They said the air would be bad today, the breath of the volcano sullying the mist. I do not mind exchanging the Ha with Madame Pele. It seems right to greet her of a morning. I stepped onto the lanai, a less committed sharing of breath than venturing out into the forest.
The scent was not what I expected. The sulfurous taste is there and also something else, a hint of the stone dust of the grinding of rock against rock. The mountain is subsiding, slip sliding, not away, but down, the crater opening wider. The door to her house needs expansion. This is a remodel. It is noisy, I can tell you that.
She emptied the place of her furnishings and is distributing them down mountain, to the consternation of many. Others say, good riddance, as if those people down mountain do not deserve to have homes of their own. The cruelty of people is what we felt in grade school, and there it is all over again. But it is small, a little cold marble of intolerance for the newly unsheltered. What is left, the larger part, is the aloha. The love people have for each other, their now anxious love of the 'aina, the land, the land getting a new surface.
I pulled on my boots and some blue jeans and wearing my sleeping shirt and sleep rumpled hair I ventured out into the forest. My dog came along the path to the pavilion with me.
Out of the corner of my eye in that spot of peripheral vision where sometimes there is a wild animal or the ghost of the child that grew up, the woman in a yellow and black kihei emerged. At first I thought I saw a woman I knew, a friend who often walks the forest paths to honor beings of this place, stopping by maybe to talk story. This was an older woman, her hair long like my friend's. but black with a million metallic streaks, each a single hair glistening like platinum and gold. She carried a carved ohia walking stick, a paoa, and laid it across her lap as she settled onto a bench. I was about to light the firebowls for some warmth after we greeted each other, but they sprang into flames before I could touch them.
When we first moved into her forest, I was uncertain how Pele would feel about that. Would our efforts to both honor her sacred forest and make it our own meet resistance or acceptance? We came in slowly, visiting at first, then after many years taking up residence. There were those who said, you must restore her forest to what it was before, only native plants. But we had our own vision.
"I like what you've done here," she remarked, waving her broad arm at the pavilion and the landscape. I listened for hints of sarcasm but she nodded thoughtfully. "Even the white orchids. I would like to see them all bloom at once." The plants made tiny sounds and the birds fluttered and gathered and sang new songs as the orchids extended their spikes and the flowers burst out. As the flowers came open you could hear muffled pops as their petals pulled from being together to being apart. Their fragrances filled the air like fresh cookies from a bakery, like hives of honey. Dewy perfumes mixed with the drowsy datura and in the distance the volcano exhaled a plume of flower breath, plumeria and pikake, tuberose and frangipani. The plume traveled high into the sky and then dropped its essence in Hilo and Papaiko, Laupahoehoe and Honoka'a. It fell onto the ashy desert of Ka'u, and embraced Honaunau and Kealakekua.
The woman with the paoa in her lap turned her eyes to me, and they glowed with deep fires. "It is time to take back the land, the 'aina," she intoned and I shuddered. I couldn't help but feel foreboding and a mild sense of treachery. "I am showing you how to do what needs to be done in your own house," she went on. "You want to reclaim all you have lost to those who have taken from you, do you not?"
I sensed her impatience, and her fury. I felt the rage in her bones, and my bones engaged in the sense of all the violence done in the name of certain ways and ideas, those grabs for an ultimate power by whoever has that in their blood. "Your way of undoing the wrongs is one by one. My way is to start over."
The pavilion shook wildly. The flames in the firebowls grew tall, but stayed in their confines and did not go near the rafters.
"I am not about politicizing everything," I said as meekly as I could and still be heard. She raised her peppery eyebrows.
"Ha ha ha ha," she laughed, and I heard the laughter of my friends in her voice, the laughter of the women who are the emotional ballast that sustain me beyond the solid ohana in my own house. "This land here you care for, nothing will happen to it, not because I like you so much or even because I love your flowers, because I am not about honoring the creative spirit in you." Her eyebrows went up again. "And...politics schmalitics", she laughed. "This is my forest. You know that."
"And the rest of the island?" I wondered. I am not sure I even said it out loud, because wrath was coming out of her in a primal overtaking of all the air around me. I was afraid I might be overcome and suffocate. She relented and I gasped for breath.
"You would do better with my sister Hi'iaka." Her paoa slipped off her lap with a clatter and it felt like the pavilion might jump off the ground. "The land is its own being. The mana that mixes with the land through the roots of the ohia has become weakened." She pulled herself up. "I protect my forest. Mana, mana'o. Honor the land and the land will honor you."
It came to me then, what was different about us. I did not care to reclaim anything that had been taken from me. I do honor the land. My friends in Leilani honor the land. I did not want to argue with her.
She shook her shoulders a little as she stood, as if dust from the volcano may have landed upon them. "It is not that some fault is in the people of Puna, but in the earth at the part of the island are the paths of the magma. It is too late to change all that now. There is more life in change than in staying put. Perhaps I will take my own words to heart and take a journey. A hui hou, my friend. Watch for my sister. She is on her way here next."
As the visitor trod the path away from the pavilion, she called back to me, "Watch for Hi'iaka. You can hear her coming now."
The sound of an ipu entered the forest with fresh mist. A distant chant, the clattering of 'ili'ili. I l'ea ka hula i ka ho'opa'a. There would be hula. There would be renewal. Sooner rather than later. The dancer is important, and so is the drummer, and so is the chanter. All in, all together.
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