The Parliament of Ferns

Entire text of three part series

Dear Readers,

I’ve appreciated so much your feedback about the Parliament of Ferns, my recent three part series on pua’aehuehu, Mū Hawaiian fern medicine. I thought I’d share the text in its entirety for those who’d like to have another look at it. I always find I learn more from re-reading and thought you might like that, too. I’ll be back with a new post this Friday or Saturday.

The Parliament of Ferns

Aloha Future Beings,

If these words have reached you that means they survived the cataclysms that destroyed my civilization, maybe even our planet itself. Earth.

If Earth no longer exists I don’t know how you are reading my words, but I have faith in them the way I have faith in water who came to Earth from an unknown source, and release them into the mysterious flow.

If you can read, whoever you are-whatever-know my words are spores, capable of creating organic life without sexual fusion, for the organic was glorious in all its manifestations. You could be life’s next avatar. Let us not be lost to amnesia.

Maybe you don’t need sex to reproduce. Maybe you don’t need solid ground. If so, I’m sorry. They were two great pleasures of human existence that sometimes brought us closer to the being we called God, though by the time I lived many thought sex and Earth were dirty, minds tainted by the culture of control that feared their wildness.

We took water for granted until it dried up, until it flooded the cities where we sacrificed ourselves to the machines that destroyed us.

The last time civilization was destroyed by a flood, a man named Noah built an ark and brought aboard two of every creature. This time Noah’s ark won’t be enough. As humans merge with machines, organic sex, the two by two kind, is dropping off, along with fertility rates. People are more interested in the virtual than actual bodies. That is why spores are needed and not seeds, and why, when I was asked to place something worth saving on this new ark in the hopes something good from our civilization would survive so future beings could recreate culture, I chose pua’aehuehu, Mū Hawaiian fern medicine.

I am not Hawaiian, though my mentor Ke’oni says since Mū was the original Earth civilization, at one point we were all Mū. I don’t claim this as an authority to appropriate a culture, rather to say I claim my place as a child of Earth. I don’t have any special powers besides to pay attention and to grieve. That’s one of the ways we failed-not feeling our losses as the waters rose and the world burned. The birds and insects died by the billions and most of us didn’t notice. There was so much loss we numbed ourselves to go on. We had these things called rent and bills that controlled us. Earth, bought and sold. Fire trapped in engines and bombs. In my time water was commodified and people forgot they used to drink it free from streams and wells. I’m sure we’ll be paying for air soon.

I’m at my desk writing this on Hawai’i. The Big Island many called it. The gods are still alive here. They hear our prayers and offerings, and everyone has a story about how Pele upended their life to teach them a lesson. Just four years ago she destroyed 800 homes a mile away from me. Ferns are already unfurling on the black lava.

In front of my desk an avocado tree is fruiting. I am keeping an eye on the vanilla vine snaking around its branches because if it flowers we plan to hand-pollinate. There are still bees here in Puna, but they aren’t the right kind. Vanilla is also a colonizer. I don’t say this to absolve myself by admission, but to acknowledge that I chose to be here in this time and I will do my best to flower where I’ve planted. It’s too late in the game for blame.

Debussy wafts through my earbuds into my cochlea, spiraling like shells inside my head.

I wonder if music exists in the future? Maybe there is only music, sound waves spiraling out from the invisible to build shells around themselves like chambered nautili. Mynah birds squawk and bang on my tin roof as I tap black keys that translate thoughts into silent shapes on a screen. You’d never know they were born from the warm interior of a human body, air in concert with bones, organs and body fluids carving out canyons.

I hope you have water on your planet. I hope you can sing in the rain and pull a bucket up from a deep well; cup your hands where a spring pours out, I hope you know thirst so you can quench it; meander like a river, flood an arroyo, soak in a thermal pool heated by a goddess. And rainbows-how water paints the sky with the sun’s hidden colors.

I can’t believe how many rainbows I’ve passed without bowing. I still think they’re beautiful, but the awe is mostly gone. That is why I’m writing-to keep feeling alive for as long as I can. My message may not be understood in my lifetime. I may not even understand it. But I did my part. Not like a good soldier, like a lover on her back in a clearing looking up as light entered, receiving spores on her upturned palms.

I will let the ferns speak now.

“Aloha. We are the ferns of Hawai’i. We speak through a human avatar, Jennifer Lighty, who has offered to transcribe our teachings, kept alive orally for millennia by the Mū Hawaiians and revealed in her time by Ke’oni Hanalei, Mū descendant who still knows his lineage back to the stars. We originated when Earth was partially ethereal, thus we believe we have something to offer to those in a liminal future who may find themselves needing guidance at the crossroads.

