There are stories, and then there are stories.

The youngest one doesn’t have many yet, but then again I have to wonder: whenever he’s here upcountry he wakes up in the middle of the night crying instantly, recipient of a nightmare, or perhaps just the scariness of dream-which-isn’t-quite-differentiated-from-waking-life-just-yet. He is, after all, barely all of two years old. Perhaps the stories of the aina are seeping into him now, as if via osmosis, and his nascent self feels it all too intense by half, hence the darkness tears.

The oldest one… well, she could’ve lived several lifetimes already, each one worthy of the surreality of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, or a Salman Rushdie, or a Toni Morrison. Once upon a time, she lived on a beach in Kaua’i, no roof above her head other than the timeless stars. Hōkūle‘a guarding her spirit, and that of the other homeless familiars around her. She, too, would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, wondering where her baby went, the one taken from her with such elemental, sundering, force she could no longer abide mere sanity.

The one in the middle: well, once upon a time in the dead of an upcountry night when she was a young teenager she happened upon the body of a man, his head blown half off, victim of a drug deal gone bad. Here in upcountry Maui. Pristine, heavenly, paradisiacal Maui (—or so it is claimed). She and her young friends ran all the way to Pukalani Superette, where no one believed what they breathlessly had to say, thinking they must be high on dope. That was long ago, when she yet didn’t have the power totems inked permanently onto the surface of her limbs and elsewhere on her body. She still remembers vividly the bloody light-blue shirt the dead guy had on.

And I, I am in the middle of all this now, both by choice and happenstance. And it has made all the difference… between madness and equanimity, between death and the holy incarnate—between this, and that.

[ Click on the image above to see the full, vertically oriented, tableau. ]