Is This Your Lucky Day?

This morning I reached into my sock drawer and pulled out two black socks from the pile of black stockings. And by some quirk of fate, I had a pair--they matched. Now, that is as rare as a mouse who while playing on the keyboard, managed to type out a complete sentence.

 

Does that mean this is a lucky day?

 

Do you believe in synchronicity? Or the Muse or that stories are circling in the either and are determined to find a teller? Steven Pressfield tells the story of Liz Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) meeting a fellow writer and found that the story she began years ago but dismissed was picked up by this new friend who lived miles away from her.

 

My daughter said we should complete a story we began some time ago before someone else picks it up. I’ve heard of this before. The Red Balloon was written by two people almost simultaneously but was printed by the author who ran to the publisher first.

 

Sometimes the world seems magical. Other times it appears determined to pelt us with monkey wrenches.

 

Do you have an answer for that?

 

I could say it’s our mindset or our attitude, but maybe there is something else playing with us. Perhaps the Muse is as fickle as we are. 

 

In Hawaii, there is an ongoing belief in Pele, the goddess of the volcano. They treat her as a living entity who can be appeased with gin. But, so the story goes, she has a fiery temper, and a benevolent side, such as helping drivers on the road. She burns down some people’s houses while stopping short of others, and has been known to make an abrupt turn thus saving a sacred site—of which there are many scattered around the Island. (You probably wouldn’t recognize them for often they are rocks stacked upon rocks.)

 

Oh, I have an explanation: There are magnetic lines in the earth called lei lines, and sacred sites are built at their junctures. Suppose--and this is a big suppose—that the lava followed those lines and turned when they turned. 

 

Prove me wrong.

 

Then, there is the story of Ruth, who, years ago, saved the town of Hilo on the Big Island. When molten flowing lava threatened Hilo someone suggested calling Ruth, who had a reputation for controlling lava flows. She lived in Honolulu and was a large woman, so special arrangements needed to be made to transport her. 

 

Once in Hilo she requested they build a straw hut for her, provide her favorite libation, and then leave her alone. Someone spied and said she just lay down in front of an advancing lava flow and meditated.

 

The following morning, she was alive, and the lava had stopped short of her. 

 

Boy, that’s almost like laying down in front of a freight train and figuring it would stop before it ran over you. 

 

 

I just opened my book The Frog’s Song (about our adventure in Hawaii) to see if I had written about Ruth—I didn’t find that I had, but I found the Signature Tree that I had forgotten about. 

 

There was a tree on the property we bought called a Signature Tree by the owner who showed us the property. The tree was large, like an apple tree, but evergreen with somewhat succulent leaves. It looked like a deciduous tree, that is it didn’t lose its leaves—at least not all at once. If you wrote on a leaf, your writing would last until that leaf was displaced by another.

 

On one of the leaves, we found this note: “Goodbye farm,” signed by the owner’s two little girls.

 

When we left, we signed our names.

 

It’s been eleven years. Our leaves have probably dropped off by now. 

 

 

P.S. I wanted to tell you that my book, The Frog’s Song by Joyce Davis, is on sale. Maybe I should have titled it The Song of Hawaii, but the frogs sang louder, so they got first billing. It was on sale a week ago, but is now back to its regular price. Sorry. I have no control over its price.

  

“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”
​— George Bernard Shaw ​

 

In case you missed it:

Patagonia now has a new Stockholder—THE EARTH

 

Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard gave away his business.

It’s revenue in 2022 reached 1.5 billion.

Here’s how it works: 100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature. The funding will come from Patagonia: Each year, the money we make after reinvesting in the business will be distributed as a dividend to help fight the crisis.-Yvon Chouinard

 

 

Buy from Patagonia!

 

Mr. Chouinard doesn’t believe anybody should be a billionaire. I agree, a couple million ought to keep a person for life.

 

Founder: Yvon Chouinard

Headquarters: Ventura, CA

Customer service: 1 (800) 638-6464

CEO: Ryan Gellert (Sep 24, 2020–)

Founded: 1973, Ventura, CA

Revenue: 1.5 billion USD (2022 estimate)

Number of employees: 1,000 (2017)

Over the Rainbow

 

Listen to Oz  sing "Over the Rainbow,"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I

 mellow out, dream of sandy beaches and swaying palms, then check out

https://www.bestdamnwritersblog.com/

buy Joyce's book, and never forget that life is grand and you are loved.

 

What in the Heck is Alohilani?

 

"Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams."

—Haruki Murakami

 

Quote of the day on the Internet. 

 

If we really believed that, we would be ecstatic to be alive. 

 

I'm not seeing a whole lot of that lately.

 

Today I'm taking a turn from talking about life, the universe, and everything and talking about flowers. 

 

Hold on, Jo, talking about flowers is talking about life.

 

"Earth, 114 million years ago, one morning just after sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive the rays of the sun."—Eckhart Tolle

 

 

Plants had already populated the earth. It's complicated. Ferns produce more ferns without flowers by producing "spores" on the underside of their leaves. Trees produce more trees from cones, and the Banyan tree "walks" by way of a limb touching the ground and sprouting, thus making a new tree. That tree does the same, and so on.

 

Plants that flower, however, were late bloomers.

 

The first flower probably did not last for long. And probably for a long while, flowers were an isolated and rare phenomenon.

 

One day, however, a critical threshold was reached, and suddenly the world exploded into color.

  

Think of this, my dear friends; we could be like the flowers reaching that threshold. The monkeys did it with their 100 monkey phenomenon. One day a single little lady monkey washed her sweet potato in a stream. It wasn't long until all the monkeys on the island were washing their sweet potatoes, and they had not seen her do it. 

 

There could be, for human beings, a sudden explosive awakening where we pull our noses out of the mud and look to the glories that could be ours. We could see that we are glorious, powerful beings connected to a divine presence. I want to be alive to see it, experience it, and be a part of it. 

 

I wrote the following for my other site Jo's Store Books and Coffee (as a Christmas idea, and incidentally, about a man named Joe). Since I was into flowers, I am putting it here as well. 

 

Alohilani

 What in the heck is Alohilani?

That's what we wondered when we moved to Hawaii. 

A handwritten sign about two feet long and eight inches high with handwritten letters spelled Alohilani existed on the right side of the highway. It was our marker to turn onto the road on the left. That road was practically obscured by cane grass as tall as our vehicle. Many times we would have missed our exit had it not been for that sign. The road to our house road was virtually invisible from the highway, as it took off through cane grass as high as the car.

 

We had purchased ten of the most beautiful acres at the end of the road—the end meaning as far as you could drive. The road at one time transported pineapples from Pahoa to Hilo. At that time it was impassable beyond our property.

 

Along our two miles of lumpy, bumpy road leading to our house, a gate and a park-like setting existed, indicating that something spectacular lay beyond. We must have lived there for two months before we found out what it was. It was Alohilani, an orchid farm.

 

As we were preparing to leave the Island about a year later, I called Alohilani. Joe, the owner, invited us to visit his beautiful spread.

 

The portion we saw after driving through his gate and away from the road was acres of green around his house, manicured into a park-like setting, populated by three dogs, three horses, a multitude of sheep, and pigs who played with the dogs and slept clean and sleek under the palms.

 

"Isn't this what a farm is about," asked Joe, "having animals?"

 

My kind of guy.

 

Joe told us that when he first moved onto this property, the land was raw, untamed, and wild. He bulldozed and planted and built the highest treehouse I have ever seen. It must have been 100 feet in the air, and not in a tree but on poles. He built a packing building and erected rows of shade-cloth-covered structures, and filled them with orchids.

 

Growing orchids is labor-intensive we found out.

 

The day my daughter, grandson, and I arrived, Joe was in the process of breaking bottles.

 

The bottles were about a foot long, squared on the long sides, and about two inches in width.

 

Holding a bottle over a trash can, Joe gently tapped the end of each bottle with a hammer, broke the glass, and then poured the tiny orchid plants into a bucket of water. Two young women then placed a single sprout into a one-inch peat-pot.

 

The bottles were filled with a gel substrate that nourished little green sprouts. Joe said that the suppliers did not throw in the seeds randomly, but carefully, with long tweezers, placed each plant in rows on the gel. In two years, those tiny plants would become exquisite flowering orchids.

 

Joe, now a widower, told us that the climate on the Island was perfect for orchids. The plants grown there are much hardier and healthier than those raised in greenhouses or imported from the orient.

 

We told him we were leaving the Island and moving back to the mainland. Here we were neighbors and had only just met each other when we were about to leave. I looked over at the pigs sleeping contentedly under the palm trees. They were of the wild variety, black and sleek and grunting contentedly on clean grass, paying us no mind. They were free to come and go at will, and those sleeping under the palms, Joe told us, had been born on the farm. The wild pigs had found a haven, even if—we discovered later, once, in a while, one becomes food for Joe.

 

As I was preparing to leave, Joe said, "You eat pork, don't you?" He opened a refrigerator packed to the brim with packages of meat, took out an entire pork shoulder, and thrust it into my arms. A parting gift. How wonderful to have met him.

 

I was investigating the possibility of importing orchids when we got back to the mainland. At the time, Joe was willing to provide me with the opportunity of importing orchids. However, when we returned to the mainland, I found orchids in shops and grocery stores less expensive than I could provide. Joe found a way, for he was constantly exporting them. As he said, his plants had been grown on native soil and were thus healthier--perhaps specific companies, florists and others appreciated that.

 

As I said, we were preparing to leave the Island. First, we had decided that while we made great tourists, we made lousy Polynesians. Island living was not for us. Second, my husband had developed a heart condition, and the doctor asked me, "You know about the Big Island, don't you?"

 

"In what regard?" I asked.

 

"If your husband needs further treatment, he will have to go to Honolulu."

 

Holy smokes, I thought, I'm not commuting to Honolulu.

 

We couldn't get off that Island fast enough.

 

Incidentally, we saw a golden orchid—really. It was as gold and gold, and alive. This orchid was not at Joe's but at another tourist- display-farm. (Perhaps that was the reason for Joe's tiny sign, only to show delivery trucks where to turn--and us--not for tourist's directions.) The golden orchid had a price tag of $25,000.

 

However, the golden orchid was not for sale. I wondered at the time if this was like the old ploy of having a thousand-dollar bottle of wine listed on a menu, so the others seemed like a bargain.

 

Joe was the real deal.

 

If you want one of Joe's orchids, I will try to get it for you. I can provide types and pictures. But it has been 10 years since our visit and my communication with him, so I will have to see how that would work.  

 

You can find Christmas gift suggestions on https://www.jos-storebooksandcoffee.com

 

 

Alohilani in Hawaiian means "Full of compassion."