Sing Me Back Home

Aloha!

"Every man's memory is his private literature."

~Aldous Huxley

Waikiki in the distance. Taken from Palolo Valley


"Everybody needs his memories.


They keep the wolf of insignificance


from the door."


~Saul Bellow

Lei Stand in Chinatown, Honolulu

"Pleasure is the flower that passes;

remembrance,

the lasting perfume."



~Jean de Boufflers



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Growing up in Philadelphia

we were blue collar and ethnic,

but we were urban people

with a patina of middle-brow sophistication

when needed;

My parents knew how to dress and behave

at the parent/teacher meeting.

Country Music

was the sound of OTHERS:

Rural, Super White, Conservative.

It was the music of folks that hated folks like us

even before I was a freak (what others called 'hippies').

Let's just say that it wasn't what we heard at home.

But the folk movement

made us look at C&W as a true folk expression,

sequined sports jackets, bouffants and all!

Plus it was marvelously transgressive

for me to be a country fan.

Youthful rebellion - so predictable.

Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee

about summed up the gulf.

But later,

through his tribute album to

Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

I became a fan of ole Merle.

In fact I became quite a country fan.

My pal Jim and I even drove to

Great Adventure in New Jersey

so see Willie Nelson in his

Blue Eyes Cryin` in the Rain period.

When we got there

it was coming down pretty good'

and only a handful of us waited in the stands.

But Willie and his band,

Sis on piano, and that nice Jewish boy on mouth harp,

played us quite a nice intimate little set.

What a great memory!

Last night I caught the PBS' American Masters

devoted to Merle.

It brought back so much!

I'm glad hubby went to sleep a bit early

so I could just sit there and cry.

A whole period of my life opened up to memory.

I though of how Jim used to sing

I fall to Pieces

and I wished I could hear it one more time.

So many great songs!

I've been listening on Pandora & Grooveshark all day.

If I had to pick just one Merle song to share,

Working Man Blues comes to mind,

but it has to be this one:

Listen to it with my Aloha....

Let Merle sing YOU back home too...

"I'm 70. At this point if they gave me a life sentence,

it would only be a few years.

So F**k `em!"

Merle Haggard

Every Day Gold

ALOHA means:

'Welcome! Glad to See YOU!'

A Ted Trimmer beauty!

"Until you make peace with who you are,

you'll never be content with what you have."


Doris Mortman

"A good traveler has no fixed plans

and is not intent upon arriving.

A good artist lets his intuition lead him

wherever it wants."


- Lao-Tzu

“How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol?

How about the pillow?

It has more feathers than the dove,

and it doesn't have that dangerous beak”



Jack Handy

Tall Ship!


.

Recent research shows
that we soon grow accustomed
to new pleasures:
that new car,
the beach house that was so hard to get.

Investigators advised leaving that beach house
from time to time
so one might have their pleasure freshened.

I know that all it takes
is a ten day off-island trip
for the romance to be re-ignited.

Scene: Airplane cabin, return trip, approaching Diamond Head.
Characters: Me and a nice lady.
Action: I am softly crying.


Nice Lady (sympathetically): "Returning home?"

Me. "Yes" (blubber)

N.Lady: "How long have you been away?"

Me: "tttTEN Days!"


and...scene.

*Applause*


It's official: I've lost it!

But, you know, walking outside on deck this morning
the skies were eloquent, fish were swimming around,
and we're still floating.
"Gotta remember to really enjoy all this," I told myself
sternly...except that I was standing in the bow at the time :)


Our friend Ted Trimmer has been too busy studying photography
to share many new photos with us here.

The other day we were discussing English landscape painters and their genius with light.
"Yes, they specialized in doing the most with their limited, northern English light," Says Ted.

Brilliant! Thanks, Ted for teaching me something new.


And thank YOU for visiting! cloudia

Surf (Exhibit's) UP!

Aloha!
Today we're going to the...

No. Not an every day outing
to Ala Moana Park. . . .

To the Museum!

This is our Bishop Museum,
a world class institution dedicated to the preservation, & study
of Polynesian/Pacific Cultures, Peoples & Environments.
Perhaps you've spotted it above the H-1 on your way in from
Honolulu Airport.

A closer look.


Charles Reed Bishop came from Boston as a young man.

He married a princess, founded our first bank, this museum,
and he is buried as royalty in sacred land among chiefs,
with his beloved wife.

They were handsome people!
(See them HERE)

Recognize the site of the big party
in the final episodes of LOST?


"The past is our definition.
We may strive, with good reason, to escape it,
or to escape what is bad in it,
but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."

~Wendell Berry



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"If we open a quarrel between past and present,

we shall find that we have lost the future."


Winston Churchill

Time to go back outside!
(Back to the present)


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The Bishop Museum
has opened an exhibit of surf boards.


I can hear the amused, if politely suppressed giggles of cultural superiority: "Ah, what next? 'Beach Blankets Through the Ages'?



