Thumb Out and Bound for the Underworld, Part 1
Seeking purpose without having a clue
Hello Friends,
Last week I moved onto the slopes of Hualālai, one of five volcanoes on Moku o Keawe, and the fourth one I’ve lived on, although to say I’ve lived on any of the island’s mountains is misleading. Moku o Keawe doesn’t have mountains. It is these mountains, five volcanoes who thrust up through an immense weight of water to cross the border between under and upper worlds and recreate the surface as something utterly new, what we call land, congealed fire, in its own image, rippling in waves that also look like the water that once kept it down before it knew there was a surface to break through.
Hualālai and the four other volcanoes: Kohala, Kilauea, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa are not “on” Moku o Keawe, they are the island itself. To live on this island is to live on a volcano, and most people who stay here, even for a short time, know what that means. Stories of how Pele shakes lives to the core abound, but there are other gods and goddesses here, and each one of the volcanoes has stories about these beings. This little essay intends to be a study of how living on the slopes of three of these volcanoes has impacted my life and speculation about what my new relationship with the fourth could bring.
I’ll start with traveling back in time to childhood. I am five years old walking down a dirt road on Block Island, known as Manisses by its original people, to watch the sunset on the West Side. It is the first time I have come to know a place by its direction on a map. All summer long I will roam what we called “Rocky Beach,” gathering stones and skate egg cases, periwinkles, and slipper shells. When I go back to the Connecticut woods to begin school I will be drenched in the perfume of banked Irish moss and will be haunted by fog that doesn’t clear until the sun burns a hole in it at midday, so haunted that as soon as I’m given a choice upon college graduation, I will return to Block Island and take up residence there for the next 25 years.
Growing up in Connecticut in the woods I didn’t see the horizon very often. Sunrise and sunset were not part of what shaped me.
I loved playing in the woods with the neighborhood kids-the coolness in the trees’ deep shadows, discovering skunk cabbage and lady slippers, leaping in piles of leaves-all these wonders drew my attention down. After high school I lived in Paris for a year and then, for four more years attended college in Washington, DC. That whole five years I have no memory of ever knowing what direction anything was or where the sun set or rose. I did manage to get around just fine without knowing any of this, but I wonder now if those years when crippling depression first oozed into my life had anything to do with not having a relationship to anything in the natural world. My roots were severed. Although I thought I knew where I was in space, I really had no clue.
As a child, my gaze was rooted, not skyward. On Block Island, where the trees had been cleared by the white settlers who also quickly wiped out the Manissean people and culture to cultivate crops and build ships, there was more open space. For the first time in my life watching the sunset was a common pastime. There was a whole culture around it and people talked about last night’s sunset and all kinds of other weather-fog, sea smoke, n’oreasters, gales. They talked about sunrises, too, though not being a morning person I still to this day haven’t seen many of those in person. Weather drew us together and people became intimate with the island through the simple act of paying attention and acknowledging the fascinating changes of the island’s land and seascape. Through paying attention, people fell in love. We may think that love is out of reach, but it’s really that simple. Pay attention long enough to something and you develop a relationship with it. Stay in relationship long enough and affection develops. Eventually you’ll realize it’s far more than affection you feel-it’s love. You realize you can’t live without that place, that particular view: a marsh, a cove, an old apple tree, or that life without intimate contact with your love seems faded. You take to your bed on a city day and listen to the traffic twenty stories below you and wish it was the sound of the ocean.
Time travel with me now to January 1994. My plane touches down on a runway blasted in hundreds of miles of black lava. I know nothing about Hawai’i and am shocked at the barren sight. This is not my idea of a tropical paradise. A guy I’ve never met named Ian has been sent to pick me up at the airport by another guy I’ve never met named Drew. Drew is a friend of a friend in Honolulu where I’d been couch surfing for the past two weeks who had a coffee farm on the Big Island, which I had never heard of until I was invited by Drew to come stay at his farm. The coffee harvest was over, but he said he had an extra room at his place and I was welcome. Why not, I figured? This was all before the internet or even cell phones. All of this was arranged by someone else on land lines. I don’t even remember talking to Drew myself, but somehow here was Ian at the airport like Drew said he’d be. We drove through a lava desert in his battered truck that reminded me of Block Island vehicles. I kept telling myself as the truck rattled along I was safe and acted like I felt right at home as if this was enough to make it so. I didn’t know we were driving south, or anything else about the Big Island. I was that trusting.
