moloka'i and many things

i've known that i needed to come to hawaii for quite some time now.  its strange because it is my longest, currently living intention or aspiration.  well now that might be a ridiculous thing to say, but i decided a year and a half ago that i needed to come to hawaii after hearing a really inspiring guest lecture.  it was october of 2007.  i was pretty far out there, probably not sleeping much, drawing overlapping circles all the time, reading wendell berry.  but this guy who gave the lecture was friends with kasulis, an East-West Center guy, and he was talking about the proliferation of perceived difference and talking about ideas that launch perpendicular to the engrained notions of progress.  very much in line with the paradigms of intimacy and integrity that were structuring my thoughts at the time.  afterwards i walked out of the building and into the rain with this buzzing certainty in my head that i would go to hawaii.  i thought i would come in a much different capacity, but it was the dawning of the thought of hawaii.

then i fell in love.  then i fell in love with farming.  and a way of living.  and then my hawaiian intentions shifted, they drifted to japan and i imagined zen temples for a month or two before settling on the prospect of wwoofing in hawaii.  and this was many months ago.  and there was a lot that happened in those months.  but i had this shortcut, this easy path come to hawaii.  and then out of all of the places i could have gone i ended up in this particular place.  i contacted ten or fifteen farms before emailing john, and he turns people away every day.  so looking back its nice to see the gaps that open and allow the present to develop.  

i've been appreciating the present pretty intensely for the past three months and its the best way to contextualize the past.   i'm not giving myself the credit here, its an imperative of how beautiful the world is, you can't help it.  but with all of this fond reflection on the past through the joy of the present, it's still hard for me to believe in the benevolence or openness of the future.  that's not quite right, it's just that i get antsy when i don't have an idea of where i'll be in the immediate future.  

now, just this evening, i have the general plan for the rest of my time here.  i was really needing this to come together.  and i didn't know how it was going to work until just a couple days ago.  i finally got to talk to the woman who owns the yoga center on moloka'i.  all of my important  correspondence with her had happened through john and it has left me feeling like i still needed some confirmation.  they are good friends and for some reason she would just call him instead of me.  so i've had about a month of this hanging intention to go to moloka'i.  but tonight we finally talked and had a wonderful conversation and they'll meet me at the dock at nine in the morning on friday and it feels fantastic to have that certainty.  i'll stay there for ten days.  it's reputedly the most beautiful place on the planet.  

after that, the plan is to attend a two week workshop in permaculture design.  this is the piece that just fell into my lap the other night.  and it fits perfectly right in the transition space between life here on paradise and my intention for the next nine months in ohio.  there was this hole, that was leaving me unconvinced of making a reality out of the big idea.  namely, how to immediately transition between the easy enthusiasm of my life here and the more dynamic engagement of going back to ohio and keeping the good intention alive.  and that's where this piece came falling in to fit. 

it means the investment of some reserve cash but its an investment in the theory to compliment the practical reality of my life on the farm here.  i've learned from living here, in very concrete ways, in the food i eat every night and the location of the paths i walk on every day and with every bucket of duck-fertilized water and with the blood and the texture of the chickens we slaughtered and with the growth of every lettuce leaf and the time and space to reflect on it all.  but this education is place-specific, and though that's what i celebrate most about it, the transition of this knowledge to a new place, and even more so the application of  knowledge of an established system to the establishment of a new one was a leap that i wasn't convinced i could make through my own unguided research.  there's just too many things to initiate.  that is the startling good fortune of finding this course, it will initiate me.  and though i will have only scratched the surface after a two-week course, the experience of matching concepts to what i've been living and doing for the past three months, should help bridge the gap between my maui-inspired intentions and the ohio-world where they will need to be realized.  

its what i need in order to know where to start. 

...

i wish i might have said all of this more concisely.  

...

it also seems like i could have described the joy of getting solid plans made by saying something really flashy about liminality and communitas, but luckily that bag of jargon is getting dusty in some corner of my mind.