Stopping by becalmed Olowalu reef on the way back from dropping Pono off in Lahaina.

How calm? This calm. The pearlescent sheen on the water transforming and mutating every single second, as if the element were a living, organic being. Which, in a way, it is.

In the distance, the island of Lanai—where there are no guns hence no children there die in a carnage of molten hail—and beyond it the source of all this beauty... where all our weapons and madnesses will end up, in the fullness of time.

The mothers of us all, who have passed on and whose ashes are in the oceans, find shape and form again in these honu, silent visitors at our sandy verges. Two in sand in the lee of the red-earthen cliff, visiting with their silent ancestors, the markers falling to the relentless, edifying, sea.

The diaphanous veil that covers the sleeping eye, conceals the seeing of the coral steeping in the warming, acidifying sea... the silence, she is deafening, a condemnation of our deepening, collective guilt.

I am watched over by wordless creatures—yes, it is they that watch, not I—meditating on the verge of a sea reddening from the eroding land where graves once locked in darkness now come to a watery light. Where are the seeds of voyaging, that I might find my way back to eternity? These creatures have the answer, but not the words. I will wait.

Early, this morning.

And I will slip into the olivine shadows, that crystalline world, with the quiet of honu, with complete and overwhelming forgiveness. And I will fall into that gentian blue depth where sing koholā, when time is of no further consequence.

But for now... I stop before work, in a kind of grief. It is from knowing, acceptance, love. His voice, and his letterforms and glyphs on the glowing rectangle in my hand, is what keeps me together. The funny little bits of colour and joy, a reminder of what remains solid and true.

There, that barren bombed-out island, with its escarpments formed and exposed to the winds and waves—of history, of currents of air and water, the regnant geology of our brief time on stage... towards there will my grains and constituent molecules drift, to participate in the timeless makahiki that a Hawaiian cousin once described so well, in imprisoned words but not a halting spirit.

That is the way it will happen—unburdened, soul-free, final.

Since I started running again, my circadian rhythm has me waking up naturally at the crack of dawn, no buzzing alarm necessary.

Or, it might be the random scatter of roosters calling out to the sun to appear already. Some are distant, some near, one very near. At first, I wanted only to somehow catch it and wring its cacophonous neck, but now I see the utility of such creatures: they link me up with the organic, with the rotation of the planet, with the natural passage of time itself. I will still run after them, as it constitutes an excellent exercise in fartlek; I know I will never catch one, but that's hardly the point. It's in the lunging, the angles, the sudden changes of direction—these dynamic, kinetic acts will benefit me in ways I understood a long time ago, and only now to which I return.

It is late in the afternoon. I've driven far upcountry, to the roofless dormant church behind which a cistern finds ground—and in which my mother's mortal ashes lie. Parked on the verge of a nearby narrow cambered road and ran then hobbled to this place...

The pieces of broken cistern wall that once were gathered by siblings and I to mark her grave are now dark and moldy with age, rain, and time. But when I turned one over I saw a pale ungrimed surface hence turned others over, too: to hold a fresh sharded face up to the sky, and more clearly mark the tiny demesne that is all what's left of her...

And I stooped, knelt, crawled on all fours underneath two nearby jacaranda trees now beginning to bloom for spring or what passes for such on this tropical isle with those petals of purple colour that she so loved which is why she bade us leave her ashes here...

And I gathered mostly freshly fallen ones, placing them in the bowl of my shirt but one unfallen sprig I could reach and broke off for the offering, here where memories come to live and wait and live again, for as long as sun reverberates around planet and until the arid heat takes us all—molecules, atoms, vanishing thoughts—in the last immolation that is all our wondrous, fearsome, elemental fate.

I miss you, mom, more than any puny words can say.

Out on the ocean, the luminescent light caught itself between saltwater, and air.
Reflected, it took on substance above, immanence below.

Once upon a time, some eight iterations of sevens ago, I first beheld the sea.
It was both sound and light, a kind of salty keening sheen, a white noise of
wave upon pale sand, upon seawind.

Little could I have known that that would become my substance, the substrate
upon which the rest of my life would wheel. No one is an island, it is said,
but things have I seen that have come to refute that notion—
which we will all know, in the final tock of the emblematic clock,

     before the lamentations,
          the unbelief, and the draping of memory
               upon the fraying cliff of the soul.

There was an apposite quality to the time. Dusk, some evenings ago.

Had stopped along the winding two-lane highway on the bluffs
       above the decimated coast northeast of Ho'okipa.
              Saw that the gathered clouds—hung thick above the island
       by the humidity and absence of the trade winds—
were beginning to capture that spectral silver glow I love so.