Well, smarty pants, it turns out that this is not an exhibit of Rad Boards with cool graphics but a historical retrospective of important chiefly artifacts associated with a sport
that a little something called "The World"
has adopted in recent decades.


Oh THAT!


Yes, the sport has a real history
and when you look at the huge (14 feet!) heavy (150 lbs!)
ancient boards that carried Hawaiian Ali`i (chiefs & chiefesses) hundreds of years ago
a frisson rushes from them that few other artifacts elicit.



Here you can see Princess Ka`iulani's board, and one associated with Prince Kuhio too. Perhaps it is their names on our streets, buildings and holidays, or the immediacy of island life but we fondly consider the royals our ancestors,

we all do here in Hawaii, Hawaiian or not.




You see, today we are all chiefs,
or have the chance to think so of ourselves,
to behave, to bless, as such.


They called Kuhio "The Citizen Prince"
both royal prince, and territorial representative
to the US Congress.




We all enjoy the royal skies, the KAPU (sacred) waters, and welcoming our visitors
from all over that world out there...
as if we each owned this place.



So salute the royal surfers

and scryers of cloud information

(clouds in formation).



Thanks for being my guest today.

YOU are always most welcome! cloudia

Caption Party!

Aloha Web Wanderer!


Come Ashore Here for a Spell. . .

"For everything you have missed,

you have gained something else,

and for everything you gain,

you lose something else."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Long summer day
Patterns on the ocean sand
our idle footprints"

Shiki

And now our caption party:

What is your idea for a caption to the photo above?

I'll start you off:

What is this man thinking?



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Cup of Wealth

Aloha

You May Already Be a Winner!

“Ordinary riches can be stolen,

real riches cannot.

In your soul are infinitely precious things

that cannot be taken from you.”


Oscar Wilde

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.”

Henry David Thoreau

“I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.”

Pablo Picasso



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In the Hawaiian language,

Wai means fresh water,

and water is recognized as a blessing

at the root of all life.



The word for Wealth

is water twice, water squared.

Wai Wai,

and a rich man

is a Kanaka Wai Wai.



But what is true wealth?

Who are the wealthy?



Yes, health is wealth,

they are only one letter apart!

But what is the root of wealth?


I see a clue in the nature of water:


that it must flow to be fully itself.



When confined, water gets musty

losing it's sparkle.



Living a consciousness of lack

I always despaired of ever having enough "water" in my possession.

I longed for a water-windfall of my own, just for me.

But I know now: that was cup-thinking.

And the cup always seemed half empty.



Now I know

that it is the flow

not the amount.

You cannot hold an ocean in a cup.



Wai Wai!

Go! Go!



Saved wealth is stagnant,

But when we flow among others,

spreading our nurturing moisture & joy about us,

we are then wealthy in the way that matters!


And we will never run dry again. . .

This Moment

Aloha Summer-Bunny!

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"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders,

but they have never failed to imitate them."

James Baldwin

"At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look;
at 45 they are caves in which we hide."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

This Moment

so rich, so full, so textured. . .

directing it,

'using it'

seems unwise

a waste of it's imminent perfection.

.

So how to make a dream come true?

We invent new ways

to achieve This Moment

so rich, so full, so textured.

Aloha & thank YOU for your visit!

Pop over to 'comments' and leave a howdy-DO :) cloudia

Rainbow Connection

Aloha Voyager!

Welcome :)

thompson_richard 1 hour ago
"There were concerns in the late ’90s of gay men walking across the gangplank in feather boas and high heels,” retired Lt. Cmdr. Craig Jones of the British Navy related (The New York Times, May 23, 2010). “That just did not happen.”

Second Lieutenant Edward George Seidensticker of the Fifth Division of the United States Marine Corps, who had previously lived in Hawaii, arrived on the first day, having glimpsed Mount Suribachi, and surviving under its contours many of his longest days and nights during the battle of February 19 through March 26, 1945.

He wrote of his Iwo Jima experience: "I was told not to stand there like the fool I unquestionably was but to get to work on a foxhole. Only a few feet away was a conspicuous and macabre object: a bare Japanese arm, raised from a heap of litter
as if in some last gesture of exhortation and defiance. The rest of the corpse was under the heap."

Seidensticker later won the National Book Award and also the Order of the Rising Sun for his translations of Japanese novels into English. His royalties from his literary career alone made him a millionaire. His work at the battle of Iwo Jima was of a rudimentary sort, e.g. Bazooka wa doko desuka? Where is your weapon now?
At the end of Seidensticker`s visit to Iwo Jima, any Japanese citizens remaining on the island of Iwo Jima were corpses. At the time of his death in Japan, he owned more land in the State of Colorado than any other private individual.
Seidensticker lived for 20 years in the Hawaiian Islands (counting his Marine Corps training on The Big Island).

Contrary to common belief, John Wayne and Errol Flynn didn't climb Mount Suribachi.

But my good friend Ed, a gay man, did.