Growing into our Names

A Tribute to Virginia Dare, A Call to the Village

“I want to live close to the people I am going to die with.”

These are the words I brought back from Manisses to Moku o Keawe. It’s strange being back. I feel disoriented, my body had started to attune to fall rhythms. I tell myself I migrated to the tropics like once of the ospreys I’d just watched cruise over Crescent Beach, but I don’t actually have wings. Truth is, I jumped on a big old jet airliner that dropped me in Kona. At the moment, I’m sitting outside on my lanai in shorts and a t-shirt typing this, when my body wants to be in sweater weather.

Back on Block Island (the colonizer name of Manisses), a nip in the air is burnishing the few trees that weren’t felled by the white settlers gold, preparing them to let go in glory; the cold is calling out the crimson in the poison ivy lining the island’s paths so it’s easily discernible. Its poison is so strong it’s possible to get a rash even in winter when it’s dormant. Here on Hualalai, everything is green except the patch of grass where my Honda Fit, Budette, was parked for the 6 weeks while I was away. Budette got a break, too, something that doesn’t happen often in the tropics unless one takes it, and she’s driving better than ever. I’m not sure why I’m telling you about my car, except to say I never know what’s going to show up when I set an intention. What I’m really trying to say is othing is inanimate and names are important.

Budette was a name given to me as a child by a family friend, now departed. (My little brother was Buddy.) He drove a small MG convertible, quite a bit snazzier than a Honda Fit, though both cars are zippy, and I like to think of him when I slalom down the roads to Kealakekua Bay. I named my car after him the day he died and sometimes the affection I feel when I pop in her to drive down the mountain are enough to shift my whole mood for the better. Like I said, names are important.

Hualalai, the mountain that hosts me, means “calm fruit or seed.” O’oma, the ahupua’a in which I dwell (ahupua’a are ancient Hawaiian land divisions that run from mauka to makai, ensuring the people who live in them have access to resources from the uplands to the ocean) means “the pitcher of a water spout.” If the place names where we dwell are reflections of our current state of being, or guides to our potential future, you could say I, Jennifer Lighty, am concave, curving inward to allow the calm flow of water down the mountain to the sea. O’oma is also a chant I received from Miguel Rivera, who received it from the Guatemalan poet Humberto Akbal, who said it’s a sound that that cannot be translated into words. Instead, the syllables carry the meaning of moving loss into the completion of grief, a place beyond words, without a name, that still calls to us. Only when we grieve do we truly let go. Too many rivers and streams these days are dammed or never reach the sea.

Back on Manisses, my friend Mike writes of sitting in the sun like a cat, soaking up the last of the sun’s warmth before winter enfolds the island. The sun will still rise and set, but for months its warmth will be hard to access. Faith will be required. Trust in the circles and cycles.

On Manisses, I lie in the sun for hours, shifting my towel down the beach as the dune shadows deepen. Sunset can last an hour, the sky abandoning itself to every brazen shade of purple, especially in winter when the trees are stripped bare and the deer sustain themselves on the bark of old apple trees. This is when faith in the light is most needed, and trust in the dark. I lived a long time on that island.

On Moku o Keawe, the light is too bright to sit for long in the open, and shadows are either as abrupt as a thousand-foot valley wall cutting the day in half with a machete, or deep as a steep gulch whose tangled vines never received the sun’s direct touch. Light and dark are more extreme, and my body, attuned to the lingering shades of low-light, misses the gentleness of Manissean transitions. On Moku o Keawe I feel exposed. I know if I sit too long in the sun I will die. And I know there is nowhere to hide from my shadows. Pele is an omnipresent force, the very ground on which I walk is her flaming body, and it will burn me when I need to wake up, even covered in vines and lush ferns that cast lacy shadows on the forest floor. Seeking shade is an act of self-preservation, not a way to find relief on a hot day. Every day here is a conscious choice to live or die in a practical way.

And what of those words I carried with me from home to home? How did they find me, these gifts of the wind I channeled through my fingers and throat to this keyboard?