I knew it would be fleeting, so I did not hesitate.
       In movements made precise and unthinking by so many repetitions,
              the glass rectangle poised in air, webbed by my fingers—
       tapping, swiping, engaging—and the image found itself
into the marmoreal library of my vanishing memory.

There, is living... here: death... and—in between—remembering.

I will never be undrawn to these surfaces. Transparent and opaque at the same instant, they are possessed as if with gravitational force and we, unmoored automata, like shards drawn to brokenness. It brings me in mind of that Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery, kintsugi. We are all compromised vessels, impure but gifted with shape anyhow. And when time and space eventually grinds us down to our constituent dust and molecules, forgotten. But for the time we take up form in the long void, we resonate—in the unspoken hope that others nearby vibrate in our frequency. At least for a little while.

There are ghosts everywhere I look. 'Anakē Lei's German husband, for one, whom I never had the pleasure of meeting.
I would have been much interested in his philosophy of light.

Or the ashes of a young man—you know of whom I speak, Kulani—strewn here in these waters,
in a remnant act of a life too painful to be lived but for we who remain can see that act as a tragic delusion.
For what? The loss of love? An emptiness filled with fear of loss?

Still, beauty persists. We who remain will keep our memories, tragic and awful and transcendent as they are.
Each day a tolling of a distant bell, a reminder. That we are to stay and to abide, until our bones say we no longer can.

Have I told you how perfect this locus is? For sitting? Thinking? Writing?

The table, heavy and spare—lacquered with the conversation and silence of years
as a family grows and deepens. The wind outside, a permanent presence sweeping down
from the Ko'olau gap of Haleakala Volcano to find the ocean at Pauwela:
       washing the mind of the detritus of day.
The night outside, filtered by its citizens of crickets, geckos, and the creak of bamboo.

Have I told you how well this suits me? I am grateful for it. Living on borrowed time—
as we all are—I am thankful for it. For the souls who crafted it into being and marked their living upon it.

Have I told you how perfect it all is? I feel the brush of a mottled tail on my leg and the cat,
in his language, has bade me open the door for the letting out of him. I stand, I breathe, I am.

The momentarily opened door is the night is the mind is the time.

Have I?

Consider the dead: who,
in their long sleep, have now forfeited the opinions of the quick—
we, the living, for whom warm blood still courses through the ravines and fjords
of our circulatory landscapes, neurons still firing with shy gregariousness
through our limbic systems—
       consider them for a moment.

Permanent migrants from the shoals of the living, definitively stopped by fractal time
and the demands of the thousand and one gods.
       Kūpuna. Ancestors. Loved ones.

There, in that green yard by the gentian sea, they lie gathered.
There must have been, in the epoch of the ahupua'a, others buried
in now-unmarked loci of the lava-crusted earth, whose names are long forgotten
and gone, like yesteryear's winds. But for the memory of them.
       Ghosts. Spectra. Sensations.

You would feel them here too, like you can the warm summer sun on your skin,
the salt tang of the sea. It is the mid-afternoon of the breath, soon to be nightfall.
An iwa glides overhead, seeking land, or perhaps something else.
       Rest. Solace. Remembering.

By itself, floating in that mirroring plane, the setting moon is a featureless white pixel. We are it: singular, alone, illusorily perfect. You will scarcely believe it, but this image is precisely what the eye sees—the balance between light, light reflected, dark, dark intensified. Mobile digital photography has come close to capturing what courses in the synapses, in the journey between eye and brain.

There is a photograph I saw yesterday showing a whole coterie of the world's smartest technologists—almost everyone male and white—meeting with the American president-elect. In the coarsened political landscape of my mind, there was only one aghast word I had for it: prostitution.

Meanwhile, the moon will float, sink, levitate, heedless to the Stürm und Drang of our human foibles. There is a haiku in there somewhere, or a koan. I should return to all that, in a fundamental way. Meanwhile, there is a very specific work to do—it is there, in this image, telling me what to do.

The mystery is that ... it all comes around in the end.

       She was like those three kinds of light: focused, diffuse, ethereal.

Aunty Lillian's life was that brilliant floodlight, rendering meaning to all she touched and encountered—
her focus at once direct and all-encompassing.

In the diffuse glow of warmth within that lanai I can see her influence—
by her example, her leading, a community of faith moved forward in love and work.

And finally, in that ethereal splendor of a dusk-grown sky above a valley, a river, a town—
a manifestation of her legacy, what she meant to us, what she gave to all.

The mystery is that ... when kupuna leave, then we arrive at the dawn of knowing.