Searching for the Spring in the East

On beginning a new book

The Completion

Here at the end, I find I have nothing to say.
I have been consumed by this journey, though I'm still here in this body,
longing to walk under winter stars with the deer 
in cold so deep it touches the heart of Earth's dreaming.

I have been consumed by this journey, though I"m still here in this body.
The frozen ground has not forgotten me.
In cold so deep, it touches the heart of Earth's dreaming,
I am carried beyond memory.

The frozen ground has not forgotten me.
Earth, I am home. I belong here.
I am carried beyond memory.
My ancestors who crossed oceans are now free.

Earth, I am home. I belong here.
The lost forests have received my grief.
My ancestors who crossed oceans are now free.
My prayer now, is empty me.

The lost forests have received my grief.
Earth, my home. I belong here.
My prayer now, is empty me.
Release me from meaning.

Earth, I am home. I belong here.
I shall rejoice when each color of the rainbow appears.
Released from meaning,
I will seek shelter in the trees' rooted shadows.

I shall rejoice when each color of the rainbow appears.
Longing to walk under winter stars with the deer,
I will seek shelter in the trees' rooted shadows.
Here, at the end, I find I have nothing to say.

A few days ago I drove south, then turned east. heading into the wind that was encountering its first obstruction for thousands of miles. Moku o Keawe, the island where I live, pushing back at the sea’s onslaught with fountains of fire. Kilauea was erupting, and offshore lava was defying the weight of water to form a new island that would one day break the surface and prepare itself to receive a new chief, someone like Keawe who lived for the land and the people.

I came to start my new book. The one I’ve been trying to start for two years since I finished my last book. I came because I needed to turn a deadline into something alive.

I left my car on the road, even though the yellow gate was open. Risking someone breaking the windows and stealing whatever was inside was part of the deal. I walked, searching for a spring where wai, fresh water, poured from a cleft in the rocks like a birthing woman.

I walked, hoping Pegasus, the winged horse who birthed the Muses when his hoof touched Mount Helicon, would find me.

Pegasus had been born fully formed, wings dry and ready to fly, when Perseus slashed open Medusa’s throat.

A knife had been held to my throat. I survived and wrote about it. Now I was going back to the story that led to that story, the birth of myself on another island in the labradorite Atlantic where the water was opaque and the secrets took longer to reveal themselves. I had walked that island’s shores for a long time.

I couldn’t find the spring. I could have sworn I took the right turn both times I backtracked and searched for it, but I kept ending up at the same tide pools ringed by green succulents where the spring was supposed to be. What happened to the estuary where my friend and I sat in water up to our hips, serious and quiet like Cézanne’s bathers? That had been one of those rare where you know what a blessing it is to be alive.

Fragment of Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Cézanne

That is where I wanted to start my new book. But I couldn’t find it. The spring had disappeared. I could look up directions on my phone. I was in another dimension, but I still had service. No. I knew that was the wrong way to start.

This book was to be the story of my return to nature, my descent and my homecoming. To begin now with the machine would be a mistake. I asked the holy in nature to guide me.

I carried the medicine of Palai Hinahina with me, grief. It was in a little bottle in my bag, but it was also inside me. I let my feet guide me to the next tide pool. When I looked into the black mirror, I knew I had found the water that wanted to receive it. Three drops in the water, one under my tongue, and one on the back of my neck where my spirit entered my body at my cervical spine, a parallel opening to the one I passed through to enter this world as a physical body. I swore I would not squander this opportunity. I would complete and make way for more light.

You are sad. You carry a sadness, I’ve been told a couple of times by people I’d met in ceremonies. The first time I was upset, ashamed to be seen. I felt weak, but now I don’t mind. It is a wellspring from which I make beauty. Now, the grief medicine is not just for me.

This way, I heard after my offering had been received in the black mirror. Before I turned, I looked past the ripples on the water to the shining black lava on the bottom. Fire and water, my guides.

Further east I walked, until I came to a bowl in the black lava filled with white sand, coral ground down by waves a hundred feet away that would take me if I wasn’t vigilant. It wouldn’t be personal and if that happened, I knew it would only be what I deserved.

There were no sharp edges here, the lava had been softened by wind and waves. Everything was a receptacle to hold water.

I was safe.

And then the wave crashed over me.

When it left, I had not moved, but the wave had moved me, and I knew I had walked far enough, and that I wasn’t going to find the spring. This is where my book wanted to begin, touched by the same ocean that was also touching, right then, the island of my conception.

I stepped out of the bowl and walked to higher ground, took my notebook out of my knapsack and wrote the first sentence.

Mother. We follow you downhill at dusk like goslings to the edge of the pond.

I played around with the phrasing a bit, but didn’t add any more sentences to the page. The wind blew me onshore, back to my car, which had not been broken into. I drove with it at my back until I reached the south curve of Moku o Keawe and turnedwest. The sun was setting, completing the day. Night would soon rise out of the ocean to ascend Mauna Loa who rumbled quietly like a sleeping dragon for miles on both sides of me.

You carry such sadness, someone will say to me yet again in a few nights. She will be a stranger. A medium. She will say she has a message from my friend who died, the one whose bones I planted at the roots of a jacaranda tree that will soon be flowering. The one I held as ash in my hands I offered to the water in the book I finished two years ago. She wants me to be happy, the medium will say. I don’t know if she means she herself wants me to be happy, or if it’s my friend who died who wants me to be relieved of my sorrow.

I think it’s the medium, because Jada knows the weight of her ashes are not heavy. They were light in my hands, so light my breath lifted them like the wind, and they are about to become purple flowers that will fall like jewels all night onto the ground where pigs root, churning up the soil for seeds. They have long been absorbed by the water’s black mirror, dissolved in starlight.

Palai Hinahina, Sister Grief, thank you for being here with me at this beginning. Bless this new book to completion.

Sorrow is not exactly the same as sadness, is it? Sorrow is a way of being with the lost spring, and Medusa, birthing Pegasus out of her slashed throat.

Sorrow doesn’t need to tell the medium she’s wrong. She lets the woman kiss her left temple as instructed by the spirit who’s talking to her, receives the blessing from the other side.

On my left side, driving north on the western flank of Mauna Loa, the long mountain, right before the sun goes down, in my peripheral vision a scene from one of the fairy tales my mother read to me as a child appeared. A flock of birds flying in a V, keeping pace with my car. Could they be geese? There were geese here on Moku o Keawe, but I’d only seen them on the ground in pairs or a small gaggle eating grass by a roadside. Never a whole flock. Never a flying V.

We pass through the shape of a V to enter this world. The cleft between our mothers’ legs. Vulva. One word in English still rooted to the truth of how we came to be here. I didn’t find the spring pouring through the cleft in the rocks, but I know the wai has blessed me.

I was tempted to stop the car and look up what other birds flew in a V on Moku o Keawe, because I still had service, but I kept my hands on the wheel. I held steady and accepted the blessing, Mother Goose watching over her gosling as she drove into the dark of a new story.

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Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light