We have had our eye on Jen since she was a girl and have been speaking to her for many years. She heard us all along and shared our essence through poems, but has only recently been able to directly hear us. We asked if she wanted to volunteer for this task because she is a poet, a suitable amanuensis, for as Percy Byshe Shelley proclaimed centuries before Jennifer was born, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The Mū knew the world is constructed of metaphor and taught that before you speak you must first become a poet. Those who can link words to that which is seemingly other and move the heart are the world’s true governors. We thank Jen and her ancestors, most notably her grandfather and great-grandfather Harris and Jacquett Lighty, court stenographers in the 20th century City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia. Through blood they gifted her with good ears and swift fingers.

What we are going to tell you contradicts the historical record, which in Jen’s time required material proof to be accepted by the establishment. Perhaps that’s changed in your time. We’ll just say that the scientific method was responsible for great advances in human civilization, while also being limited by strict adherence to the material. As Hamlet, a fictional existential hero created by a famous playwright known as Shakespeare proclaimed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” While we support critical thinking and the use of one’s senses to remain grounded, there was little material evidence of Mū culture in Jen’s time. Instead, the culture was preserved in chants and by us, the ferns. This is some of what was known:

Mū was a pre-Tahitian culture that existed in the Hawaiian archipelago well before the Neolithic Age, about 20,000 years BC according to the time measurements of Jen’s civilization. BC stands for “Before Christ.” Christ was an advanced human avatar who seeded human consciousness with the truth of their divine origin. His teachings were over-materialized and resulted in a religion of control that governed most of the planet by 2022. Unlike the scholars and sages of Jen’s time, the Mū did not write their wisdom down. Some of it was encoded in symbols in post-cataclysm cultures by the Mū diaspora. Hebrew, Mayan and Egyptian art contained Mū teachings labeled esoteric, which only meant they couldn’t be comprehended by the rational mind.

To be irrational was not valued in Jen’s time. As a poet her gifts were, for the most part, not valued. Fortunately, she followed her calling anyway, and found her way to places quiet enough the elements could still be heard. She wandered and absorbed esoteric wisdom in many sacred places. Finally, in Hawai’i, she encountered Ke’oni Hanalei. Her channel opened and she was able to receive our words.

Ke’oni Hanalei means “A Spiral Hurling Forth.” His parents chose well. In 2013, ten years after  his grandmother, Maui medicine woman Kau’ikeonalani transitioned, he chose, as a sovereign Aquarian being to lift the kapu against sharing pua’aehuehu.

Ke’oni had been tested through cancer, death, addiction, incarceration, abandonment-all to understand he was the only one who could truly abandon himself. He dedicated himself to leading a life of purpose. Kiakahi, the Hawaiians called it. He knew the teachings could be lost and chose to share in the most direct and practical way available to him at the time, social media. His daily ferncasts on Instagram opened the minds and hearts of thousands of humans.

One thing we want to make sure you know is that we aren’t attached to results. We have preserved this ike because it is our sacred purpose, not because we want to save humanity or Earth. When our words are lifted on the next ark as the water rises, we will keep on until we all die out. That is when we’ll know our purpose is complete.Consciousness is expanding. Will it happen fast enough so that humans of Jen’s time can avoid the catastrophes that are only trying to wake them up? Probably not.

Where did the Mū come from and why did they choose Earth?

Some of this information cannot be disclosed yet, nor may never be.Our teachings are meant to be embodied, so we have chosen not to reveal some things to help you understand one of our principles, Pai Huna, Divine Mystery. We could tell you, but then you wouldn’t have the opportunity of surrendering to the unknown, but the Mū Hawaiians of Keoni’s time have preserved some of our origin story in chants and they can be shared freely.

The Mū were descendants of the first beings on Earth known as Mea. The Mea were not in full participation with gravity, thus were partially ethereal. They appear in the mythology of other cultures. In Greece, they were known as the Hyperboreans. They came from the junction of four star systems known in the Mū dialect as: Makali’i, Mata-Roro, Hōkūle’a and A’ā. In English: the Pleiades, Draco, Arcturus, and Sirius, all visible in the night sky of Jen’s time.

Jen learned from Ke’oni that the chants say Honua, Earth, and the third dimension of physical matter were an experiment of the creator, Ka mea nāna i hana, to engineer aloha mā, self-reflective love. Before this Source consisted of pure love-aloha. Alohacould not be perceived in time and space, therefore Ka mea nana i hana separated itself from itself in order to love itself. Free will was born. Kiakahi Rā Ana-purpose-was worshipped, not idols or individual gods.

Because aloha was too vast for humans to experience, in order to experience aloha māin the 3D, aloha was fragmented into 103 human emotions, traits and qualities. The path to direct experience of aloha was experiencing each of these emotions. This is where we come into the picture.