They found me through the death of my friend Virginia Dare, who in early September, died with great determination on the bed in the recording studio she built with her own hands, after living about 900 lives. Her studio was a hermit’s hut in the shade of an ancient apple tree out back of her home, Mermaid House, where I passed many a moon listening to her sing and play guitar from various dwellings. One summer it was a bus parked in the backyard hollow, another year a tent in a grove claimed from the deer who huffed at my canvas walls and stomped with ground the first few nights I invaded their territory. There were also a couple of autumns in a shed constructed over Cooneymus Spring that flowed out into a pond just around the corner, bathing the land in pure magic, and a winter in Mermaid House itself, when very sick, Virginia and Sadie, another denizen of Chez Sirène, took me in for healing. I lied for a good month on Virginia’s biomat in the library under a tower of books, a lifetime of re-learning within arm’s reach, pulling a book down when I was well enough to focus on a few words, and sometimes even when I wasn’t. Virginia rolled across the dining room from table to wood stove in her reclining office chair, regaled me with stories and song, ozone water and Rick Simpson oil suppositories.

But this story isn’t about me, or at least I’m not the main character. And it’s not about Virginia either, though I will tell you she was the main character of many a good story, and never was a woman more perfectly named. Virginia may have received her first name from her parents, but she was her own. Virginia—virgin in the original sense, a woman wholly unto herself. Holy woman unto herself.

There were many Virginias. Name an archetype, somebody has a story about her that embodies it. One I particularly loved, was Virginia the Huntress. She was Artemis, the Greek Goddess of hunting, the Moon, childbirth, wild animals, protector of young girls until they married, goddess of the wilderness who roamed the forest with her dog pack, whose sacred symbols were weapons: bow and arrow, spears, knives. Whose body was lean as the crescent moon, adorned in animal pelts, lithe as the deer she loved.

Most people on Block Island don’t love deer (on Manisses we revere them) because they munch on gardens and spread Lyme disease, but I never saw Virginia shoot one. She did, however, shoot stray roosters from the back deck with a BB gun that’s still mounted on the studio wall. I never understood why Artemis was also known as the Bear Mother until I started writing this, but now it makes sense. Artemis held bears so sacred she sent a plague on the Athenians who killed one and told them it wouldn’t cease unless they consecrated their daughters to her. Virginia was a mother bear, creating a safe den for many gestating daughters. I was blessed to be one of them. She helped me bear down, do the hard labor of birthing myself. Mermaid House was a true place of refuge for many.

Like I said—there were many Virginias. She chose their last name—Dare—herself, after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World on August 18, 1587, in Roanoke, Virginia, the Lost Colony, named for the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. Wikipedia states that her fate is unknown, the fact of her birth only recorded because her grandfather, the governor of the colony, returned to England for supplies, but recent archaeological investigations speculate that the colony was not lost, but relocated to where the Chowan River meets Albemarle Sound in present-day North Carolina, so even though the ultimate fate of the original Virginia Dare remains a mystery, she could have lived a long life and had children who colonized Turtle Island. Maybe some of us are even descended from her, we women who birthed ourselves at Mermaid House under Virginia’s protection. The original Virginia Dare did not choose her name and was not a pioneer by choice. The modern Virginia changed the story, for herself, and for all the women before her who felt like they didn’t have choices, and for the women of the future. Be daring. Don’t like the hand you were dealt? Claim your life. Choose a name to guide you. One you want to live up to, a North Star you want to follow, not one someone tells you to.

As the descendant of white European settlers myself, the first Virginia Dare is my cultural ancestor. I am the result of her legacy. I can’t change where I came from, how I got to Turtle Island, or anything my ancestors did since then,, but I can live up to my name. Jennifer, from the Welsh Guinevere/Gwenhyfar, meaning White Wave, turbulence, the rough water we all must cross in life. My last name, Lighty, was originally Liechti—light. It’s a Swiss German topographic name for people who lived in a clearing. My people were wood cutters when the forest was still so dense a patch of light meant something.

You could say the translation of the name bequeathed to me by my parents who didn’t consciously know its depths, is White Wave Who Clears with Light. I am here to shake things up so the light can illuminate the darkness. Not to knock the good dark, the womb dark. I’m talking metaphorically here, working the polarity. Dark isn’t bad, but it is harder to see in it. I’m a guide.

