The Day the Earth Exploded into Color

 

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.

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.

 

 

 
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

Final Words

 

When I was a kid, I said that Jane Goodall had my job — to go to Africa and study animals.

But I was wrong. It was her job.

Field study all day, every day in the jungle? I wouldn't have the patience, skill, or fortitude to do what she did.

I would be screaming from the hilltops that it took me 6 months to get close enough to a wild troop to really study their behavior. Yet, all day, Goodall would sit or travel with her binoculars, trying to make contact with a wild troop of Chimpanzees. She spent her evenings writing up her notes.  Her hiring company knew that sending a young woman out into the jungle was unheard of, so, her mother, her number one supporter, went along. The mother would cook, and she and Jane would, ceremoniously, have a small glass of whiskey before they went to bed.

"As I traveled more, we'd each raise a glass at our respective 7 p.ms. It was a way to feel connected. Now I toast her up in the clouds every evening."—Jane Goodall.

Goodall said she knew she was safe in the jungle.

Her benefactor, Louis Leaky, curator of the Natural History Museums in Nairobi, saw in Jane, the Secretary they sent to him, the patience and love of animals he knew was necessary for the job as a field researcher. She said she was never bored. Nature provided endless entertainment.

She did what she set out to do. She made contact with the chimpanzees and changed the definition of a human being. You watch. You'll see it.

I devoured her book, In the Shadow of Man, when it came out. It was her first account of the field study and told of the time a chimpanzee, Mr. Gray Beard, came close enough to her to allow his shadow to fall upon hers. 

She declared as a child that she wanted to go to Africa and study animals. And her mother never discouraged her.

She believes that we are all put here on the earth with a purpose. We may not know what it is, but our presence matters.

Last night, my husband and I watched/listened to her last interview on Netflix. "Famous Last Words: Dr. Jane Goodall," with Brad Falchuk. They recorded the interview in March on the condition that it would only be aired after Goodall's death.

What a woman!

How can we not love the animals, and want to preserve our planet?! It seems that it isn't a priority for us anymore, but this little lady, having seen many things in her 91 years, admonished us not to lose HOPE. If we lose hope, we are lost.

We have come out of hard times before—we will come out of it again.

Notice how grand the Earth is and how thin the breathable atmosphere surrounding it is.

 

  

Our atmosphere is so thin that our mountains protrude through it to such a height that you need to carry Oxygen with you to climb Mt. Everest. ("Earth's breathable atmosphere H is about 8500 meters. Mount Everest is 8850 meters high, so it does poke out of the atmosphere, but barely.") 

A friend, who climbed to the base camp of Mt. Everest, really, she did, I was blown away, she was slight of build, one you would never guess had that fortitude, said we climbed high, slept low. In other words, they climb higher than their intended camping place, then they descended to camp so they slept at a lower altitude than the day's climb. That gave their body a chance to adapt.)

A trip up to around 10,000 feet has us breathing heavily. And Altitude sickness is a real threat.

 

Save our air. Do not pollute it. It is our life.

 

And do not die with the song within you unsung.

What a Difference a Week Makes

"I think I could turn and live with animals*, 

they are so placid, and self-contain'd, 

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, 

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, 

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago…"

–Walt Whitman

 

I stopped the quote there, for I believe animals can be unhappy, which Whitman says they are not.

We have a new animal, a happy animal, a dog my grandson named Zeke.

I just learned that the word animal comes from the Latin word "soul."

Zeke is a German Shepherd mix. Small for a German Shepard. He's a lover, sweet and gentle. My daughter chose him from The Greenhill Animal Shelter. 

He has three legs.

He had a genetic deformity in his right leg. The RV Outlet in Eugene, Oregon, paid for his surgery, a generosity for which I am incredibly grateful. They gave that dog an opportunity for a happy life and gave us a happy dog.

When my daughter first told me about him, I was reluctant to have another dog enter our two dogs and one-cat household, but within a day of having him here, I was in love.

One serendipitous part of this sudden experience was that a couple of days before my daughter learned that her dog Laffe has cancer, she felt called to look at dogs at the shelter, and while there she fell in love with this three-legged dog.

I was drawn to Whitman's poem, for this dog does not whine about his condition. He hops about, dropping joy on his three paw prints and us.

Regarding whether animals have souls, a subject I ran into this week, how in the heck would we know? People used to argue about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, and arguments regarding philosophical thought still rage.

I vote that if humans have a soul, and I believe they do—then so do the animals. To me, the spark of life indicates a soul. (Hey, plants are alive too.)

Gary Kowalski took up the daring question of the soul in his book, The Souls of Animals) — an inquiry into the "spiritual lives" of whooping cranes, elephants, jackdaws, gorillas, songbirds, horses, dogs, and cats. At its center is the idea that spirituality — which he defines as "the development of a moral sense, the appreciation of beauty, the capacity for creativity, and the awareness of one's self within a larger universe as well as a sense of mystery and wonder about it all" — is a natural byproduct of "the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life."

Do fleas go to heaven? If they do, they are fed a replicated formula and keep their mitts off the other critters.