The Journey to Sovereignty
The Story of Kū'au
Hello Readers,
Sharing a little story this week along with some watercolor illustrations I made as I prepare something longer for you.
It’s a story I heard from Ke’oni Hanalei from Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals when I reached out to him with an inquiry about an unusual looking fern that was growing around the house I was abiding in last summer. I had actually lived in the house during the height of the pandemic for a year and had always been curious about it, but had never thought to ask until last summer when the undulating fern with curly leaves just wouldn’t let me go.
Here is the story Ke’oni told me when I sent him these pictures of this fern, a being I’d already lived with for an entire year before wondering what it had to say.
Kū’au was a limu (seaweed) who deeply felt that he was not meant to be in the sea. He was born to be on land and root in dirt and even on the trees as an epiphyte.
With great courage and risk, Kū’au bid farewell to his aquatic family and life and released the roots that held him to the lava rock at the bottom of the ocean where he’d lived his whole life and let the currents carry him to the surface.
The waves tossed him on shore and Ku’au crawled all the way up on to the land.
He taught himself to breathe by accessing his memories of how to draw air in and out of his leaves and of how to withstand the power of the sun without the shield of the water.
He succeeded.
Kū’ua became the fern he knew he was meant to be, claiming his full name Hālākū’au. In time his wisdom and medicine became part of pua’aehuehu, where he is known as the fern of perversion, which sounds alarming if you’ve been corrupted by modern civilization to view the perverse as something sexually deviant and harmful, but in this case perversion means diversion, as in to go a different way. Your own way. That is the medicine of Kū’au. “To pave your own way and become wholly sovereign, no longer subjugated by established norms,” is how Ke’oni phrased it.
“Diversion also means to no longer allow your memories and the programming to determine who you are now.
Big question: why are you asking permission of the past to live in the now? Why is the past so seductive to you?
For Kū’au, he could not have succeeded had he kept asking the permission of the ocean to endure his birthright of land.
In particular — the ocean could not give him the proper advice to root, to photosynthesis in the absorption of light in land, and to activate his spores. The ocean simply did not have that knowledge for him. He had to RISK doing it and remembering himself.”
-Ke’oni Hanalei
As Rilke so famously said to the young poet almost a hundred years ago:
“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
-Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
And that is why I am not going to give you answers, at least not today. Because I am living these questions. They are food for my soul from Earth’s soul, holy beings come to feed me when I truly need it.
I am growing into some new form. This isn’t new for me, but this time feels different. In the past, the past has shaped where I’ve gone. This time, if I let the questions support me, if I float in them like Kū’au on the sea, when I reach the solid form of a shore I may not even recognize myself when I root again.
Are you floating, too? Tell me. Are you sinking or swimming? What would happen if you let go of anything you learned in the past about what it means to be a human being?
Remember. And then forget again. Remember. Open your leaves to the sunlight and breathe.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light