Free Paid Subscriber Giveaway

And the Ceremony of the Kabocha

Dear Readers,

This past week, I passed the 100 hundred subscriber mark. Thank you! I’ve decided to celebrate this milestone by giving away three year-long paid subscriptions. If you are already a paid subscriber you can also participate. I will extend your paid subscription another year.

By participating in this giveaway, you will also help me out by hopefully bringing more new subscribers into the fold. All you have to do is hit the like button at the bottom of this post and share it, using the button in this email. It would be great if you could share why you enjoy my writing, but not necessary.

You will see options to share on Facebook, Twitter, email or copy link. There is no direct link to Instagram, but you can copy the link and share it on Instagram stories. Make sure to use the IG link button so it’s live. It’s in the options that come up when you create stories. If you also tag me on IG at @jenlightywriter I’ll give you a bonus entry.

Finally, I need you to leave a comment in the comment field at the bottom of this email so I know you shared this newsletter and I can enter you in the giveaway! Winners will be chosen randomly on September 13th.

Last note: the three free paid subscriptions will begin when this newsletter turns paid. Right now it’s free with an option to be a paid subscriber. I’m not sure yet when that will be, but will keep you posted. Most likely within the next few months.

If you’re all in you can hit the share button right now! I will also add them after my offering this week, which is a recent cut from my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. I just cut 15,000 words and found a lot of material that I think is worth reading that doesn’t serve the book, so I will be sharing some of that here and developing it into longer essays.

The next day I descend at dusk with twenty-one seeds scooped out from the belly of a kabocha that grew near the female shrine on the property where I live. This land where I’m the caretaker once provided food for the ali’i who lived below in The Place of Refuge. The terraced ruins where the maka’āinana farmed kalo and sweet potatoes are right below my house. I sleep surrounded by ruins.

When I get to The Great Wall I’m not sure where I’m supposed to offer the seeds. I say out loud, “Please show me where to make this offering,” and walk through. To the left, I see the ponds are full, almost overflowing. “Walk right,” I hear, not out loud, or in a voice other than my own, but I follow it. My body is a compass and today, at least, I will not doubt it. Over the rolling succulent-slick lava I walk toward the King’s compound where I began this ceremony. At the King’s stone seat I discover it’s rained so hard water has pooled in a fissure beneath it, just below the center where I imagine he sat. I squat and open my paper towel, begin dropping the kabocha seeds in the rain pool. All twenty-one.

Past, present, future merge.

But wait-there is one more! I brought twenty-two seeds. Is this significant or a random mistake? I don’t want to be a false mystic proclaiming I know the answer to everything.

Meaning, when you thing about it, is so easy to make. Too easy, I’ve discovered. Not that I’m opposed to significance. I just don’t want to impose my agenda on the world outside myself anymore. It’s time to give the world on the other side of my skin the space, and all the time it needs, to be heard on its own terms. If the multiplicity we reduce to the pronoun “it” wants to communicate, I am available. I will show up until “it” trusts me, day after day. If it doesn’t, I won’t hold a grudge, and I’ll do my best not to be disappointed.

I claim my emotions as I claim the border of my skin. I am boundaried, but I am also porous like the lava rock all around me weathered by eons of rain. My blood and bones understand their language, and this book is my attempt to speak with the same elemental simplicity, to return words to their source in our shared body.

These seeds, sticky in my palm, recently hibernating inside the sugar-sweet orange flesh of a kabocha growing on a vine near a shrine to the holy female seven hundred feet up this mountain, where my sleep is permeated by dreams that awaken the dormant cells of my body that remember they are sacred and holy beings, will be my covenant. I speak:

“Dear King Keawe, I am Jennifer, daughter of Bruce and Susan, granddaughter of Harris and Anna, Jack and Dorothy, great granddaughter of Jacquett and Sarah, Bernard and Anna, Jim and Bess, Alfred and Anna. I come from an island much smaller than yours, mist-enshrouded, gale-swept, green in summer, golden in fall, stripped of color by winter, an island reborn each sun cycle through the portal of spring-pale yellow daffodils and peepers, cattail shoots in the marsh and snapping turtles crawling up through mud to lay their eggs on dry ground. It was called Manisses by the people who spoke its original language, Block Island by mine, the colonizers who are still coming, driving the people like me, the maka’āinana, from the land with their million dollar houses.

In this place, to love without money requires sacrifice, the ritual consent to not be seen and heard, to be content with the scraps off the tables of the rich or to compete with each other for the few available places we could afford. There I was given each other: live in the cracks-in boats, in barns, in tents, in a backyard school bus, as a caretaker for the wealthy who for the most part were willing to stop their ears with wax like Odysseus’s crew, oblivious to the sirens.

