarking on an adventure outside of my comfort zone, seen through through the lens and form and gift of poetry that is part of it, I can make these bits and pieces into something new, possibly something with a thread of transcendence.

“Am I ready?”, I ask again. Are WE ready?

Are we all ready to let the buds of spring unfold into an exuberant summer of new possibility and realized dreams?

Letʻs check in together three weeks from now.

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Itʻs been lovely to have the luxury of musing about Time and about Age, while (metaphorically) soaking in the cleansing water of a spring-fed brackish muliwai, a pool of lingering warm images from eight days in the Canyon.

Inevitably the time comes for the main event, a high dive off a nearby cliff into the churning waters of a week of writing poetry along a life-changing River.

Which is to say - if there are insights and answers to be found to the Three Questions I took with me to the River, the place I need to be looking is in the poems that I scribbled in the sandy, smudged pages of my journal.

This week I bring you the story of a poem and the answers it had for me - tentative, open ended answers with more questions folded inside them. The poem is titled Switchbacks in Time and todayʻs writing will also take some switchbacks.1

As I disclosed last week, the third of the Three Questions I brought to the trip was about Age, and what I could learn from the experience of Deep Time and Ancient Places I would find along the River, in the Canyon.

That was the third Question. The first Question, however, began with this statement:

“A phrase I heard spoken earlier this year at a panel: the answer to every question is ʻāīna.”

<switchback alert>

If the word ʻāina is not familiar to you,

or if you are not sure how I am using it,

a term much more complex than just the simple translation as “land”,

I recommend you back up to read this essay: “Another Look at Place.”

<switching back>

…the answer to every question is ʻāīna.”

That statement struck me and stuck with me because the context, the topic of the panel discussion I attended in March 2025, was not one for which that answer would have been obvious. It was the phrase with which the moderator summarized a panel whose topic was “Redeeming Māhū: Deconstructing & Reconstructing Māhū with Hawaiian Mindfulness.”2

The Question that was on my mind six months later as I filled out my Freeflow Institute application, the Question held in mind to explore on the Grand Canyon floating-writing course to which I was accepted, was:

What does that Answer mean to me, how does it guide me?”3

<switching back>

Our days on the Colorado River began with the sound of a conch alerting us that coffee was ready. Many of us required that hit of caffeine to face the task of breaking down our tents and stuffing bedding and belongings back into dry bags for the dayʻs journey. Usually we had time after breakfast to gather in a circle for our daily poetry-writing assignment (sometimes the poetry workshop happened at lunch or in the afternoon - we were on River Time.)

This particular day, as I recall it, was the day of another fellow travelerʻs birthday.

Or maybe it was a day before.

It was the day we camped at Saddleback Canyon.

Or maybe it was a day after.

On this particular day, the two metal boxes that constituted libraries, one belonging to Freeflow Institute, one belonging to the outfitter Canyon Explorations, were open in the middle of the circle. The first instruction was to pick a book at random. Then to turn to random pages in the random book, and without looking, point with your finger at a random word. Write it down. Repeat until Time was called.

I should have taken my Time.

I ended up with almost thirty words written in my journal.

Almost thirty words randomly selected from a randomly selected book. What was not random (in the way that many of the events in this Substack memoir do not seem random): it was a book about the history and geology of the Grand Canyon that fell into my hand. Exactly what Iʻd asked to explore in my Time and Age Question!

The next task was to use those random words, in my case almost thirty random words, to create a poem in which each line began and ended with the same word, the same one of those random words from the random pages of a randomly selected book.4

The first of the almost thirty words in my journal was Araucarioxyton.

Araucarioxyton.

I kid you not.

My mind went blank at Araucarioxyton. With all the rest of our daily poetry-writing exercises, I at least managed to quickly crank out a not-completely-shitty first draft.

With the Araucarioxyton-and-29-other-words exercise, the page remained blank.

For the entire day and the entire night, my mind and the page remained blank.

Over the following few days I doggedly returned to the exercise, trying out a handful of sentences. Then experimenting with a few stanzas, different variations on a starting point with one or another of the words. Four pages of false starts in between four more pages of other poetry exercises and fragments of dreams recorded before the sound of the conch drove thoughts of anything other than coffee from my mind.

