Pineapple label painted by Barry the caretaker for Pu'u Honua.
View of Pu'Honua, "Place of refuge."
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
To front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
--Henry D. Thoreau
Walden
That’s the idea, and the reason we are running off to Hawaii.
I see, however, that while the woods are where I am happiest, it is not essential to go there to live deliberately.
And how does one live deliberately anyway? By being honest perhaps? Honest to oneself, to others, to life? To live simply so one can see, smell, taste, to experience the greatness that is this time on earth? To honor the divine that is imbedded within all of us? It seems that oftentimes the doingness of life, the seemingly necessary tasks that keep our “civilized” time on earth perking along is the very thing that holds us back from being happy. And so, how does one simplify that?
Says Daughter D, “We can let life push us around or we can be conscious, that is choose for ourselves.”
I know, the old axiom “Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water,” holds today as it did when first spoken. Some things just must be done.
Julia Cameron, in her book, The Artist’s Way, has a suggestion on how to handle those numbing concerns, those petty, circling thoughts that stand in the way of creativity. Write them out. She calls that process “Morning papers.” Do not, I repeat, do not print them, send them, or publish them. And yet the world loves drama—you figure.
I have to tell you one thing. I grieved for two days over this: Here I was bragging over the wonderful pineapples we have (had) growing on our property, and then Wham! The owner dropped this bombshell.
“Reconsider bulldozing the pineapple fields,” he said. “The mother plants will only produce small pineapples now. Best to start a smaller newer field.”
“By December there will be only Christmas pineapples few and far between. They are not as sweet as the summer ones. Season is between late July to end of September. Not many left now.”
(The harvested ones were being sold the day we arrived on the property.)
To be fair, he said we needed to replant, but I thought that meant rotate, that is keep some, plant more, take out the old ones. The idea of bulldozing the field was too great a burden that day.
We mailed four of the pineapples home to ourselves to see how they shipped. I believe the handlers played football with one box, half the pineapple was bruised, half was okay. The others were fine, not quite as sweet as the one we tasted straight off the field, but the four were green when I mailed them, and we ate them one week after shipment.
Did I tell you one thing we did while in Hawaii? The hotel kitchen had a blender, so I dropped in a peeled pineapple, husband darling broke into a coconut (dropped from our tree) we put the coconut “water” into the blender, plus a couple bananas, and a couple ice cubes. The blended result? Superb.
The Sheridan Hotel lie next door to our hotel. And while we loved our “apartment” at the Holua Resort, their swimming pools were simple. The Sheridan, however, had a magnificent pool. waterfalls, slides, a pool leading via a canal into another pool, that leading into a wading pool with aquarium sand at its bottom. So where did we swim?
The Sheridan.
Baby D learned to splash the water, and he loved floating along as we coursed the pools. Apparently they didn’t care that we weren’t guests. And hey, we spent money there, sitting on the deck, drinking iced tea, ordering sandwiches. We ate brunch there one day and dinner the last night of our visit. That last night they were showing the movie “Momma Mia” outside on the veranda. We sat in the open air, watched Momma Mia on a large screen, and that movie—second time I’ve seen it—was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long time. A party.
A fitting ending to our time on The Big Island.
