Aloha! Welcome if you are joining me for the first time, welcome back if you have been reading along since I started this memoir-in-installments last Thanksgiving. For those of you who are new, all the past posts are archived (but the archive does not offer an option to sort from the earliest forward, only from most recent back). My solution: if you “subscribe” you will get a welcome email with links to all the posts in order! There is also an option to download the Substack app and read that way. I do try to link back to previous posts for context when I remember.
And now back to January 1997…
The omens were telling us we were on track. The only vacation rental we could secure for the next month happened to be a home Marlies knew well. When we first arrived at the house in Kula, the owner Kili was there to meet us and show us around. I mentioned to her that I had just let go of my apartment in Manhattan. She shared she had worked as a foreign exchange trader in New York for a while. We were standing next to an enormous arrangement of tropical flowers, ginger blossoms and stalks of bird-of-paradise picked from her garden; it made sense that her favorite memory of NYC was the mass of tulips blooming on Park Avenue in the springtime.
Then Kili turned serious and a bit sad. Her closest friend from that time had died on Pan Am Flight103, blown up by terrorists on December 21, 1988. Holding her gaze with tears glistening in my eyes, I told her Why I Was Not on Pan Am 103.
Our being in the house was not a coincidence. Marlies and I each had a connection, to place and to her. Kili appreciated that we were not the typical vacationing rental guests. And we felt blessed to have been guided to a place supportive of the work we felt we had to do. Which was, simply put, to bring together our different perspectives and strengths to sort out all the stories and channeled information about the times we were in and our roles. To learn from each other in our respective domains of strength. To rebuild our understanding of the world together, and be confident in what we believed so we could go back into the world guided by our own experienced truth rather than by what others told us.
Because, without making it personal, there were forces that wanted to gaslight us, to cause us to question our own judgment and sense of truth.
Please bear with me for a bit of an academic interlude. The branch of philosophy concerned with the theoretical basis for knowledge is called epistemology. Epistemology describes what frameworks we accept to validate a belief or proposition as “true”, versus being merely an opinion. It answer the question of how we separate out accepted “facts” upon which to base our actions and understanding of the world, from the personal assessments or judgments that we humans constantly make just to navigate in our daily lives, and that may be valuable or not. Epistemology became a running theme in my life, one I still explore in various ways today.
During our time in Kula, this fancy word epistemology was not just an arcane, academic subject. It should not be abstract for you either. Think of how the question of legitimate sources of knowledge plays out daily in arguments like “I read it on the Internet so it must be true” or “It was published in mainstream media so it must be false” or “Here is what the science says so it must be true” versus “Here is what the Bible says so that science must be false.” Think of how the logics of our western European systems of understanding the world negated the logics of indigenous systems of understanding the world - and conversely how some scientists schooled in the dominant culture are reversing course and currently looking to practices grounded in ancestral wisdom to solve today’s environmental and social crises.
So - epistemological exploration is my understanding of the first thing Marlies and I spent the next three months doing. At least thatʻs how I look at it with 20/20 hindsight. At the time, we were just both at an inflection point, each for our own reasons needing to re-evaluate our next steps. The what, the why, and the how. We were determined not to go back out into the world until we were certain. We started at square one: were determined to figure out how to figure out the truth.
Day after day we shared our stories and talked through the possibilities until we felt confident about knowing something. Remember that leading up to our first meeting, every single person in our circle was convinced Marlies and I could not understand one another, let alone become friends, because our ways of moving in the world were so different. That difference turned out to be exactly the reason our friendship was important. Our commonality was that both Marlies and I took an empirical approach, meaning we relied on our observations and experiences to validate or reject ideas. We were interested in what was true universally, as well as in what might work differently and be true only in one domain or another. We both were curious about the ways in which seemingly contradictory ideas or approaches could both be true, and were able to tolerate ambiguity and complexity as being in the nature of things.
As a shorthand, we referred to her domain of expertise as “upstairs” and mine as “downstairs.” I still sometimes use these lighthearted terms. Marlies grew up observing a world of energies and elementals and spirits, and was a long time student of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. I observed through the practical world lens of scientific studies, business and engineering. But we were both humans with capacity to grow in our understanding and skill in each otherʻs worlds. Marlies helped me integrate the random experiences and teachings of the previous five years, the sometimes crazy and confusing things about which I have been writing in this memoir. I began to have a more coherent view of following my intuition, holding the frequency, the universal pathways to spiritual growth, working in and with other dimensions of reality. I became more comfortable accepting things I did not believe based on logic, but recognized to be true.
Marlies also helped me trust my own abilities. For example, she was very skilled in setting up altars and spaces to hold or attract particular energies, sometimes to create healing environments. She slowly taught me how to work with the arrangement of items on the physical plane until I could see and sense the effects for myself. She also explained to me something I had never considered, which was that as someone operating primarily on the physical “downstairs” plane, but increasingly connected “upstairs,” I needed to become more conscious of how my actions affected both planes. It was as if being anchored in the physical meant that my movements upstairs were amplified; a small mess I made here could do big damage there. Perhaps that was what Oh Shinnah was saying to me in 1993, the words echoed in the epilogue to The Valkyries, about becoming a Warrior of the Light.
To this day, tropical flower arrangements always remind me of my friend Kili
It felt like we were making progress and we kept extending our stay. Kili came over to refresh the flower arrangements and talk story and dropped our rental rate each month as our friendship grew. Marlies and I believe we actually lost a day in there someplace. Actually lost a day, not just as in we lost track of time. Although that happened as well.
One day I drove to Morihara, the local mom-and-pop store, and picked up a few items including a newspaper. I was momentarily disappointed to discover the paper was a day old. Then I gently reminded myself with a laugh that it had been at least a week since I had looked at the news, so the date really did not matter. The national news section had a photo of a man named Osama Bin Laden. I shuddered when I saw it, even though it was the first time I had encountered his name or image. I told Marlies there was real evil there, and it bothered me immensely. It would be more than four years before I would remember that foreshadowing intuition and know why.
These months in Kula were crucial to how I operate in the world today. Here are some of the principles I rely on, the things I know allow us to discern truth and to trust ourselves.
The shudder that passed through my body upon seeing a photo? What we know in our gut, our naʻau, rather than through our minds is trustworthy.
The core revelation of meditation practice - that our consciousness is not our mind or our thoughts or our feelings or our body - and that consciousness can be trained to become a skilled neutral observer - that observer is trustworthy. When we find a gap in our parade of thoughts, feelings, projections and can truly be present to the moment, our observations become trustworthy.
Energy is trustworthy.
Each of us has an inner connection to a greater loving consciousness that is trustworthy.
The Truth with a capital “T” is beyond what our human brains and senses can encompass. Some of the most reliable ways of accessing larger truths get denigrated as “only” myth, story, art, poetry, music. Of course all of these can be abused to manipulate our thoughts and feelings. They can also help us let go of our conditioning and expectations, quiet our judging mind long enough to access information that is trustworthy.
The awe we feel in the natural world is trustworthy. The messages we receive from the natural world - whether from those beings thought of as “animate” or “alive” or from those elements and elementals and forces that in Western thinking only children and poets recognize as being conscious - these too are trustworthy.
One day Velvalee called. She and Joié had “heard” they were to come to Maui. And so the moment called us to to venture out of our cave and begin to practice these skills of discernment.