Finally, at the bottom of a page of dream fragments, fragments of a dream in search of interpretation, I recalled the First Question.

And the ultimate Answer to every Question.

ʻĀina.

And just like that, I knew where to begin.

This, in somewhat edited, polished but probably not yet final, form - is that poem.

Switchbacks in Time

After all, the answer to every question is ʻāīna; ʻāina answers the riddle of this poem after all.

[some definitions]
Seawater is also ʻāina; always above below or beside land is seawater.
Cambrian – the Age of seas above land; trilobite crawled the Cambrian.
Trilobite crawled the land below seas; now land above imprisons fossil trilobite.
Brachiopods - two shells fit above and below; bivalves- two shells fit beside, more common than the brachiopods.
Pennsylvanian – the Age of seas and land beside; some kin crawled from sea to land beside in the Pennsylvanian.

[an aside beside]
Cousin Tom the Pennsylvanian lived in Albuquerque; 
or was it Santa Fe where he lived, my cousin?
Albuquerque where my mother the Pennsylvanian escaped to college; 
it was later Tom lived in Santa Fe, after Mom in Albuquerque.

[eons earlier...]
Plants colonized the land; cousins of trilobites and brachiopods crawled after colonizing plants.
Araucarioxyton rose high above land; the Arizona state fossil, rainbow canyon colored wood of Araucarioxyton.
Herbivorous dinosaur found shade beneath storied Araucarioxyton; in Jurassic 65% of dinosaurs were herbivorous.

[eons later...]
Mastodons were herbivorous too; endemic to the lands of this continent were browsing mastodons.
Came later still the humans; omnivores, hungry, migrating across the lands of this continent they came.
Navajo ancestors may have seen the mastodons; mastodons and mammoths migrating through lands of Navajo.

[now i wonder...]
Was climatic change a concern of mastodon; the human hunter surely was.
Complete extinction took 80% of our animal kin; 80% when the cycle of Climatic Change and hunting was complete.
Different traits and accidents of fate, DNA mutation and adaptation, created different
         sidelines to genealogies; kin survived on diverse sidelines. 
Worldwide, plant and animal and human kin survived Climatic Change; 20% of us  survived, worldwide.

[now i know...]
Along this River, Time moves backwards; along this River, Time riffles and rapids and flats along.
Sluggish waters eddy my perception; River Time eddies me, sluggish.
Retreated from the rim world; rim world time from my mind retreated.
Every poem and hug and salty snack and giant splash and every
         replica of granary and photo and song and watercolor replica
jacketing the experience for careful transport; fragile, as precious fossils travel to the      rim in careful jacketing.

The answer to my every question is ʻāina; River is this ʻĀinaʻs The.

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Poetry Brain is a virus caught on the River infecting all of my writing at the moment. It latches onto words and patterns and anomalies. I fear this Substack is like a petri dish encouraging its growth. Please stay along for the ride. Very likely there will be both calm stretches and wild rapids ahead.

Age.

Last week I wrote about Time and to state the obvious, Age as a noun is a measure of Time. Age - a point or period in Time to which we attach meaning, meanings, about which I can sometimes obsess. Age is a verb as well - a process for me as a subject or a determination by me for an object.

Age.

The Freeflow Institute application to join the cohort that would descend into the Grand Canyon asked applicants to share three questions we intended to contemplate during the Canyon and River experience. One of my questions was about Age.2

Specifically, given that I was choosing this experience to mark my 70th birthday, I was interested in how the experience of Deep Time and ancient places might transform and inform my sense of self at this Age and in the coming years.

Age. 70.

It is not uncommon for people to tell me I do not look 70. I do not know what 70 is supposed to look like, although I do know that it typically looks older on us fair skinned folks than it does on my friends blessed with more melanin. Especially in an “Age” where the 30-somethings at the salon are getting injections of filler, where Zoom settings remove your wrinkles and add makeup with a couple of quick clicks, I have lost my bearings on what 70 or 35 is supposed to look like.