We, the ferns of Honua, are the only known species on Earth by the year 2022 BCE that have preserved our sacred DNA through the cataclysms that wiped out previous civilizations and caused mass extinctions of plant and animal life. We exist in evolutionary stasis, have remained unchanged even at the level of the nuclei and chromosome for at least 180 million years. Every other species that survived, even crystals and stone elements, have had to adapt to continue on Earth.

How we have done this is again governed by Pai Huna, but the Hawaiians of Jen’s time are correct in saying we have a biosphere around us that extends an inch out from our physical avatars that cannot be explained by science. Yes, surrounding each one of us is what her civilization considered an alien world. It’s not alien to us, of course. We canshare that our spores are the main contributor to this force field. They feed and sustain our metaphysical state while anchoring us to the physical by helping us reproduce. As we drift on the wind and fall onto rock and soil we plant the original source codes of Ka mea nānā i hana in Earth.

Speaking of Earth, it’s time to ground this parliament. In Jen’s time the word was most commonly associated with the governing body of the United Kingdom who, as the British Empire, colonized much of the world with the extreme form of possession known as property ownership, an extreme manifestation of the attachment to meaning that is the true cause of the collapse of every civilization that has occurred on Earth. (And in other planets and star systems, too-though we’ll stick to Earth to keep the word count of this parliament within the limits the ark builders have designated to keep the boat afloat.)

A parliament, from the Old French parlement, simply means a conversation or talk. Jen knows this word from her days as an aspiring Medieval scholar when she escaped the disenchanted modern world through Chaucer, whose poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” tells the story of a legendary negotiation between birds that ends with Nature allowing the birds the right not to choose a mate, reinforcing free will.

Free will, if you’ll remember, is the child of the fragmentation of aloha, and we are pleased to report that our scribe Jen has exercised it by choosing life over and over again in the face of trauma and despair. We bless her hands for this, her tongue and mind and heart, and we want you to know we trust her. These words, transmitted through her hands, are ours. We are united with her in our shared kiakahi of embodying the principles of aloha.

As we mentioned, by the time of Jen’s transcription we had revealed ourselves to humanity through 103 avatars. As we must be directly experienced in order to be resolved by the person working with our medicine, who must then express us somehow in order to embody our teachings, we have not asked Jen to write about all 103 of us in order for her to remain in integrity and integrate Pa’iwa’iwa/Truth. She writes only of the ferns she has embodied enough to express our teaching with poetry and clarity. She has our full permission to share these words.

The Ferns Speak:

‘Ohia Lehua/ Divine Emotional Pain

I am ‘Ohia Lehua, the mother of all ferns. I am the first to root when lava cools and hardens. My red blossoms unfurl from gnarled branches. I break down the knife-edged rock waves into soil.

The path to aloha begins with pain. You may find that confusing. I may scare you. In the future, if you have lost the ability to feel know that sensation is a gift. I am the birth canal, the bloody route to being.

Drink from me like the curve-beaked i’iwi and learn: at the center of pain, how sweet the nectar.

Waikau/ Divine Emotional Courage

I am Waikau, a woman who lies down with a pride of lions to rest in the day’s heat in preparation for the night’s hunt.

My message is simple and is carried in the syllables of my name in English, derived from French-coeur-heart. When growth scares you hear me roar:  pa wale pu’i ai. “Open your heart wider.”

Laukahi Hou/ Divine Emotional Compassion

I am Laukahi Hou, a raging mother soothing her inner child, a mirror that doesn’t break when shown the ugly truth. I reveal innocence only.

I am here to show you the primary law of the universe, known in Jen’s time as “The Golden Rule.” Do No Harm. This means you first. Attend to your own suffering. From there you can extend compassion to others.

‘Ihi’ihilauakea/ Divine Emotional Serenity

I am ‘ihi’ihilauakea, a doe in a forest clearing aware of light’s grace filigreed by ferns filtered by the canopy.

I am quiet, easy to overlook. I can be lost in busyness, which is why I most often reveal myself when you’re alone. Who am I? Awareness of your own contentment. The more you welcome me consciously, the more I show up.

Lā’au/ Divine Emotional Remedy

I am Lā’au, a paralyzed man who learns to paint by holding a brush between his teeth.

I am resilience.

I have three parts: acceptance, recovery, adaptation. Do not wallow in resentment, guilt or shame. The survival of a species relies on its ability to adapt.

Hō’i’ō Kula/ Divine Emotional Rest

I am Hõ’i’o Kula, a chief inhaling steam in a sweat lodge on the eve of battle. A priestess asleep in an asclepeion. A surgeon napping on a gurney outside the operating theater.

I am the key to discernment.

‘Iwa’iwa Noa/ Divine Emotional Liberation

I am ‘Iwa’iwa Noa, Tolstoy at 82 walking away from his home and wife of 48 years to die among strangers in a train station. Inanna entering the Underworld naked after being stripped of  her royal regalia.