Back then on my first night I didn’t know I was sleeping on Moku o Keawe. To me, it was the Big Island, which as I mentioned, I’d just heard of a week ago before landing in the lava desert and being picked up by Ian in his truck.
I imagine some, sealed in AC cooled resorts never sleep on Moku o Keawe, but in my case nestled into the mountainside in a three-sided shack, the dimensions between the two islands quickly started to bleed.
That first volcano was Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” largest active volcano in the world and second largest mountain from its base at the bottom of the ocean to its peak. I was used to mountains as something far off in the distance, so I didn’t actually realize that first night in Drew’s coffee shack, that I was even on a mountain. Mauna Loa is in fact, so long, it’s a third of the island. Its slopes go right down to the sea on the west, south and east sides of Moku o Keawe. The western flank, where I was, is steep and mostly covered in jungle. Trying to sleep that first night in the coffee shack I was aware of the jungle that didn’t even seem outside. Remember, the shack only had three walls. The jungle was right there in the “room” with me and I pretended I wasn’t terrified, even when Ian popped through the trap door into my room in the middle of the night. I was wide awake in a second. Fortunately my “what are you doing?” was enough for him to climb back down, but I was shook. That same night, early in the morning just before sunrise, an actual earthquake shook the whole slope! Roosters, dogs and humans all howled. I cowered in bed until it was light enough to escape without breaking an ankle on the descent down to the highway, hoisting my pack on my back like a turtle shell. Once my feet hit pavement I faced the traffic heading north and stuck out my thumb. The only reason I headed north was because it was the direction I’d come from.
Several rides later I was back in the lava desert and a woman named Julie was asking me if I wanted to stay in her house for three months while she went to Oregon. “You remind me of myself at your age,” she said. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew she was an ally and when I saw her house right on the water in Puako, I said yes and passed the next three weeks reading by the ocean, leaving only to walk a mile to the store for food and on a weekend trip with a neighbor who’d taken a fancy to me to camp in Waipi’o Valley.
Waipi’o didn’t look like a mountain. Being a valley it actually looked like the opposite. Never once during my time there (for when Julie came back I hitchhiked north again and descended into the valley with my blue tent that I set up in the pine trees by the beach with only a jug of water, a few cans of tuna and a bag of granola. I ended up staying for six months)-never once, living inside the sound of falling water, did I think I was living on a mountain, let alone a volcano. But I was. Kohala, on the northern part of Moku o Keawe, is the oldest of the volcanoes. Close to 100 million years old. Waipi’o and the other valleys of the Haumakua Coast formed when parts of the mountain slid into the ocean.
I’ve written a lot about my time in Waipi’o and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop. So far it has been the defining episode of my life, my before and after. How I responded to what happened there is what made me who I am now, although the journey has not been so clear cut, rather meandering like the streams that carve through the valley in a serpentine pattern toward the ocean that seem random but are, in fact, inevitable.
In the old days, in a different culture you might have said it was my initiation. I reveal a lot more on this in my upcoming book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, so I’m going to just say here that it may have seemed like I was a modern girl making brave and risky choices like sticking out my thumb on the side of the road, seeking rides from strangers to places unknown, but I was really following something much more ancient and yes, ordered. Without having a clue what I was doing, or even the self awareness that I was in search of anything besides an adventure, I was seeking the way down. The descent. I was seeking the Underworld.
Waipi’o, the ancient slopes of Kohala, pulled me down. I won’t say here what happened at the bottom of the valley. More details will be in the upcoming book. But I survived. I made it back up and went back to “the mainland” and went on functioning like a normal person who hadn’t been to Hell, a pretense I was not able to maintain for long.
