What Fills You With Liveliness?

 

“What fills you with so much liveliness that you want to do the work yourself?”—Jane Friedman

 

This morning as I stood at the sink with my hands in soapy dishwasher, an image flashed in my head. It was another day with my hands in soapy dishwater.

I was in Hawaii and worried that we were on the verge of running out of water. It freaked me so much that I get images of it to this day—and I’m not in Hawaii. I’m in Oregon where everyone in the family would laugh when I say I conserve water, for I have left the water running more than once, but hey, that’s when I left my mind someplace else.

In Hawaii we used a water catchment system where rainwater was collected from the house’s roof, shuttled into a pipe, and carried to a storage tank in the backyard. From the tank it flowed magically into faucets in the house. We had hot water too, after we replaced the rusted-out water heater with a new on-demand Propane heater that gave us instant hot water. On the first day on our new property, though, I took a cold shower in the sunshine in the yard on the glorious green grass.  (Using plastic tubs of cold water.) I left invigorated as though I’d had a brisk swim. However, I didn’t want to do that every day, and Daughter Dear said, “One of the great pleasures of life is soaking in a hot bath.”

All this water shortage was El Nino’s fault.

El Nino is a complex weather condition related to the wind and the ocean water. During an El Nino, California gets the rain, and Hawaii gets the drought.

Hawaii has a solution:

They provide a free water fill station with enormous nozzles that will fill a tank quickly—that is if you have the capability of hauling water. We put a small tank in the back of the pickup for that purpose. See why I love our pickup truck—for moving, hauling garbage to the free dump, and for being my office on wheels. It’s a general work horse.

During the rain shortage, I heard the rattling of a gigantic water truck delivering water to the neighbors on the ten acres next to ours. They had horses and thus a great need for water. That showed that you can have water delivered by the truck load to fill your tank.

We added a second storage tank on our property which Husband Dear and a helper built. After leveling the ground, adding a sand base and a plastic liner, Husband Dear and assistant built the tank up to eight feet. Husband Dear worked from inside the tank, and with the helper outside, they built up the tank using metal panels. That left Huband Dear inside a tank with a ladder being the only way out. Or a helicopter.

The ladder worked.

I wrote about our experience on the Big Island in a small book, The Frog’s Song, published by Regal Publishing. It should have a subtitle like “Living off the grid for one year.”

No, The Frog’s Song is not a children’s book. It is the story of one husband, one daughter, one seven-month-old grandson, two dogs, and two cats, who took leave of their senses, put their house up for sale, and moved to a tropical Island.

Pila of Hawaii calls moving to the Island a “Sojourn of Rejuvenation and Discovery.” 

Pila was convinced that Hawaii is where an individual must physically connect within a kind of initiation to prepare for the turbulent years ahead.

Daughter Dear and I felt “called” to the Island, we didn’t know anything about the sojourn, it simply seemed imperative that we move there. A year later, it seemed imperative that we leave. We moved to California for two years recovering from our “Sojourn,” before moving back to Oregon. We kept questioning what we felt on the Island, why we had such energy shifts, and why some places felt good while others felt odd. And then we learned that the Island is often called the Dirty Laundry Island because your issues come up to be healed. Whoa!

 (It turned out that leaving the Island was necessary for my husband’s health—more in the book.)

At the City of Refuse—one of the most tranquil places I have ever encountered, we heard an elder tell his story. As a child an elder sat down a few children and asked them, “What lies beyond the horizon?

“The sun, the water, nothing.”

To them the Island was their entire world.

“No,” said the elder, “There is life beyond the horizon.”

 I took that as a message and another reason to leave the Island, especially with a year-old child. Don’t stay cooped up on an Island when there is life out there.

More on The City of Refuge in the book.

I wanted to use The Frog’s Song as a title for my book after drawing the frog card three times from the Medicine Cards deck and learned that “The frog’s song calls the rain that settles the dust for our journey.”

To our surprise, the Coqui frogs of Hawaii sang us to sleep at night by singing their name, “Co-Qui.” To me they sounded like birds. Others on the Island consider them to be “Noise pollution,” and I guess in large numbers they can be quite loud, but I loved ours.  And I had to laugh when we returned to Oregon where at night, we heard the booming sound of a Bullfrog. (Trumpeting our return?)

“On the Big Island,” wrote Pila, “you are on ‘new turf,’ and the comfort zone known as your ordinary world no longer applies…You are at one of the few doorways in your reality where the Earth liquefies, and nothing is as it may seem.”  That is why Pila feels it is paramount for individuals to come to the Big Island and experience the energy in person at least once.

When Captain Cook asked the natives where they lived, and they said Hawaii, he thought they were ignorant savages. What they meant was that I live in Hawaii, “The Breath of the Creator.”

“Ha” = breath

“Wai” = life force, the water

“I” = I

“I live in the supreme wellspring of the life force of creation which is within me and all I behold is Paradise.”

Some say that Hawaii is not an easy place to live, for if you go there to run away from something, that something will present itself. Yep. And I know that the “call” to Hawaii, is a call not so much to a physical place, but to home—to the breath of the creator.

 

To say “ALOHA” is to stand in the presence of the breath, spirit and light, and to acknowledge and recognize all of this in another.” Pila of Hawaii.

Aloha,

Jo

All this from washing dishes this morning. 

 

Click for link to amazon 

 

 

Stacks and Miracles

 

This looks like the drafts for one manuscript.

However, this morning my desk looked more like this:

One of the advantages of cleaning a drawer—this was a file drawer where I had slipped in receipts through a slot I made by leaving the drawer slightly open is that I find something of value.