In this lifetime, this includes doing what I’m called to do in order to dismantle the structures of colonial oppression, white supremacy and capitalism, structures that effect our material lives, and to go even deeper. I am here to expose the very roots themselves, the origin of our separation from nature that occurred in what we know as the Fall, which according to the Mū doctrines as received from Ke’oni Hanalei, occurred when humanity made possession its primary organizing principle. So with my white caps, my rocky seas, I expose those roots, but if I’m truly to fulfill my name’s potential, I need to let those roots receive the healing light, too—the long, translucent beams from the Sun, so loyal, it’s easily taken for granted.

I think I’m doing a pretty good job with capitalism, sometimes too literally. It might be easier to be more effective if I had more money, and I know I would be able to make a deeper contribution if I had my own land and didn't have to constantly stress about rent, or even having a place to live in the first place. I could do more to dismantle white supremacy, be an active anti-racist. Note to self. In these transitional times, I believe the most effective people are making changes from within the system. I respect the people holding space outside of it, but I’m practical. I want to get shit done.

I can say if I died today, I would leave many unfinished creations behind, but my legacy would be established. I would be a worthy ancestor like Virginia, whose medicine we planted in the ground before I left Manisses, four witches, a guardian for each element, offering stories of Virginia to the directions, doorways. We tended her bones by candlelight, fed them goat cheese and wine, bawdy laughter and grateful tears.

The second Virginia Dare is my ancestor, too, and I want to carry her legacy of sovereignty, kindness, and daring on, but even though I’ve been telling you a lot about Virginia and me, like I said in the beginning, this story is not about us. This story is about living close with the people who will be by your side as you die, the way Virginia died in her recording studio surrounded by good humans. It also includes living close with the non-human companions who will see us off to the other side. This story is about the village.

One afternoon, deep in recording, mesmerizing the fairies fluttering in the apple boughs with her siren’s voice, a hawk soared through Virginia’s open door and perched in the studio. Hawks have talons and beaks that can shred a dove mid-air. Have you seen one hunting? Maybe you’ve come across the remnants of one’s feast: a smattering of bloody feathers on the ground without even one bone left to pick over. You or I might have panicked if a hawk swooped into our small space, but not Virginia. She carried on with her recording, held in the hawk’s far-seeing eye. She sang. The hawk listened. On its own time, it flew out the open door. A shadow passed over and the mice in the fields shuddered.

Virginia is for Lovers. Remember that bumper sticker? Beloved Virginia. Close to the hawk. Close to the ancient apple. More Lilith than Eve. Original sinner who serenaded the town of New Shoreham with her song, “Wild Pussy Don’t Get the Blues,” on a sultry summer night. Virginia who worshipped a goddess named Mary with a whole album of songs. Ave Maria, she sang. Stella Mare. Star of the Sea. Guiding light surrounded by those who loved her in her last sleep, human voices singing her home with glasses of wine raised— spirits for the spirits. She who had channeled the wind such that hawks swooped low to listen, sung by the wind at last, blessing the night with her last breath, and then with silence.

Virginia Dare by Elise St. George. Follow her on IG: @elise_marie_art

“I feel the woman power in this house,” my friend Roark said when he came to the reception at Mermaid House a few days after Virginia’s death. That’s right, Brother. And that woman power will live on, because Virginia created a village, and village folk tell stories. And that’s what I’m going to leave you with, along with an invitation to come back next week for my telling of the Inuit story, The Huntress, along with further explorations, metaphorical and material on village consciousness and what it has to offer humans and non-human denizens of Earth in this time of breakdown, which, if we choose, can be a breakthrough. Break on through to the other side, the Doors sang, inspired by Huxley. Cleanse the doors of perception. What you see is all a matter of how you see it.

Virginia heard the call of the primal goddess and didn’t quake. She sang right back to her. Here’s a link to her last completed album, Songs to the Divine Mother. Listen and remember her, but more important, think about your own legacy. What is the story of your name? Are you living up to it? Do you need a new name to live up to? If you do, dare to call yourself who you know you are or want to be. Dare to be a worthy ancestor like Virginia.

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Before I go, thanks to all who’ve bought Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, my new book published in August by Whale Road Press. Links to purchase the book are here:

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For those who’ve read the book, I would greatly appreciate reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews help boost the algorithm, which will help broadcast the book to those who need its message. You don’t have to purchase on Amazon to leave a review. You do need an Amazon account. Here’s a link:

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And last, if you missed my interview with the brilliant Marni Suu Reynolds on The Golden Thread Podcast, here’s a link to that:

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light