This is the second in a series of three impressionist travelogues, Talk Story, about that one time I answered a transpersonal call I should have sent to voicemail and journeyed down a mountain then across an ocean and up a volcano. Because daily holotropic breathwork plus alpine plunge and Ho’oponopono practice is truly ascension medicine. Catch-up on part one, about a Kahuna named Kaos.
Before the shotgun stared me down through the netting of my REI two-person tent, lit perfectly by a Pisces Full Moon…
Before the synchronistic Tater Tot wisdom drop, at a cove shy of Magics, left me curiouser and curiouser…
Before the desert epiphany in hot springs stewarded by Cosolargy in Carson Valley, Nevada sent me to the Big Island…
I invested in an arsenal. Two machetes. One KA-BAR. A Swiss Army multi-tool. Gas station flick blade, with a pin-up chick printed on one side of the handle and an American flag on the other. (My favorite machete is pictured below alongside my road spatula in my She Shed—where I wrote Season: Ingredients for Intuitive Living in Apple Hill, California.)
When I got called to a gridwork mission, I packed like my life depended on it. I knew the outcome, if not the method, of my mission: to work energetically with the weather to change the pattern in the Pacific and bring back the balance between El Nino & La Nina. Eventually, at an indie bookstore in a mini-mall where I’d switch shuttles coming and going from Cook to Kona, I’d discover Zach Royer’s Hawai’i Vortex Field Guide, which filled in more than a few blanks.
From the jump, I’d planned to work/trade, from farm to farm, until I became clear what my actual mission involved. Walking beneath the banyan canopy in Hilo Town, taking in the wreck of abandoned waterfront hotels now occupied by legions of feral felines, I understood with total clarity I was in the wrong spot. I was not supposed to be on the rainy side of the Big Island. I should proceed to Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the world from its base, and offer prayers to the snow goddess held by the dormant volcano. Poli’ahu, the elder sister of tempestuous Pele, preferred her unbothered, icy perch but every so often she’d sled down to the Saddle dividing the high and low country to meet her predictably disruptive sister in battle.
In Hilo Town, I shed all my backcountry gear and saved my pack and tent. I offered my camp stove among other donations to the unhoused folks I’d seen camped in between the mammoth banyan roots. I arranged for a bus ticket, a five-hour ride, across the Saddle to Kona Town. Captain Dan kept me company, offering me a beautiful breakfast of liliko’i and mangosteen—the Queen’s fruit—at the bus depot where he sat down next to me and said I looked salty.
Captain Dan explained he owned several yachts and that he was now on his way to catch a private plane from the Waiamea airport to Moloka’i where he’d be sailing for Guam tomorrow as part of a charitable charter for a sea-faring non-profit. Did I want to come? He could use a navigator. (Later, I will Google him when I’m back on-grid and I will be elated to discover this man was exactly who he claimed to be.)
This sixty-something, sun-soaked stoner spent the first part of the bus ride pitching me on his proposal, using chapter/verse from his plastic-wrapped, annotated Bible rescued from the ocean floor more than twice. I demurred on the grounds that I’m somebody’s mother, which was/is true. I bade him farewell when the road forked toward Kohala, and Captain Dan stumbled out along the shoulder bordering Parker Ranch, at an elevation so high my body began feeling alkaline again.
Two weeks after I landed in Captain Cook, my daily routine on the cash crop farm doubling as a B&B, kicked off with a sit beneath a liliko’i grove alongside a Jackson chameleon I spied. I’d dragged an abandoned plastic patio chair from the coffee and mac nut orchards to overlook the azure waters of the Kealakekua Bay vortex. I’d count out my Wim Hof reps and allow my gaze to softly locate the glints of yellow liliko’i drops in the mulch of foliage at my feet. I’d unholster my KA-BAR. With a quick flick of my wrist, I’d lift the tops off the egg-shaped vessels and then slurp the juice and seeds.
The morning before Magics, as I scavenged the last of the queen’s fruit, I felt eyes on me. Above, in a mac tree branch, blotting out the blazing Sun, sat a white owl. Neither one of us moved, or blinked. Too late, I will understand this pueo is my aumakua, an ancestral messenger bearing a warning that escalates in its insistence the longer I refuse to heed it.
Caution.
Watch your back.
Ask for help.
Run.
Ready for more? Catch part three here.
