Creation begins in the hungry darkness of chaos, the web of life begins in the sea. Words appear
from nowhere, phrases form, the thin tendrils of the upper clouds,
hang around briefly, tantalizing with possibility, rain falls onto the shore,
driftwood suggests bleached bones,
i look again from the window
a long ribbon of river crosses the plains, a dense cloud bank looms ahead
i turn to the words, an orderly flow regimented across the page,
“We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place. We behave as if there were magic in mere thought, and we use thinking for purposes for which it was never designed. As a result we are no longer sufficiently aware of the importance of what we cannot know intellectually, of what we must know in other ways, of the living experience before and beyond our transitory knowledge.”
A large block of print, leaves bound and contained between hard covers. Ice forming on the wings,
passengers strapped in, beneath blankets,
the aisles empty, the plane groaning with
dreams
and soon kaiao, dawn, Aue! the dawn-colored sea! somewhere in a garden, keiki
plant seeds, a beginning emerging with the sunʻs long shadows, i recall Wade Davisʻ One River, Kogi elders sitting high on a Colombian mountain, gazing over the Caribbean at dawn, munse, the Kogi word, also their word for vagina, a tight weaving of metaphor and life, every journey a thread,
light now flying over the ocean, below plane shadow
surfs the waves,
and i am back in Hilo again, sitting downtown
drinking coffee and reading of wildness in literature,
of dewdrops and appetites, albatrosses and seahorses,
walking again in an early morning misty rain,
and now it has passed and the light changes
again and again while i read and look up
in this world of back and forth, back and forth
and the shadow’s shadow passes over, it is the month
of hiroshima, a bear rests in the cloud, and the sun breaks
through again, a quick peek, a teasing of light behind a palm
the greens growing emboldened, a tendril of breeze,
i think of raindrops herding together on taro leaves,
of appetites, of vortexes of destruction, of those places
where occurs the collusion of consciousness
with the material world, those places of mirrors and shadows,
of beginnings. A young child of dexterity spider-climbs a palm, the trees
line the bayfront, clumping like knots on a rosary cord. My excitement
when i travel now is always the return, the beginning, when chaos has
exhausted itself, and all that remains is compassion. For now,
there is food on the table, but much work remains to begin,
there is much to understand,
to allow doors of perception to reopen, to learn to think like an ocean,
many-rivered and boundless,
encompassing and nurturing,
and the sea waits quietly,
home to albatross,
home to seahorse,
home.
Kīlauea, Hilo, United States. Photo by Mandy Beerley on Unsplash
