I'm going to read you a little bit from the last chapter, which
is set in Hawaii.
One thing I'll tell you, because I'm not
going to read it, the Hawaiians--
the native Hawaiians-- have the notion of the 'aumakua.
An 'aumakua is a kind of spiritual guardian.
And families often would have a particular 'aumakua.
It could be any kind of an animal.
Shark was a very powerful 'aumakua.
And a family would have a long--
often many generations long-- relationship
with a particular animal that would
do fabulously magical things in guarding that particular family.
So you need to know that word because I think the excerpt I'm
reading uses it later on.
When I arrived in Oahu I moved into an apartment
on the edge of the Forest Reserve
in the upper Mānoa Valley.
Honolulu may be an urban sprawl, but the university neighborhood
of Mānoa feels like a village.
Well-tended bungalows cluster on the valley floor
between symmetrical ridges that rise on two sides,
rippled with fins of volcanic rock overgrown with mossy green.
The ridges meet on the mauka or mountain side of town
as opposed to the makai--
the ocean side-- forming a deep lush crotch
of green out of which slides a slender waterfall.
Taro patches once were cultivated here,
fed with the water running off the ridges.
There are a few taro plants today--
one or two diminutive species planted in a landscaped yard,
or a vagrant giant with heart-shaped leaves
as big as a human torso growing on the edge of the now largely
cement-lined Mānoa stream.
At night the neighborhood looks like glitter
spilled on the ground, the dark heights calm and sculptural,
rising into the blacker sky.
The hills are high enough to catch the passing
clouds, so on the mauka side of town it rains every day--
fat drops popping and ticking against the dense waxy
foliage outside my screen, the wind sloshing through the trees
like an omnidirectional tide, so that the trees lean and sway
and swirl like jellyfish in an ocean of air.
The shape and scale of the valley is deeply appealing.
Human habitation, though dense, is in modest proportion
to the harboring land.
I have looked and looked at its beauty,
walking several miles every day on my way
to and from work along sidewalks, through a meadow,
down a trail bordering a schoolyard,
and through a winding back alley, trying
to find the language to convey the spiritual power
of the softly verdant cliffs above.
Natural beauty, as all cultures seem to have known,
raises the spiritual energy of the world.
One does not need a specific system of belief
in order to experience this, for it is
an inbred biological capacity--
E.O. Wilson's biophilia.
We cannot help but love the wonders of form and color
and vitality in the lives that surround us.
When one feels the upwelling of that energy,
it is often accompanied by the desire to pass it on.
Some people take photographs.
Some write passionately in notebooks,
or send letters to a loved one.
Some make drawings or paintings on stone or paper.
Some give the joy back to the universe in the form of a prayer
or chant.
And some just hoot into the silence
to hear their voices fill the air and return to them.
My method is writing.
That's where my love of nature meets my need for human culture.
After our weekly classes, my graduate students and I
gathered at Mānoa Gardens for beer and talk
about the state of the world.
I've never worked with a more diverse group
of individuals, each one a multicultural phenomenon.
One was an East Indian businessman
who grew up in Sierra Leone and runs a data entry
company serving clients on the mainland
through the computer labor of workers in the Philippines.
He told of having visited a village in India
where youngsters attending an after school computer class
were picked up by their fathers riding on camels.
"We've almost solved the problem of production," he said.
"Soon everyone will be able to have what they want."
"But we haven't solved the problem of distribution,"
argued the Marxist African-American basketball
player from Berkeley, citing who gets left out economically,
the growing split between rich and poor,
the lack of justice in the free market economy.
I joined in-- the most monochromatic of the bunch
as a pale faced New Englander--
insisting we cannot speak of human progress without counting
the cost other species are paying for our success.
"I've been reading about hominid evolution," I said,
"and about how we're genetically best
suited to live in small kinship groups, at most 100
to 200 people.
We haven't yet got an ethical system
to deal with the complexity we've become,
so no wonder we're confused."
A young Californian of Austrian heritage
told of attending high school in a Catholic monastery,
and of his disillusion with the politics of the monastery's
moral system that resulted in his getting kicked out.
He took up surfing, which he practices
with the intensity of a monk.
And he-- it's true--
and he spoke about the sacred tradition
of surfing among Hawaiians, and about how proud
he is to have earned the respect of locals
through his courage and skill on the big waves.
A woman of mixed European ancestry,
who grew up on Long Island, New York,
but has lived for 27 years on the Big Island
where she makes paintings depicting the old Hawaiian gods,
spoke about her understanding of the sacred
as transcending religion and culture.
It sounded pretty ethereal to the rest of us,
especially after a couple of beers.
Everyone agreed that for all the gains and individual freedom
and rights democracy has won, there
was no longer a common ethical system for Americans,
no real sense of the sacred as something absolute,
unquestioned, and inviolable to guide us.
Among my students were two women of Japanese ancestry,
one a retired Episcopal school teacher, and the other
much younger, a former social worker.
