January 1997: From Oʻahu to Maui - #37

Strong currents lead me to my next port of call

Mahalo to everyone for being here again, and a quick word of welcome if this is your first episode of They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. Since this is memoir, not every essay stands alone, and I do try to provide a few links to people and places and previous adventures. If you have already subscribed, you received a welcome email with all past installments and essays in order. If not, you can enter your email below and you will also receive future writing once a week in email form. Mahalo for reading and journeying along with me.

For whatever reason, the scene around Velvalee and Joié on O’ahu felt intense at the start of 1997, definitely more intense than the week I had spent with them at the beginning of 1995 on O’ahu or the road trip from the East Coast to Colorado at the beginning of 1996. And that is saying a lot.

My time in NYC getting my affairs in order apparently had not compromised the Higher Plan after all, and I was welcomed back into the daily routine of holding the frequency under the kukui tree. Prageet and Marlies were also in Hawai’i, and checked in on their way to meet up with students and friends on Maui. That meant for a time we also had two channeled guides joining the circle, Prageet’s guide Alcazar, and Joié’s guide Aiea.

Channeling. Receiving messages from guides, or “other dimensional” beings. I have written about how even as a Wall Street banker I came to trust in my intuition, and learned to follow the omens. Somehow I receiving messages in those ways, mysterious ways in which the Universe was responsive and providing me directly with information, was easier to accept as “real” than the idea of communicating with actual vocalizing entities. And yet my experiences over the four years preceding this time kept demanding that I make my peace with the idea that non-human or at least non-embodied conscious beings exist and that we can communicate with them. And to accept that the information and advice they have for us may be valuable and worth following.

The concept of channeling is a central one in The Valkyries, the first book by Paulo Coelho I picked up at the end of 1992 in the São Paulo airport. Early in the book, the young man Paulo and Christina meet in the Mojave Desert explains that everyone can make contact with four kinds of entities: elementals, spirits, saints, and angels. He also explains to them that the second type, disembodied spirits, are contacted via a medium, and that some of these spirits are great masters. The Guides who spoke via Praget and Joié, were of this type. In the literature you will sometimes hear them referred to as Ascended Masters. Others claim to be based on starships, extraterrestrials invested in helping us evolve to their higher dimension.

When Prageet channeled, his eyes flew open and one could clearly see another consciousness flash out from them. Joié tended to channel with eyes closed but her posture and gestures shifted, becoming more fluid. The voices of the guides were not the same as the voices of the channel. And now that I was sensitive to it, I could detect a palpable shift in their energy when the Guide came through. I could walk into a silent room and tell immediately whether the human or their Guide was sitting in the circle. That much - and the universality with which different cultures have some form of this expression of human potential - convinced me that something was “real” in the experience.

The phenomenon was real - but was it trustworthy? After the drama around my departure in November, I became more circumspect about the channeled messages. I knew how often I looked outside myself for validation of my choices or of something I desired to be true, making up a story from my observations to support the answer I wanted rather than dispassionately witnessing omens. Plus human to human communication fails often enough. Non-human to human communication must have even more “noise” and room for misinterpretation. Still, I was on a learning journey, and I was flattered to be chosen to hang out with experienced channels for hours a day, for months at a time, without paying for workshops or buying books and tapes. It was seductive.

But as it turned out, not seductive enough to keep me under the kukui tree.

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The owners of the home where the kukui tree graced the yard were patient with the stream of visitors. Mostly. I crashed as their houseguest when I first returned, but soon it was clear I had worn out my welcome. Although Shayla’s B&B had no vacancies, my thought was to find something similar nearby. As I was considering options, Marlies called. Tensions about choices and plans for the year were high between her and Prageet, and she felt hurt and confused about how to make changes in the dynamic. Without hesitation I proposed that I would fly over to Maui, and we could spend a week together to create a little space for her to heal and think things through, a little space for me to get clarity about my own next steps.

Spoiled by having spent months with easy access to the beach from Shayla’s house in Lanikai, I booked a Wailea resort hotel room. I envisioned hours on the expanse of white sand listening to the sound of the waves and watching for migrating humpback whales, enjoying delicious meals of local ingredients without having to worry about cooking or reservations, and generally pampering ourselves in between conversations.

View from a Wailea, Maui hotel. Still one of my favorite spots for R&R.

One week rolled into another. We changed hotels twice. Prageet was unwilling to address the issues; Marlies was unwilling to go forward with things as they were and saw no reason to leave Hawai’i when he did. I spoke regularly with Velvalee and Joié but did not feel drawn to return to O’ahu. Somehow my conversations with Marlies felt more important. Since it seemed we were going to continue to stay on Maui for a bit, we decided to visit some vacation rental agencies in search of a more affordable and spacious option than resort hotel rooms.

Finding something at the last minute during high season turned out to be a challenge. Finally, at the last agency on our list, one all the way over in Paia, the rental agent lit up when we told her what we were looking for. We were in luck - they had just added a new three bedroom vacation rental home to their inventory and it had no bookings yet. She described the house blessing the previous weekend, explaining that these were local owners who lived right across the gulch, visible from the rental property. The home was upcounty, in Kula - she asked whether we were open to that, reaching for a three ring binder to show us the photos and details of Kili’s Cottage.

Marlies’s eyes grew wide. She shot me a meaningful glance. “Is this the one?” I asked. She slowly nodded. “Did this house used to be painted gray?” she asked the rental agent for confirmation. Now the rental agent looked surprised. “Yes, how did you know?” Marlies explained that their friends had been long term tenants in that house. She added for my benefit that she and Prageet used to store their Stargate workshop materials there.

We booked for a month. A month that turned into five months.

There are no coincidences. Besides being the right place for the work Marlies and I had ahead of us, it was the start of a friendship that continues until today. The owner of the home, Kili Namau’u, became my first mentor in the importance of reviving Hawaiian language and cultural knowledge.

It is also not a coincidence that this episode of my memoir will publish just weeks after the wildfires that leveled the town of Lahaina and acres of Kula, both beloved places to me and to many.

I am writing about events that took place almost 27 years ago, and now as then Kili is Director of Pūnana Leo o Maui, the Hawaiian language immersion school. In August their sister school Pūnana Leo o Lahaina was burnt to the ground and its students displaced. If you can find it in your heart and pocketbook to make a donation of any size, checks can be made out to “Nā Leo Pūlama o Maui” and sent to:

Nā Leo Pūlama o Maui

P.O. Box 1038

Wailuku, HI 96793

If you prefer Venmo, this is the link.

Mahalo for your support.