More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can’t avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and pasts that become gods and nightmares that do, as well. As I age I learn that there are more gods than I’ll ever know, and yet I have to watch for all of them, or else they can use me or I can lose them without even realizing it.
Ken and 3 other people liked this
What do you do when pono, a healing word, a power word—a word that is emotions and relationships and objects and the past and the present and the future, a thousand prayers all at once, worth eighty-three of the words from the English (righteousness, morality, prosperity, excellence, assets, carefulness, resources, fortune, necessity, hope, and on and on)—is outlawed? When our language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, was outlawed, so our gods went, so prayers went, so ideas went, so the island went.
No more bright pride from Mom and Dad—if not for me, then at least I could still live off the warmth even if I wasn’t the firestarter. No more no more no more. Someday I would be the same. And everyone I loved. Nothing.
The loss becomes as much a part of me as anything. There’s no time for it to take me over.
This idea of a perfect night they have and can never live up to, so they do it again, right? Over and over.
Whatever part of me flowed into you from my body, it turned us tight into two people that shared a soul. I believe that of all my children. Fathers will never understand the way you get deep in us, so deep that there’s a part of me that remains, always, a part of you, no matter where you go.
Caleb liked this
Everything was made new, over and over. It shook me with something so holy and complete I didn’t need a prayer to know there were gods with us, in us.
and we place the lei in the pit and the soil slides back over it like an eyelid closing that will never open again.
There’s aloha yet, to keep the rest of us alive.
Took a ride on a warm syrup version of myself for hours, right?
If someone were to ask me what money means this would be what I would say: The world feels like it will stay under you no matter what you do.
“I think maybe I missed it,” I say. “Like it was looking for me, same as him, and I never figured out how to answer ’um.”
Let’s not call it hope. It is a labor of sorts; that is all.
you’d think it’s all ass-rape and gang shanks, but for real it’s the quiet that’s violent.
Something is alive all over my body now. Something like a hula that won’t stop dancing.
“If the one thing you are gets taken,” I say—I’m not even really thinking when I talk, the words is just coming through me like they was always there—“if the one thing you are, the part you always figured would be your best, if that gets taken away, the next day…” I shrug. “The next day it’s like you’re carrying around your whole future like a dead body on your back.
I ask Mom if love ever made her feel alone. If it ever made her feel like she was starving in a room full of food.
“Whenever I’ve made a choice in my life, a real choice…” She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. “I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”
“I’m always losing better versions of myself,” she says. “I don’t know. You just have to keep trying.”
After all this time away, the island can still never be anything but my home, and I can never be anything but her daughter.
The chanting and the singing. I know the language even if this is the first time I hear it this way, a language of righteousness and cycles, giving and taking, aloha in the rawest form. Pure love. The chant grows in numbers, the way talk at a large gathering of people shifts from individual conversations into a babbling hum, so that what I’m touching now is more than voices, more than a chant, it’s a hum of energy, and I can feel the hum extending into everything around us:
A wall of chanting sound storming over everything else, a demand from the island to be realized—no, released—this way.
You run hard enough and long enough and everything inside is muted under the torrent of your body moving blood and oxygen and your head buzzes bright.
For Mom, Noa was a son but he was also the legends that came with him. How those contracted everything that hurt us—the broke years, the move to the city, the shit jobs she and Dad had—into a single point of purpose.
Big destiny is a thing you get drunk on.
“He never was a superhero, Dean,” I said. “That was the problem. No more saviors, okay? This is just life.”
Even the last time, like he took the fall because he was so far away from where everyone else walks.
“See that? It’s what I’m saying. We’re not okay enough. Not yet.”
I am the centipede thrashing deep under the rocks. I am the burrowed bird tucked sleeping in the tree. I am the knot and flex of the trees.
Scrape all the sound from the sky and this is what is left. The sound of now. This is what we stand in Malia and I on top of the ridge of Waipi‘o.