Surprise! A great accumulation of papers, receipts, car repairs, and health information were stacked up in a great pile inside the file drawer. The pile expanded when I took it inside the house to the dining room table. But surprise, surprise, I found a paper I was looking for, and while sorting through my stack, I found this:

From Desmond Tutu:

"We have to stop pulling people out of the water. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in."

Right on, I thought, remembering the conversation I watched some time ago of Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of South Africa, and The Dalai Lama. Those two clearly loved each other and were as mischievous as six-year-olds, teasing each other relentlessly while sharing their spiritual practices. At one point, one poked the other and said, "Act like a holy man." Tutu got the Dalai Lama to take communion, and you couldn't help but laugh when The Archbishop persuaded the Dalai Lama to dance.

The Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, an advocate for civil rights, is married, has four children, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his role in anti-apartheid. In 2009, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1989, Tutu spoke out about the Israeli Palestinian conflict, asserting the right of the state of Israel to its territorial integrity and security against attacks by those who would deny its right to exist. And now, 35 years later, we still have that conflict. Sigh.

Yet those two spiritual friends, after what they had gone through, got together in a spirit of joy and colluded to write THE BOOK OF JOY: How to Find Joy in the face of suffering.

Well, I have to buy that one even though it costs 16 bucks on Kindle.

When Tutu asked the Dalai Lama how long he had been exiled, he answered 35 years, then added:  "There is a Tibetan is saying, "Whenever you have friends, that's your country, and whenever you receive love, that's your home."

Thanks for reading. Thus, I have a reason to write this blog, find that quote to give you, and find "The Book of Joy," which I intend to read.

You see, miracles happen every day. (And all the pages are in their own little file folder.)

Mark Twain's Tips For living a Kick-Ass Life

 

 

I wanted to quote Mark Twain in my book The Frog's Song, but the editor kept taking them out.

 

Publishing companies must be cautious about quotations and have permission to use them. I thought that Twain had been quoted so many times he was public domain. 

 

Nope. Only books before 1923 are public domain. 

 

After that, one must have permission to quote them. (I guess Hal Holbrook acquired special permission to do his one-man show on Mark Twain.) Twain's quotes are all over the place, but not from the book MARK TWAIN IN Hawaii, Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands. Hawaii in the 1860s. It was copyrighted in 1987 by A. Grove Day, and thus was off limits for quoting.

 

 

The book MARK TWAIN IN HAWAII was compiled from the series of 25 articles he wrote during his four-month visit to the islands. He was 31-years old when he got off the ship in Honolulu on March 18, 1866, and had only recently adopted the pen name Mark Twain. Twain was not a novice but not famous either when he landed the exotic assignment of writing a series of articles for the most influential newspaper in the American West, The Sacramento Union. 

 

  

In a letter to his friend Charles Warren Stoddard in Hawaii (Octobers 26, 1881, Twain wrote: "If only the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, beech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom all thanks belong, for theses privileges, and never house-keep any more…what I have always longed for was the privilege of living forever away up upon one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea."

 

I considered that book to be such a gift. I often wondered if the previous owner left it behind by accident or design. I found it in the Macadamia Nut processing shed behind our house. We processed no macadamia nuts during our stint. The only macadamia nuts I saw on the property we bought at the store.

 

We used the shed's wire shelving, meant for drying macadamia nuts, for storage, as we had moved from a large house into a small one. The much-needed extra space was a godsend, as our two washing machines (daughter's and ours) and one dryer stayed there the entire nine months of our stay. We preserved electricity (solar power) for more important things, like lights, the water pump, computers, and watching DVDs at night. Daughter and I, with little grandson in tow, used the Laundromat, where water and electricity wasn't an issue, and my little grandson watched Finding Nemo for the first time. 

 

We have a washing machine and a dryer in the house now and abundant water and electricity. Oh, happy day!

 

I've told you all this before? Oh, sorry. It all came back to me this morning as I sorted papers and found Mark Twain's Tips for Living a Kick-Ass Life, by Henrik Edberg, dated May 16, 2008. 

 

Edberg dated his article, May 16, 2008. That was before we moved to Hawaii in December of 2009, when I had no idea Twain had written about the islands. Neither did I did not know that his 25 articles are the very best ever written about Hawaii. Finding such gems as Edberg’s article is why I need to attempt organization once in a while.

 

I won't copy everything Edberg wrote, but I will list the tips.

 

Approve of yourself. 

"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."

Your limitations may just be in your mind. "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

 

Lighten up and have some fun.

"Humor is mankind's greatest blessing."

 

Let go of anger. 

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."

 

Release yourself from entitlement.

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

 

If you're taking a different path, prepare for reactions.

"A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."

 

Keep your focus steadily on what you want.

"Drag your thoughts away from your troubles...by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it."

 

Don't focus so much on making yourself feel good.

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."

 

Do what you want to do.

"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." 

 

Check out Aloha tee-shirts on Etsy:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheFrogsSong

 

 

 Aloha.

"Hello, Goodbye, I love you."

"Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy."

 

Humuhumununakiapua'a, Hawaii's state fish. We practiced a lot trying to pronounce that one.

After an 8-year term he was demoted for a time, but has been reinstated. Now he swims with stately vigor.

 

 

 

 

 This notebook will lay flat which means it won't fight you by closing the pages as you are placing passwords of whatever on the lined pages. I like my "Chirp" notebook for it has quotes, but I prefer a spiral binding. This notebook has a lined interior, no quotes, and is available on Etsy.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheFrogsSong

Aloha,

Jo