Whatever you look like unadorned is what you will look like in the Canyon. The sparse eyebrows and sun damage? No sense bringing an eyebrow pencil or foundation to be washed off with the first big splash of 50-degree water as the oarsman steers into the waves of a riffle just for fun. Within days the skin of your face and hands and ankles and any other part of your body exposed even a tiny bit will be chafed, peeling, blistered or some combination thereof, despite your attempt to hold it at bay with copious amounts of various salves. Exfoliation of the skin is a constant reminder that the Who you were in the Rim World is peeling away in the freshness of river flow.3

And everyone looks beautiful, alive, radiant, on the River.

Age. 70.

Now people feel emboldened to ask me whether I feel 70, or how it feels to be 70. Seriously? I have never been 70 before, I was 69 until a few days ago, how would I recognize when I feel exactly 70? I know it is not the same as 35 felt. Coach Garmin clocks my Fitness Age at somewhere between 60 and 62.5 depending on the week. Is that how old I feel? To “age” myself as a transitive verb - I just puzzle over the scale.

Scale.

Have you ever traveled with a geologist? Iʻm thinking about another story I have yet to tell here, of traveling by private train from Tucson to Mexico City through the Copper Canyon on the Second Mexican Mining Rail Excursion, imagined by the Mining Club of the Southwest in 1981 as a way to mark the 80th anniversary of the original Mexican Mining Rail Excursion4. On that trip I learned that geologists are always laying their rock hammer on or next to the object or formation they are about to photograph as a way of visually noting scale. I still joke “scale” out loud at random moments and find my companions clueless at the reference.

Sorry. I digress.

Or perhaps not. This question of scale, of units of measurement, is critical. Arbitrary River Units, rock hammer units, love affair units, named generations that only begin with the Greatest and go down from there, the rate of growth of a humanʻs whiskers or a horseʻs teeth, metric or Imperial or US customary units (I could write a whole essay or poem on colonialism right there). We structure entire lives, from routine daily actions to the most consequential decisions, around our belief in the meaning of units and the significance of scale.

My question for the Grand Canyon was birthed from this impulse to measure, to find some improved scale to meaningfully measure myself, my new Age. Could the height of Marble Canyonʻs walls or the rating of a rapid called House Rock at various cfs flows help me understand how to scale my human life? Did refreshing my memory that in the Cambrian Age sea covered everything, that in the Pennsylvanian Age creatures moved to the land, that the newest layers of rock are on top, could those facts about Age and Ages give me any guidance for understanding my place in the arc of a single human life, generically and specifically?

In Poetry Brain mode, it did. It does.

Iʻll unpack more of that next week, and hope you are curious enough to check back in then. Thanks for being here with me this week and for reading to the end.

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Definitely not the same “me/I” as I was when I left. Don’t have a lot of linear words for it yet. But you will be among the first to know as I sort it out.

Time.

Friday September 19, 2025, just before the Equinox (autumn in the northern hemisphere), I got the acceptance email. Welcome to Freeflow Institute, it said.

Joy!

Panic.

I had a little over six months to prepare to hike out the Bright Angel Trail. Still, that seemed doable, so I procrastinated. Another month went by before I joined a gym. Another six weeks before I actually asked Coach Bill for help. That left four months, sixteen short weeks to train properly for a six- or seven-hour hike, 7.5 miles, 4460 feet of elevation gain, 30 lb pack. I studied the diagram and repeated the stats like a mantra until the day there was nothing left to do but fly.

Fourteen days from the flight out of Kona Keāhole Airport to touching down again on that beloved lava. Eight days in the Canyon. Reminiscent of my time in Tibet, the transformative journey with which I began this memoir.1

I returned from The River and The Canyon bewildered by Time. Twenty-eight weeks, eight or fourteen days, six or seven hours, 1.7 billion years. Those are the time frames with which I wrestle.

I am disoriented, possibly possessed, by Phenylethylamine, Norepinephrine, Dopamine, Serotonin, the chemicals of falling in love. Each photo dropped into the Cohortʻs shared album brings a rush of sensation.

It might take me two years or two decades to unpack the two-week experience. I refuse to succumb to “workshop syndrome,” the phenomenon where just like New Yearʻs Resolutions, the New Me fades to the Old Me before the next new moon. I don’t want to have just fallen in love or lust with an attractive but soon to be forgotten crush, empty promises of a new life smudged on the pages of my journal. I want to be enduringly transformed by the depth of connection and commitment and wonder and beauty and balance and fears found and faced in the Canyon. I want to stay enchanted and bonded. To The Wild. To the Sacred. To the Vulnerable. To Words of Poetry and Magic and to All That Is Beyond Words.

