Pause by the Spiral Stream

Click on photos to enlarge!
“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
Pablo Picasso



“Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends. But, there's nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.”
Ani Difranco

Spiral Triumphant!

“The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals."
Madame de Stael

My dear friends:

When you get stuck

spread out a picnic

and enjoy your surroundings!

Thank you for stopping by,

and for your comments.

Wishing you each a pleasant week,

A L O H A! Cloudia

Fifty Years Ago

Click on photos to enlarge!Ted Trimmer: Golden Dream

By building relations we create a source of love and personal pride and belonging that makes living in a chaotic world easier.

Susan Lieberman"

Royal Hawaiian Band on the steps of Iolani Palace, 1906

"The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down."

A. Whitney Brown

Dan Axler: Indiana Sky

"There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America - there's the United States of America."

Barack Obama

It was 50 years ago this week that the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Hawaii Admission Act by a 323 to 89 vote. One day earlier (March 11) the Senate had granted their "yay" by a margin of 75 to 15.

With the expected signature of President Eisenhower it would be up to the citizens of the Territory of Hawaii to give their assent. A mere 66 years after the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani's monarchy, just 42 years after the old Queens passing, the Territorial Legislature sat in morning session at her Iolani Palace while Congressional delegate (not representative!) John A. Burns relayed his account of the historic vote by telephone from Washington DC, where afternoon shadows already lengthened.

When Territorial House Speaker Elmer Cravalho announced the final affirmative tally, the representatives took to their feet spontaneously to sing the "Star Spangled Banner." Then they sang the Isle anthem, "Hawaii Pono`i." With the future (the Sixties!) and a young President right around the corner, American optimism swept the isles in a tsunami of excitement and opportunism. With full citizenship rights and voting representation, it was hoped, the strangle-hold of the old Big Five companies would be broken. Then a post-missionary, post-colonial, post-plantation-oligarchy, multi-ethnic society might bloom and prosper after lifetimes of labor, denigration, and exclusion. The Japanese-American veterans who we saluted last week: http://comfortspiral.blogspot.com/2009/03/go-for-broke.html

deserved no less. Even the frank southern racism of certain U.S. senators and representatives, fortified by the anti-communist/anti-labor organizer sentiment of the day, ultimately withered before the evident justice of Statehood. If Hawaii was too different, then the decision to admit Alaska first, as 49th US State, might be viewed as an easy step in America's westward expansion.

Not everyone was celebrating. Hawaiians who had endured "future shock" cultural dislocation, genocidal health emergencies, and political dispossession, still felt a deep pulse of love for their nation and their Monarchs. Many Hawaiian families still cherished elder members who had been born in the waning days of an Island Kingdom. These kupuna passed on stories of a stolen past that they had overheard in small kid times as their parents, who had lived through it all, quietly talked into the evening. The mother tongue, Olelo Hawaii, was spoken in private homes, and hula & chant never really died.

Nevertheless, the momentum seemed ordained. 99 % of the 140,744 local voters who cast their ballots in the June 27, 1959 statewide plebiscite favored statehood. America's "affair" with the brown hula girl was rendered respectable as she assented to become Uncle Sam's latest wife.

On August 21st President Eisenhower signed papers dissolving the Territory and establishing the 50th State of Hawaii. "Us guys stay EQUAL now!" Soon jets would bring newly prosperous visitors from the continent, many of them WWII veterans who had forged an emotional attachment with the isles. I still see the hula girl tattoos fading on their tired arms as they sun on da beach with their Midwestern wives. Pearl Harbor continues to welcome daily visitors from all over the world; Many Japanese visitors pay their respects to this day. The planeloads of visitors did come to "get lei'ed" and to catch a whiff of Elvis. They followed their dreams of an American paradise. Did you see Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's incendiary send-up of island tourism on last week's Saturday Night Live?

Far far away from the islands, in every way that places can be distant, lived a very young Me who watched "Hawaiian Eye" and "Adventures in Paradise" on a small, family black and white Philco television. It had rabbit ears, I wore Mickey Mouse ears. Already longing for escape from the conformity of 1959, I dozed off on the living room carpet dreaming of an endless summer of no school, no bullies, no stultifying arithmetic lessons.