As Hart and Kaufman, American playwrights of Jen’s time said, “You can’t take it with you."

Not many pass willingly through my gate, but I can’t be avoided. Liberation is the completion of all roles, identities and attachments.

Pe’ahi/Divine Emotional Chaos

I am Pe’ahi, a skateboarder zipping through stalled traffic, a virus collapsing a stagnant civilization. A big wave surfer towed in knowing she could die.

Most people resist me, but my waves can be ridden, though ultimately even my ecstasy must be relinquished. Even though being in form you’ll ultimately fail, embrace as much instability as you can. Even though you’ll never see me with eyes or touch me with hands, hear my true voice and not this echo, taste my primordial flavor or catch a whiff of me, I am your mother. Let the ship go down.

Anali’i/ Divine Emotional Faith

I am Anali’i, a child raised by a village, welcome through every doorway.

I am safety, the access to affirming the sacred. I open up the space to allow sacredness to expand on breath grounded in Earth’s body.

La’akea lama/Divine Emotional Magic

I am La’akea lama, the alchemist. The centaur Chiron, wounded by a poisoned arrow, healing on the mountainside. I chant and whirl with Rumi, “the wound is where the light enters,” and I turn lead to gold like Leonard Cohen singing, “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.”

Be patient. Begin slowly. It can be harrowing to recognize your poison as your medicine. There will be no one to blame. You must take accountability for your unresolved trauma. Inadequacy will cease. You will deem yourself worthy. In the chrysalis you will finally meet the poison as a friend and emerge as the butterfly.

Ka’ape’ape/ Divine Emotional Grace

I am Ka’ape’ape, a wind lifting winged milkweed seeds, a river carrying an offering of flowers to the sea.

I support the movement of a prayer. Call on me as you create. I will ensure your structures are mutable, ever-responsive as the river to the shifting bank.

Māku’e Lau Li’i/ Divine Emotional Simplicity

I am Māku’e Lau Li’i, a man greeting the sun each day as it rises.

My teaching is to fold the non-essential. Focus on what allows you to enjoy, express or acknowledge your placement in your world.

Nauā/ Divine Emotional Tenderness

I am Nauā, a monk crossing enemy lines to offer food to a famished army.

In Jen’s time there was a famous song by The Rolling Stones called “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” that advised “If you try sometimes, you’ll get what you need.”

I teach how to soften in order to relax into contrasts. Then you can negotiate.

Palai Hinahina/Divine Emotional Grief

I am Palai Hinahina, a father watching a ship sail over the horizon accepting his son will never return.

In Jen’s time many confused me with loss. I was avoided. Stagnation was the result. Trauma birthed more trauma.

I move loss in order to complete it so the next incarnations can express with authenticity, unburdened by ancestral trauma.

Kīlau Pueo/Divine Emotional Ruin

I am Kīlau Pueo: the cancer diagnosis, the fentanyl overdose, the tsunami.

I understand why you want to avoid me, but sometimes I am the only one who can reach you. I am the one who collapses your world when you are frozen; the force that awakens you when nothing else can.

Ama’u/Divine Ego

I am ‘Ama’u, Martin Luther King the night before he was shot preaching: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will…I may not get there with you.”

Jen integrated my lesson when she abandoned the first draft of this attempt to get us on the ark. She understood that her motivation was not sharing pua’aehuehu, but to get her words on the ark. In making herself vulnerable by publicly admitting this, she also integrated Pa ‘iwa’iwa/ Truth and became a more authentic human being. Once she revealed her motivations were not to be of service, but to gain attention, she had compassion (Laukahi Hou) for the part of her who longed for approval, releasing shame in order to receive a truly innovative idea, this parlement, this kukakuka, as the Hawaiians say. In so doing she showed us her embodiment of Kalamoho Lau Li’i/Divine Emotional Innovation.

Like us, Jen volunteered to be of service. For her willingness to be exposed in this process, we thank her, and acknowledge her devotion to expansion. We thank her for the poems, for keeping language alive in a time when it was weaponized against humanity to subdue and divide. We don’t know her fate or ours, but together we will go on programming the future with the principles of aloha. The codes of love. We finish with these words created by rock over water, air through bamboo, breath through organs and bone,

Kō aloha lā ea: Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Pua’aehuehu, The Ferns & Jen Lighty

Note: The path to aloha is non-linear and we have shared ourselves in no particular order.

Note: If in the future the worldwide web has not gone the way of the fabled Library of Alexandria, more of our teachings are shared on Ke’oni Hanalei’s website: www.pohala.net. If the virtual web is gone, look for the organic webs. Spiders were the ones who first taught humans how to write. Maybe you’ll see gold spores caught in silk filaments forming patterns and symbols, the language of the Creator. Maybe you will be the one to re-weave the broken strands with your aloha.