Time. Our River Guides refused to acknowledge clock time. Instructions were given to us in Arbitrary River Units.

Days blended together. We conferred with each other, uncertain to which day of the week, to which day of the trip this moment belonged. We charted our progress on a map, counting up the river miles, counting down the days of the journey. We traveled backwards through the geological time through which we floated, from the rainbow colors of accessible, easy to love Bright Angel Shale to the stark black unmoved god of Vishnu Schist.

We tried to grasp the Deep Time of the Canyon’s geology against the consequently unimaginable, unimaginably short time of changes due to politics and bridges and dams.

I am still not over my shock at The Great Unconformity. A billion - year gap in the record of Time. Where do a billion years go when they go missing? Clearly not to the Grand Canyon to enjoy a challenging adventure.

And why?

During our challenging but limited in contemporary time adventure we wrote poems. We read our words out loud in the evenings, read words by the red light of our headlamps, raw words, of the moment, scribed by our pens, not yet polished by our minds. One memorable phrase, plucked from a poem written by the member of our temporary tribe who had traveled the farthest: “ephemeral eternity.” It stuck. A catch phrase, an inside joke, a touchstone for our Cohort.

Ephemeral eternity is the long moment of waiting as the raft crosses the threshold, into the triangle of calmly flowing water sweeping everything and anything into the rapid, line chosen, committed.

Ephemeral eternity is the next moment, your paddle raised to its apex, your eyes registering only gaping air beneath, the eternity of breath held until without conscious thought your arms move to slice into the rising wave and again and again until time reasserts its ticking on the other side, six paddles raised to salute in an adrenaline-fueled toast.

Ephemeral eternity is the moment your grit-reddened eyes meet deep brown eyes across the circle and pre-verbal communication draws tears or leaves you with a hundred questions about the hundred ancestral conversations of understanding gratitude wonder and promise wordlessly exchanged.

Ephemeral eternity begins the moment your Garmin watch battery, whose charge you carefully hoarded across eight days so that damn thing could coach you up the Canyon walls, dies one-third of the way along the trail and there is nothing to do but laugh at how the Universe-Guides-Kūpuna chose to remind you of your intention. Of your commitment to walk the path as it has been walked since prehistory, which is to say as a pilgrimage, a sacred journey, a consciously chosen trial with all the breathing and pain and eventual exhilaration and wonder of birth, a re-birth, an opportunity to emerge wiser and braver, maybe to do better when you rejoin your community of human and more-than-human kin in this new incarnation.

Ephemeral eternity is where I sit now, between words and worlds, waiting for answers and directions, maybe even the right questions, to be clear.

Ephemeral eternity is the whole point of a good poem.

I donʻt know what ephemeral eternity means to a raven or a river, to a schist or a sheep, to the spirits of ancestral puebloans or to a newborn child. I think it is the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. I think what comes next is the laundry. A whole stack of sand-filled, salt-stained laundry.

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What you get today - recapped for myself as much as for you my dear readers, is the documentation of where I was at physically, mentally and spiritually in the weeks leading up to the trip of a lifetime. Unsurprisingly, the preparatory reading began to seep into my “real life.”

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Wild(er)ness, Tameness and Consciousness - A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Grateful in the Storm - and floods

Foreground and Background - and finding poetry on a Wednesday

Integrity - for sure a theme of this adventure

Discipline - a sibling to Integrity

Gyms, Headstands and Me - goals!

Flash Flood Watch - fire and rain

Acceptance - it had to be enough!

And there we are, the final days before my mythical descent and rebirth. Stay tuned for the next chapter…

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From the end of November 2025 forward….

Thatʻs How the Light Gets In - the poetry of Leonard Cohen and prophetic voices

Your One Wild and Precious Life - Mary Oliver, of course

December Memories and Musings - my December 2025 answer to Mary Oliverʻs question

Maybe the Solstice - maybe an encounter with an ancestor

December Memories and Musings III - it took me three essays to get there

Two Different Ways to Tell Your Story - linearity and circularity

And beginning 2026 with a poem:

The rest arrives next week, before I begin to unpack who I will be after the Grand. Stay tuned!

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