Somewhere distant in that long ago night, a train howled and chattered; a Harley Davidson backfired, a finned convertible wheeled past my first window blaring Doo Wop. Stirring slightly in my baby sleep, my lips practiced once again the lovely words I had "sounded-out" from the pages of the National Geographic. "Aloha" means "hello" "goodbye" and "love." A porch (my grandma had a Philadelphia "stoop") is called a "Lanai."

But first I had to grow up and move on to second grade. . .

A L O H A! Cloudia

ps: it still means "love!"

Crane Calls

Click on photos to enlarge!

"For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation? " Thornton Wilder

I'd like mornings better if they started later.

Author Unknown

"Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it."

Honore de Balzac

"Jealousy injures us with the dagger of self-doubt."

Leslie Grimutter

Construction is hypnotic. Watching heavy beams lifted high, then higher, draws an inner "wow" from even the most jaded or mature among us. At times like this it also restores our faith that someone somewhere believes that tomorrow is still coming, and that improvements will be needed.

LIVING in the middle of a construction project is something else entirely! The area all around my boat (my home, office, REFUGE) has been ground zero for the laying of new floating docks for several weeks now. The hushed Waikiki morning erupts in beeps, chugs, huge "clanks" and assorted "rumbles" & "roars" at exactly the time I sit down to meditate - or to write.

Most amazing has been the destruction and removal of a heavy cement pier two boat slips off my starboard side (nautical talk! impressed?). This has required a rodeo of cool work boats, as well as a barge that carries a marooned a steam shovel from one duty-spot to another. It looks like the bathtub toy of a confused little boy.

Huge, sea-dripping blocks of cement are lifted by the "Caterpillar" atop the barge, then handed off to a giant crane that lives behind a temporary fence directly in front of my boat. My mast has developed a massive inferiority complex! The line holding our flags and pennants has even snapped in huffy protest.

And have I mentioned the jack hammering? Even now, workday done, I sense the jangling vibration in my finger tips. Why, I wonder, isn't this text you read all wavy? I feel like the cartoon character wearing a nimbus of wavy lines because Bugs Bunny has lowered a giant bell over my head and "clanged" it with a huge mallet.

I thought I saw a puddy cat. . . .

As I recover my wits, I'll post "before" & "after" photos of the late cement pier. And the barge!

But right now I need to luxuriate in the velvety silence, eavesdropping on the clicks, creaks, and moans of my exhausted, rocking, refuge.

Just another day in paradise. . . A L O H A! Cloudia

Blog Drive

Click on photos to enlarge!Pali Highway "Windshield Shot"

"What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public."
Vilhjalmur Stefansson


Wheeeeeeee!



Do you think this person loves Hula?

"The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage."
Mark Russell


Banana truck!


This activity of blogging goes WAY beyond what anybody is saying or thinking. It is nothing less than a world wide nervous system in which all sorts of people see, think, and feel what someone very far away (and often very different) is seeing, thinking and feeling.




Every day I visit England, Pennsylvania, Mumbai, Crete, Texas, Toronto, Hong Kong, Tennessee, Louisiana, and New York CITY! And in each place I "talk story" with a person of heart and mind. Often a picture or an idea stays in my mind all day.



John Gardner once wrote:

"To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on."

Each reader is a gift. They bring their time, they open their hearts, and come along the path of our words willingly. Thank you my readers - especially those of you who are also writers. We carry on the conversation, and perhaps we are each grace notes in a world filling symphony.

A L O H A! Cloudia

Pali Highway

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving." Lao Tzu
"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe." Anatole France

"Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind." Seneca

" It is not down in any map; true places never are." Herman Melville

When driving over the famous Pali Highway between Honolulu and windward Kailua Town, through lovely Nu`uanu, and up into the lush Ko`olau Mountains, be sure to take the OLD ORIGINAL PORTION of the road! It’s called Nu`uanu Pali Drive and it’s well worth a “detour!” After separating from the main road (and the modern world) you will pass by lovely, flower-strewn ponds on your left. Then the trees join their hands above your head as you drive into a cool, hushed trail of shadows and smells. The narrow, twisty lane always makes me feel as if I’ve entered a timeless, magical realm that leaves me refreshed and rejuvenated as I rejoin the rushing highway at last. Of course, a stop at the Pali Lookout is MANDATORY! The winds, the view of the island’s windward shores, the waterfalls curving upward to oblivion, all etch themselves on your permanent record. Here too the spirits sing, remember and lament. Many of them are the wandering spirits of defeated warriors – so it’s just as well to leave before the foxy dusk. . .