The sirens there were not seductresses, they were actual alarms. Alcohol was the great equalizer. The island’s motto could be, “Get Drunk and Carry On.” Numbed by booze, rich and poor, and everyone in between could essentially ignore their own pain until someone dropped dead-liver failure, a motorcycle accident, suicide. Then we could all gather and get drunk to mourn, wailing in the taverns like hollowed-out versions of Hafiz, possessed by spirits we thought were our friends, when really we’d sold ourselves to the devil for another round of working to get by until the next tragedy brought us all together.

That is why I left that island, King Keawe, withdrew my consent from the ritual, refused the sacrifice to feed the hungry ghosts haunting the hollows and dunes. I realize I don’t belong here and I may never, not in the way I belonged to Block Island where the land claimed me for its own, but I am willing, if the aina wants me, to learn from these wave-rippled rocks, from this aquamarine water so different from the labradorite murk of my home waters where it was harder to see past the sheen to what lurks in the depths. Here the water is transparent and so am I, thin-skinned and aware of how the sun could burn the border of my skin. The pain of the world feels so close.

I hesitate to say if you will have me, I am yours, but maybe I should be as bold as my European ancestors that crossed the Atlantic. Unlike them, my life is not really in danger. No one is persecuting me for my religious beliefs, and even in my lean days, I’ve had an abundance of food. I’ve lived well, even traveled, yet sovereignty called. I am meant to show what it looks like to be a free human being on Earth.

And so with a dash of the bravery exhibited by my European ancestors, I crossed another ocean, carrying with me the river-song of the Ohio and the Muskingum where my mother was born, the Liberty Bell of the City of Brotherly Love, the “Philadelphia Freedom” of my father’s hometown. Flying through the air on the fiddles of Ireland, bringing with me tales of King Arthur and Finn MacCool, and the forest wisdom of the Rhineland gleaned from hundreds of years of living with beech, ash, spruce and oak. I am the descendant of martyrs and kings, of serfs and tradespeople. As far as I know I am the first poet in my lineage, though I suspect that I, like all humans, have one at our source, an original human who learned how to praise from birds at dawn and draw the language of the dreamtime on cave walls deep inside mountains that were already ancient before humans first stood upright.

Forgive me for not properly introducing myself before this. I’m sorry I didn’t know your name and sat on your rock and am a haole, especially a stupid one who didn’t know I should bring you the food and Kane’s Water of Life before I ever slept on this island, let alone in a heiau. I know it doesn’t matter it was a ruin. I was, and am, a fool, but my heart is innocent. I’m hoping that’s enough, and if it isn’t, well then I don’t know what else to do. I’m not going to crawl on my knees through the desert to prove myself, because at this point in humanity’s evolution on this spinning blue marble, I’m willing to take a stand for what’s simple, even if you the great King don’t approve. This is my own wild and precious life and, like Mary Oliver said, and if you’d met Mary like I had, you’d understand she KNEW what she was talking about having learned it straight from the holy in nature we are all here to serve, kings and peasants alike, with the soft animal of our bodies, with our tenderness that keeps us close to the ground, the mother of us all.

So please accept this not so humble offering-my innocence, which I thought was taken from me by violence, but that’s been with me all along. I’ve earned it and I won’t pretend otherwise. This is my proclamation. I am here to serve. In the spirit of the simplistic American culture that birthed me I say, “Let’s do this!”

And with that I toss the 22nd seed into the tide pool and watch it slowly sink until it settles on the black lava bottom. Some little fish, cousins of my friends in the nearby pond, nuzzle it. It’s wider than their translucent bodies so they can’t get a grip on it with their mouths. A crab approaches. The fish dart away and circle back. Claws flicker. The battle goes on, but for today at least, the stakes don’t seem so high. I leave, trusting no one in the tide pool will go hungry.

Just before I exit at The Great Wall: a small flock of quail moving on a collective ululation pecks at insects in the newly formed puddles from the afternoon deluge. Most of the flock is hopping over the succulents, but one bird, standing on a single leg stops and looks up at me. I will it to put the other leg down, but it hops away from me and I see the worst is true-it only has one leg. But then it flies! Lifts off the path with no effort and hurtles toward the setting sun with the rest of the flock. I am left behind in the gloaming, gutted and hopeful.

Thanks for reading friends! I look forward to sharing more with you and building this community of mythopoetic seekers in love with the holy word.

Once again here are the 1 year free subscription giveaway requirements:

1. Like this post by clicking like button at bottom.

2. Share by clicking share button.

3. Drop a quick comment in field below to let me know you shared.

Winners will be announced September 13th.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen