Joe's Orchid
"Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams."
—Haruki Murakami
"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. Ferns reproduce without flowers by producing "spores" on the underside of their leaves. Conifers, aka "evergreens," produce offspring 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 flowers were a rare and isolated phenomenon for a long time.
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 through 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.
—Haruki Murakami
"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. Ferns reproduce without flowers by producing "spores" on the underside of their leaves. Conifers, aka "evergreens," produce offspring 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 flowers were a rare and isolated phenomenon for a long time.
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 through 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.
A handwritten sign about two feet long and eight inches high, with the letters' Alohilani spelled out, was on the right side of Hawaiian highway in route to our house. It was our marker to turn left onto the road. Many times, we would have missed our exit had it not been for that sign. The road to our house was virtually invisible from the highway, disappearing into cane grass as tall as the car.
But, we wondered, what if the heck is Alohilani?
We had purchased ten beautiful acres at the end of the road—the end meaning as far as you could drive. The road once transported pineapples from Pahoa to Hilo. During our time there, it was impassable beyond our property.
Along our two miles of lumpy, bumpy lava-based road leading to our house, there was a gate and a park-like setting sitting behind it, barely visible from the road. what we saw the the largest water-tank we had seen to date. 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, planted, and built the highest tree house 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.
We had purchased ten beautiful acres at the end of the road—the end meaning as far as you could drive. The road once transported pineapples from Pahoa to Hilo. During our time there, it was impassable beyond our property.
Along our two miles of lumpy, bumpy lava-based road leading to our house, there was a gate and a park-like setting sitting behind it, barely visible from the road. what we saw the the largest water-tank we had seen to date. 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, planted, and built the highest tree house 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 breaking bottles.
The bottles were about a foot long, square on the long sides, and about 2 inches wide.
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 the suppliers did not randomly throw in the seeds; they carefully placed each plant in rows on the gel using long tweezers. 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 we had only just met 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, sleek, exquisitely clean sleeping pigs, contentedly grunting pigs on clean grass, in the shade of palms, 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 became Joe's food.
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 to import 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 moley, I thought, I'm not commuting to Honolulu.
We couldn't get off that Island fast enough.
Incidentally, we saw a gold orchid. Really! It was as gold as gold, and a living plant. 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 tourists' directions.) The golden orchid had a price tag of $25,000.
However, the golden orchid was not for sale. I wondered at the time whether this was like the old ploy of listing a thousand-dollar bottle of wine on a menu so the others seemed like a bargain.
Joe was the real deal.
Alohilani in Hawaiian means "Full of compassion."
Alohilani, Carved out of the jungle when I say we lived in the jungle, we were about one-quarter mile from Joe's place, and this shows the jungle.
Read about living for one year off the grid in the jungle of Hawaiii where the Coqui frogs (that sound like birds) sang us to sleep at night. in The Frog's Song by Joyce Davis