Fortunately, Block Island, whose residents joke it’s “the Island of Misfit Toys” from the “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” claymation cartoon, took me back in, and for the next 15 years I was able to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly while unraveling. By unraveling I mean I went insane and found my sanity at the same time. It was a long drawn out process without much human guidance, though much friendship and love from my companions in arms in the taverns and around beach fires where songs and stories were told.
I've heard storyteller
speak many times of the danger of coming back to the village from the Underworld, especially in our times when not many can even recognize the journey and when most villages have been razed and covered in strip malls. The whole purpose of going down to the Underworld is to find a gift that you can bring back to the village so you can contribute your particular purpose to your fellow humans.What happens when there is no village to receive the young person who has gone down and made it back up again? And let me tell you, the pull down is strong. It can’t be avoided. It’s hardwired into the human psyche and just because you don’t know anything about it, does not mean it won’t happen. Because of this you may end up a junkie and die on a bus station floor like my friend Rachel. You may wander off in your mind after a mushroom trip, rowing out to Beane Point a few weeks after the World Trade Center has been bombed, and never come back into your own head like another good friend, or be a prophet who speaks the truth of apocalypse dismissed with diagnosis: schizophrenic. She’s crazy. Don't listen to her.
Going down is dangerous, but yes, coming back to a world without villages to receive your gift, is even more so. No villages, no adults. No real adults, no elders. No elders and we have no one to anchor us to the four directions, we are rudderless and have to find the compass within ourselves without even knowing what we’re looking for.
My extended adolescence was an innate rebellion against being forced into what I perceived as the empty world of adults whose only parameters seemed to be financial status, marriage and parenthood. Again, I was totally ignorant of any other possibilities or even of what I was doing. I just rebelled. I lived on Block Island where one wasn’t defined by one’s job. Jobs were something we all did because we wanted to be on Block Island. It wasn’t until about ten years into my year round stint on Block Island, when I attended Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference, met Martin Shaw, and was introduced to a community of people who were mapping out their life journeys according to mythic processes and archetypes, that I realized my stubborn rebellion against joining normal society was actually a deep, unconscious devotion to finding what the Hawaiians call my kiakahi, my purpose.
Once I realized I had been to the Underworld and was able to see my past fifteen years on Block Island as an attempt to come back to the village with the gifts I’d earned there, my life made a lot more sense and I began to consciously work with the land to define my gift, and slowly, to offer it, though at times it felt like I was woefully misunderstood, that I was doomed to be an outsider, and there was no way I would ever make a living at it.
I persevered through those trials and defined myself. Eventually I began to hear voices from wider circles than the deer beds in the dunes, and the marsh hawk who hunted low over the thicket behind my house, and one day when I came face to face with a snowy owl from the Arctic three steps from my front porch, I knew Block Island, Manisses, was releasing me. Peru called-the grandmother-ayahuasca. I answered and was smart enough to know my two ceremonies were enough. I hastened back to Block Island and began again, but this time round the journey had quickened. I wanted to be even closer to the elements, found I could no longer live in a house and moved on a boat. A series of boats and tents became my shelter over the next few years. What joy in paddling out in the dark to the mooring! What exultation awakening ear level, permeated each dawn by bird song! What peace sleeping below the waterline. Rocked by the Great Salt Pond, I awoke quickly and at the end of one season found myself again on a plane over the Pacific to Maui. I intended to stay longer, but Maui was only a two week touchdown. Although it looked like chaos on the outside (no job, no money, the usual), it was really Moku o Keawe, which I still called the Big Island calling me.
If I was writing a real autobiography and not what is supposed to just be a little essay, I would tell you every detail about the winter when I was actually grounded enough to live on Mauna Loa instead of being shook off by an earthquake on my third night just before dawn. Since this little essay is, in fact, turning out to be quite long, I am going to end here with a vision of me once again on the side of the Mamalahoa Highway with my thumb out and continue on next week with the next stage of this journey. I do hope you’ll come along!
Until then,
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Jen
Volcano image: Photo by Buzz Andersen on Unsplash
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