Foreground and Background
Finding Poetry in a Single Day
Welcome new subscribers (there are several of you this week!) and welcome back to my faithful or even occasional readers. How is February treating you? Ready to gallop into the Year of the Fire Horse?
Last week I wrote about my gratitude and prayers practice, a practice begun three decades ago. Another of my daily practices is the in-a-hurry-cheaterʻs form of journaling that I began only a couple of years ago after I bought a 5-year journal for my eldest goddaughter to keep track of her childʻs early years. I also bought a generic One Line A Day version of the five-year journal for myself and one for a friend. I thought it might be fun to track these years of which age 70 would be the midpoint.
And a challenge. For Me of Many Words, the discipline of a daily sentence. Maybe two. (Insert shrug emoji)
Late last Wednesday, the evening of February 11, 2026, I sat at the auxiliary desk in my bedroom, the one reserved for contemplative and creative projects, and reflected on the day. I had just come from a community engagement workshop, one of ten through which the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority was gathering input on portions of its management paradigm relating to access and aspirations.1 I was riding on a high and could have written pages on that event alone.2
How to boil all those thoughts and feelings into a single line?
But then again, early that afternoon was the first Zoom call with those I will be with on the Colorado River in April, staff and participants in the Freeflow Institute Grand Canyon transformational experience. I was still so excited, thoughts churning. Maybe that was what I should write about.
Reflecting on these highlights, I momentarily felt guilty. I am a real estate broker, after all, had I completely neglected my work that day?
I laughed out loud. The day had begun with a closing on a $2+ million home!
That meant a call from Escrow to confirm recording, congratulatory calls to my Sellers and the Buyerʻs broker, changing status in the MLS, key turnover, social media posts, making sure final paperwork was in the file so it could be sent to the brokerage Powers That Be to review and presumably cut me a commission check. There had been tasks for three upcoming listings, a long conversation with a new prospective buyer client - all the usual things we do in a day. Things that had completely faded into the background in my memory, like some software program that allowed me to send images to the back or front had already grayed out that part of my day.
I was not surprised. Although I drifted into real estate as a third or fourth re-invention of my professional life in 2005, in hindsight it was clearly a skill set, not a vocation. A specific skill set I was directed to acquire once I had found my Place, in order to serve my Purpose3. Increasingly my calling, my purpose, my passion work is foreground. ChatGPT definitely thinks so. I used the same prompt that for everyone else seemed to generate cartoons with random elements like their dogs and a mai tai. Mine was just me standing along a coastline in a Manaola tunic with a folder of papers under my arm. Nothing extraneous, 100% focused.
But even this was not the end of the story of Wednesdayʻs reflections. Something was still bugging me, a feeling I had missed the significance of the day. I sat with it, and found myself humming an ʻoli sung at the closing of the Mauna Kea workshop a few hours before. A prayer for long life, Pule Ola Lōʻihi. An ʻoli that I learned in 2014 from the kumu who by chance was standing beside me as we circled up for closing Wednesday night. One I have sung at a house blessing, at a high school graduation party, and of course on the Mauna. But I sang it most often at my motherʻs bedside during the time she was in hospice care.
That was it. February 11, 2016 is the officially recorded date of my motherʻs death4. It had been ten years.
Of the poets we have been assigned by Sherwin Bitsui, the writing instructor for Freeflow Grand Canyon 2026, the only one I already knew about was Arthur Sze, the United States Poet Laureate who had done a residence at the Mervin Conservancy on Maui. Each evening I have been reading from his collection Archipelago, in which the poems juxtapose extraordinarily disparate images, stretching the readerʻs mind into a new rhythm, an expanded sense of the connectedness of things.
As I continued to muse on those disparate elements from my day, my February 11th, an insight occurred to me.
Instead of using apologetic words like “contradictory” “schizophrenic” “disjointed” or “complicated” to describe the disparate and seemingly conflicting elements of my daily life, I could frame the story differently. I could choose to describe my daily life as poetic.
What would it feel like to choose to view my life as a Grand Poem written in many stanzas, re-written over the course of many drafts, polished over time as water chisels stone into beauty? It feels full of possibility. I choose this story.
Thank you to all my relations who were present in one form of another on Wednesday, February 11, 2026.
I could write a monthʻs worth of essays about the efforts to protect the sacred summit of Mauna Kea that I became involved with starting in 2014. If you are seeking basic background about the current planning effort you can start here…and see more about the community engagement process (with videos!) here.
Like the exceptional quality of dialogue and listening, the lingering sense of disbelief that we had gone from an urgent and emergent response to the ceremonial groundbreaking on October 7, 2014 to a years-long process approved by the legislature for creating a management plan and turning over stewardship of the summit from the University of Hawaiʻi to a new authority on which cultural practitioners and astronomers work side by side in respect and harmony.
I have written several essays about this. I like this one Finding Your Place in the Herd.
That is another whole story. She passed a bit before the end of February 10th. The hospice nurse lived over 45 minutes away. He looked at me askance when I thanked him for giving Mom another day of life by pronouncing on the 11th. But Mom literally wrote the book Humor in the Health Professions and would have (did?) enjoy the joke.
Carefully read insights to take to heart and share