Though they were 30 years apart in age,
both were struggling in their writing
to understand the impact World War II had on family members
who lived in Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Those relatives had known themselves as Americans,
but when, through none of their own doing,
they suddenly became "the enemy" to both their native homeland
and to their adopted country, the cultural wound
was so profound that 50 years later, their children
and grandchildren are still trying to heal it.
There was also a young man of Hawaiian, Chinese,
and Japanese ancestry who had worked for a time killing
wild goats that were ravaging ranch and park lands on Maui,
and who subsequently wrestled in his art
to make peace with the necessary violence inflicted.
And there was the native Hawaiian, still angry,
200 years later, that Captain Cook and the others
had ever showed up in the islands.
"It wasn't Christianity that did the natives in," he said,
"but the diseases the Europeans brought."
I offered an appeasement that the Europeans
didn't understand at the time how
the diseases were transmitted.
"They knew what happened in other places," he accused.
"When they got there, native people died.
They should have stayed home until they figured out
what caused it."
There are moments in such conversations
when, despite all disagreements, each person leans back
from the table and looks around at the others,
astonished, and grateful that the world has progressed
at least far enough for us to sit together and try
to understand the folly and faith of our species.
We know more about the world, about the beliefs and crimes
of our ancestors and everyone else's, than any other people
who have lived.
Perhaps democracy is in its infant stage,
analogous with the point in history at which Americans first
began to cultivate the diminutive strains
of native corn.
Culture is both the crop we grow and the soil
in which we grow it.
It is our key survival strategy.
And it has become the key survival strategy for most
other forms of life on Earth.
This is the human power employed by intention and accident
that we find so difficult to acknowledge.
The black sand beach is gone.
Though many tropical paradise photographs still
celebrate its grand and elegant arc, sheltered
by gleaming coconut palms, the village of Kalapana is gone.
The ancient temple ruins--
gone.
The green canopy of palms--
gone.
Past a road closed sign, the highway
lies 30 feet deep under black iridescent lava
from the flow that began 15 years ago and has not stopped.
I hike out over the hardened surface, past crumbling
fists of lava, and over terrain that looks like black meringue,
swirled and peaked and cracked with fissures,
a trail is barely visible where the lava has
lost its shine from footwear.
The stark new earth is as solid and quiet as anywhere wild I
have walked.
Though this particular stretch of ground
emerged from the earth's hot mantle only seven years ago,
all of this destructive creativity, it seems,
ought to have a sound.
The air is cloudy and stinks of Pele's bad weather--
Pele, the volcano goddess.
Five miles down the coast a huge plume
rises where lava continues to pour
into the ocean, white steam billowing and spreading
into a gray pall that covers the coast for as far as I can see.
Under foot there is not a speck of soil,
only a few cinder crumbs that have broken loose
from the volcano's heaving project.
Sword ferns have taken root in creases, seams, and cracks--
anywhere a spore and some moisture might lodge.
Green has never looked so electric
as do these pioneers on the black lava shield.
I follow the dim trail to the ocean
and find that a new black sand beach is beginning,
where lava has shattered into particles as it meets the sea.
Beaches too small and the water too rough for anyone
to be swimming or sunbathing, but three or four small rock
piles have been built along the shoreline as offerings
to Pele, whose whims and angers fill land and swallow towns.
And coconut palms have been planted wherever the sand gives
their roots a purchase.
The seedlings at most knee-high after six years of growth,
each splitting fruit from which a stalk grows
is surrounded with stones to protect it from water, and wind,
and visitors like me.
Their stiff fronds click in the breeze,
and I keep startling at the sound.
Pending footsteps are approaching
to cross the crisp, cindered ground.
Odd how we measure time saying, "the Big Island
is 500,000 years old," when, in fact, it is still being born.
People find meaning and answering to that process.
By building and planting, they honor the form-making spirit
of earth.
But there is one difference.
Pele does not weep over the destruction
she inflicts in her building projects.
We are the animal that cannot accept the destruction it
causes, that hears not just an inkling, but a cry,
coming out of the world and feels spirit rise.
Maybe this is the voice of our 'aumakua, a guardian spirit born
of the creatures we have driven out of existence.
It cries louder and louder, trying
to get our attention above the noise.
I walk back over the silent lava shield,
past the nursery of vibrant coconut palms,
towards the lava paved road.
The hillside above is rich with greens,
some lined up in tended rows and some exploding wild.
All stages of living nurture are here side by side--
the beginning, middle, and end--
not in sequence but simultaneous.
To know myself, if only for a moment, as part at the beginning
is to know the earth's sacred strength.
I buy a Coke and a papaya at the black sand beach drive-in,
flip through a photo album showing
the progress of Pele's neighborhood improvement
project.
The woman tending the counter tells me
how great the beach used to be and how far she has
to drive now to go swimming.
"Are you sure you don't want three for $1?"
she asks, gazing ruefully at two crates of golden fruit just
picked from neighborhood trees.
"Well, yes, I guess I do," I say,
and choose two more at different stages of ripeness.
20 yards behind her the edge of the lava
is frozen into a lifeless wave.
She tells me to come back at sunset
to see how beautiful the flowing magma is reflected in the plume.