A L O H A! Cloudia

Honolulu Downtown

click on photos to enlarge!Honolulu Hale (Hah-lay) "City Hall"

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."

Dickens

Downtown Honolulu, to the right of photo above

(State Capitol in foreground)

"Where we love is home,Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Kamehameha IV & Queen Emma 1859

"He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home." Goethe

"Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest." Robert Montgomery

Did you know that our Hawaii State Archives contains several letters signed by President Abraham Lincoln? In one dated February 2, 1864 the US president offers condolences to Kamehameha V from “Your Majesties Good Friend.” This year we celebrate Lincoln’s 200th birthday. What would the “Great Emancipator” think of a Hawaii-born man of color ascending to his office, being sworn in on Lincoln’s own bible, and the Kingdom of Hawaii a US state? It boggles my mind! Incidentally, when Hawaii became a U.S. Territory the grand pooh bahs in Washington sent along a seemingly innocuous order that our archives be sent east immediately. Fortunately, quiet resistance garbed in governmental inertia prevailed so scholars and nosey types can read, touch, and smell historical documents and objects right here in Honolulu. Throw in all the historical buildings (including America’s only Royal Palace and oldest Chinatown) and it’s easy to see why Congress may name Downtown Honolulu a National Heritage area later this year. The nation’s 41st such designated area might even be announced in time for the 50th observance of Hawaii statehood on August 21st. In my dear downtown, ancient shades of Hawaiians and their gods prowl the shadows of night alongside gallery hoppers and chic nightlife habitués. Sacred rocks (Pohaku) lie beside ballast stones that traveled here in the hulls of sailing ships that carried away the last of our sandalwood trees. (Though Chinese immigrants continued to call our islands the “Sandalwood Mountain.” America: the “Gold Mountain.”). A king’s carriage way is now a high tech fiber optic channel. Torches have morphed into streetlights, Kahuna Kapu (taboos) all replaced by the Hawaii Revised Statutes. But on moonlit nights the old power and perfumes remain. The chiefs and chiefesses of old still love to laugh beneath the huddled mountains. Can you hear them whispering?



A L O H A! Cloudia

Hawaiian Superman

click on photos to enlarge! Gabe

"True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."- Anais Nin

"My friends are my estate."- Emily Dickinson

Hawaiian Superman: The Big Man, Gabe, has vacated his usual place of honor at the Harbor Pub to live with his grandchildren and family in Georgia. This full-blooded Hawaiian gentleman leaves a giant empty space in the lives of his many friends around the island. Grown men wiped away tears the other eve as everybody’s favorite band, Simplicity played his Aloha Party. “This pure Hawaiian, not to many left, is leaving us to move away to Georgia – where he will instantly become. . . MEXICAN!” Teased Andy the lead singer before launching into ‘Maui the Hawaiian Superman.’” “Gaaaabe, the Hawaiian superman.” They sang. Next verse: “Gaaaabe, the Mexican superman.” One time Gabe told us the story of his first childhood visit to downtown Honolulu. Young Gabe, a boy from the country of maybe 5 or 6, watched as the double doors inside da department store opened to admit the people. When the door opened again – the people were gone! “Don’t make me go in there! I don’t want to disappear!” He wailed. Gabe was walking history, a lot of mine included, come to think of it. Aloha, Big Man, Aloha `Oe. Parting is bitter; but you’ve always been really sweet. . . . You see Hawaii is not paradise because it is perfect. Rather, it is a paradise because we choose to greet life’s changes not with regret or despair, but with deep appreciation, acceptance, and aloha. . . Paradise is what you make of it, and where you find it. . . when you’re walking in Waikiki . . . .
A L O H A! Cloudia