Reflection: From Makaliʻi to Welo

The Gratitude of Thanksgiving to the New Life of Easter

I created They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir on Thanksgiving last year, and published my first essay, about Grief, Gratitude and Grudges, the same day. Twenty-five installments later, I have found the discipline for writing in my otherwise challenging schedule. I compose a first draft one week in advance, polishing it in five or ten minute daily breaks throughout the week, before it automatically publishes as I start the water for coffee on the following Sunday morning. In other words, I am writing this essay late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday, although my subscribers will receive it seven days later.

Is there a name for the day this will publish? I typed “What do you call the Sunday after Easter?” into the ever-popular search engine automatically offered in Chrome, and found multiple answers to my question. “Low Sunday” because after the joys of hunting for colored eggs and munching chocolate bunnies and wearing fancy bonnets to church and, oh yes, the Resurrection, apparently exuberance and church attendance both drop. “Divine Mercy Sunday” because Thomas, he of the doubts, saw Jesus and felt peace and faith in the place of abandonment and grief-and this mercy is available to all of us.

And then there was a reference to the “Octave of Easter” an eight-day stretch which begins Easter Sunday and continues through the following Sunday. In Hawaiʻi, especially in Hilo here on Hawaiʻi Island, the other name for that period would be Merrie Monarch Week, including the day hālau collectively hoʻi to their respective homes, many stopping at Puʻuhuluhulu to pay their respects.

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So far, in 25 episodes written during an annual winter season of my life, I have captured a metaphorical season in my life - the years 1992-1994 - during which some fairly remarkable people and experiences guided my transition from a charmed life in New York City, a caricature of a John T Malloy Dress for Success 30-something professional woman with a seamstress-tailored navy blue suit, silk Hermes scarf, Ferragamo pumps, Wall Street job and classy West Village brownstone apartment—to an equally charmed new beginning in a borrowed bathing suit and pareo on a white sandy beach in Hawaiʻi. The first days of 1995 found me untethered, without a profession or a partner, embarking on a pilgrimage, a walkabout, a transformative journey of unknown duration.

When I began this project, my intention was to write only about those three years. Publishing on Substack was a commitment to do it publicly. But the model of Substack lends itself to writers who write regularly and so it begs the question of what comes next. There are reasons why I am not 100% ready to write about, for example, the following three years. I feel more protective of some of the people central to those stories. There are fewer famous names to drop as anchors to the narrative. And frankly, the pace was slower, a literal road trip and a few longish residencies along the way.

People have asked and assumed that writing about this period in my life was cathartic, or healing, or therapeutic. I would not choose any of those words. I chose the poem by Antonio Marchado There is No Road to conclude the 1994 essays both because it conveyed the sense I had at the beginning of 1995 that I would make my path by walking it, and because this process of writing about 1992 - 1994 was very much like looking back at a shipʻs wake. Not like looking in my rearview mirror at a paved road with green and white street signs that I followed from there to here, from then to now. More like seeing the shimmering waves of events and my interpretations of them, allowing me to construct a notion of fluid continuity between all that happened three decades ago and all that followed right up until today, as I continue to sail this singular voyage into the coming three decades.

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A candid photo of me and my tattoo at an event at the Royal Hawaiian, Waikīkī, March 2023

For my 65th birthday, I gifted myself a tattoo. Not my first, that being the tiny rose on my left inner ankle that I got when I was 18, its placement chosen to keep the grungy leering man applying it as far as possible from touching any more central location on my anatomy. My new tattoo, like this memoir, was intended as a reflection on 30 years or so of my past as prelude to the 30 years or so of my future.

The tattoo design began with the faint representation of the constellation known as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters that I had carried on my left upper arm since 1992. It tied me to one of my chosen families and to the transformative period of time I have written about in this memoir. I began playing with idea of the constellation to represent the previous 30 years, but what then would represent the next 30? What did I intend for the next 30?

In the months surrounding my 65th birthday, the same months during which I was deciding on the design for a tattoo, more fundamentally I was in an inquiry about whether I should continue to reside in Hawaiʻi. I had a few moments of dreamy musing, the privilege I have of imagining where in the world I would like to spend “ideal” retirement years knowing I have the means to make it possible. But what drove me given the dynamics of that pandemic time, was a deep, often painful, soul-searching about whether a settler could or should have a legitimate place in Hawaiʻi, whether it would in any way serve Hawaiʻi for me to stay here, to “own property” here, as if we can own something so much greater and more enduring than our few decades of life.

Finally I came to an understanding and a commitment that made clear why I would spend my future years here. Specifically, the place to whom…to whom is not a typo…the place to whom I made my commitment is Kohala. Kohala, my kuʻu home, also is home to Makaliʻi, the third voyaging canoe built in the renaissance of the Polynesian voyaging tradition in Hawaiʻi. And Makaliʻi is the name for the Pleiades constellation in Hawaiian.

Remembering that the name for the constellation on my arm is also meaningful to this place, it became a symbol for both past and future. Coincidentally, the waʻa Makaliʻi first launched from Kawaihae in February 1995…the same time as I was launching into the journey that would eventually and permanently bring me here.

The constellation on my arm represents all the seas I see in my wake as I look back towards 1995, as well as my commitment to contribute to the perpetuation and vitality of the land, people and sustaining practices of the place I commit to call home as long as I remain in physical form.

Layered over the constellation are the leaves of the ʻulu or breadfruit. Without the okina, the word ulu also means to grow or increase. The dictionary elaborates: “Hoʻoulu lāhui, to increase and preserve the nation [said to be the aim of King Ka-lā-kaua]”, bringing us back to Merrie Monarch Week. It can indicate “inspired by a spirit, god, ideal, person, as for artistic creation". It can also mean “Center, as of a canoe or net” - which is, in fact, what home is to me, a stable place in which anyone in the web of relationships is welcome. A place that because it is properly centered and stable, allows for ease of movement, growth, and inspiration.

The annual rising of Makaliʻi in the east at sunset signals the beginning of the Makahiki season here. Makahiki starts a bit before American Thanksgiving, and is likewise a celebration of harvest, abundance, and community. Instead of saying I have been writing between Thanksgiving and Easter, I could alternatively, perhaps more accurately in the kaona or layered meanings of the language, say I have been writing from the mahina or malama (month) of Makaliʻi to the start of Welo. Welo is not only the name of a lunar month; the word can also refer to the setting of the sun, to oneʻs ancestry or family traits, to a fluttering in the wind.

The tradewinds are strong today as I write, as they often are here in Kohala, blowing from the east towards the setting of the sun. I hear voices whispering to me in those familiar gusty winds. Perhaps they will tell me the next stories that want to be told. Perhaps my readers will tell me the next stories that want to be heard.