Free Chair

As you can see, someone left a seat at the beach for you....

Step-by-step guide to ward off insanity... Hawaii style

1. Treat yourself to a large iced mocha
2. Remove shoes (if you live in Hawaii, chances are they're already off)
3. Hide your face in a hat
4. Drive down a windy road - hairpin turns required - until you get Somewhere (preferably the sea)
5. Turn up the radio to tear-your-heart-out music
6. Walk down a long beach and sit on a lonely rock
7. Feel the ocean spray on your face (it's just like that sprinkler system at Disney World)
8. (Lovingly dry off F. Scott Fitzgerald who got soaked in the aforementioned ocean spray)
9. Resist the urge to jump in and swim to Christmas Island (you won't make it, and I know this because...)
10. Smile, because whether you are looking at the real sea or the sea of life in front of you, you have been blessed.

 

House of Sea-Glass

I live in a house built of sea-glass and shells, with rain that falls from the ceiling. Sand is brushed into the corners beneath paper-cloud walls, salt lies on table and tongue, sea-dreams fizz around fidgety toes – and we all drink saltwater and are filled. Piano tongues stick out of the mouths of cloistered clams beneath my rainy-holed rock for a footrest. Giants from the locker leap up and linger in the wake of our precious parade of life by the sea. But the day dims, and tangerine is the taste of the sun as it sinks beneath the surge, and the lips of night close round to hide the sparkle of my sea-glass house. It is goodnight and goodbye, for tomorrow the sun will be new, and sea glass only sparkles for a solitary day.

Photo courtesy: Akuppa on Flickr

Hawaiian Monk Seal

Looking like a dead log on the beach...

The Hawaiian Monk Seal loves to swim out of his watery habitat to sleep on the warm sand of a Hawaiian beach. Usually he is surrounded by stakes and ropes, but this one was all by himself on a lonely beach, unbothered by tourists and conservationists alike. His only signs of life were the short stiff breaths coming out of his sandy face. I felt an urge to stroke his smooth back - the bleached gray and algae colors - but I don't have thousands of dollars to pay in fines for touching his endangered skin. So I took his picture and let him dream the day dreams of a seal...

Lost on a Moonbeam

A silver slip of a moon is showing from behind the dank dress of darkness. Radiant is the night sky in its very shroud, like the blackest heart of a diamond. The ghosts of trees are uncovered in my intrusive headlights. They appear to be sleepwalking, those trees, with their pale eyelids loosely shut and their hair tangled in the blackness. I see the stretch of the sea rising up before me, and if I could, I would drive full force straight into the waves, headlong into the horizon, and steer myself on a moonbeam to the world on the other side of the moon. There is a garden there, you know, just like Howard Pyle told me about in one of those books, those books a "grown-up" like me shouldn't read - as if fairy tales were only for children. The blinker, steady and impenetrable, guides me to the left, and life winds up along the coast on auto-pilot.

This all-too-tranquil world needs a thunderstorm, I think. One of those rants of heaven when the rain comes in floods, when the lightning strikes the fingertips of the sea, when electricity grows scarce and candlles light up a room revealing its hidden identity - the alternate reality of candlelit darkness. Send me lightning, O heavens! Send me fire...

Picture courtesy:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blupper/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Hawaii Time

Yesterday I realized that my alarm clock is twenty minutes fast. Actually, I already knew that it was twenty minutes fast, but today I realized that I don't even care. I think I've lived in Hawaii too long. Who needs a clock anyway... in Hawaii it's either surf time or no surf time, but it's pretty much always surf time (ok, I know, I don't even know how to surf). Schedules are what we like to consider "laid back" here. There's even a clock you can buy that's marked "1-ish, 2-ish, 3-ish..."

Hawaii is a rare and wonderful place where seasons cease to exist; a year is like a day and a day is like a year. I have trouble keeping track of the time of year, of whether it's summer or winter on the mainland. The days run together in a lazy, dreamlike trance. It's peaceful enough, but it lacks a little of what I used to call reality.

Mother's Day

The air - salt, water, heat - rubs up around me in the sticky green nightfall. Nothing but the salt in the air (why can you smell the salt of the sea, but not the salt of the table?) reveals the presence of the sea beyond the road just there, beyond the slow stoplight and the salt-licked condos. It is the kind of evening when we should be treated to ice cream, if we were on vacation. But we're not, and the Starbucks is closed too early, and the man wandering around alone makes me wish I parked closer to the grocery store. I am almost in a dream, asleep as I breathe, inside this cool and ambient atmosphere of the floral section. Yellow roses. Those are my mother's favorites. A bunch of baby's breath to go along. Why must it be called baby's breath? Babies do not breathe the scent of flowers, at least in my limited experience. "Happy Mother's Day," the cashier says half-asleep by rote, and I wonder if I should take offense at this - I am not a mother.

The darkness is like a sleeping dragon oblivious beneath the stars, and the sprinklings of lights between me and my home talk years in  the silence. Driving at night the long sea-winded road makes me beyond awake - like dreaming, like sleeping, with my eyes open.. "... all your actions write the melodies to the songs that we sing..." Anberlin - yes, I am an Anberlin addict - songs drift like the road, like my thoughts. Hello, Past. Hello, Memory. It's been a while, or not so long, since we reminisced on the dark road home.

Happy Mother's Day, to all the mothers out there, especially my own. My mother is the most selfless person I know, and I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for her.

Shades of the Sea

Bones on the Beach

Skeletons of salty vagrants are swept to shore like so many bones on the beach. They clutter together in cadaverous piles that bleach under the sun. Sea-scavengers are we, delighting in this death. We choose our seashells with care and hide them in our pockets. Only the best of the dead things will we take home. We burn the driftwood for our fires. We stack the sun-dried branches for our shelters. We collect the sand-dollars and starfish, the remnants of the living, to decorate our houses. We reuse the once-lost and find beauty.