Next Steps Become Clear - #40
Next Steps Become Clear - #40
Our focus shifts to where we will go after Maui
Welcome to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir - welcome back if you have been reading along. Phew - this is #40 not counting asides and essays!
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Living on an island can produce strange sensations for me, someone who mostly grew up at a mile high elevation near the Continental Divide. At moments I experience a sense of precariousness, of vulnerability, as if the ocean could take me at any time. I love spending a night near the shore and falling asleep to the soothing sound of waves, or sailing up the coast on a sunny winter afternoon, looking back at the island and understanding how profoundly ocean and island are connected. But I choose to live at elevation, where the ocean views are expansive and I can feel the roots of the volcanoes that form this island extending to the deep ocean floor and beneath it into the core of the earth.
Perhaps that is why Marlies and I were guided to make our “cave retreat” in Kula, Maui, on the western slope of Haleakalā which rises 10,000 feet above sea level. Our rental home was at an elevation of around 2,000 feet, with a wide view of ocean far below. By the time Marlies and I returned from the slapstick comedy of our excursion to coastal Hana, I welcomed the sense of grounded solidity beneath us. I felt myself relaxing back into that deep grounded state.
Over the next few weeks, the sureness of having found our grounding allowed us to gradually turn our focus toward the metaphorical horizon.
Up until now Marlies and I had relied solely on our own lived experiences in our conversations about the nature of the world and discernment. Now we were eager to have reference sources to confirm or refute ideas we had about the outer world. What constellations were we seeing? How did the geographies of places we came from and had visited tie together? Were our recollections of biology and scientific principles correct? The newly opened Maui Marketplace had a Borders Bookstore and so we drove to Kahului to visit it. Five hundred dollars later we had shopping bags overflowing with reference books, a handful of the latest top-reviewed novels, blank journals to write in, and a selection of magazines to catch up with recent events in the outer world. I added a few Hawaiian music CDs from Maui-based artists, anticipating the nostalgia I would feel as our time on Maui came to a close.
Having eliminated “noise” from the environment for the past couple of months while setting a super clean and high energy inside the house, each item we examined “read” with clarity. Energy, no energy. High frequency, low frequency. In other words, relevant or irrelevant to our world view and to our next steps.
Marlies felt the pull first. The girls were missing her, and she them. Having found greater inner clarity and strength, she began to design and organize a new set of workshops with Prageet, to be offered in the U.S. during the summer months, then traveling through Europe for the winter. I was not quite yet ready to fly home, wherever that was. But I helped Marlies pack and drove her to the airport, promising to connect up in person with her and the girls soon.
I paid Kili another monthʻs rent, explaining it would be the last and she should feel free to begin taking vacation rental bookings.
My next steps began to emerge in quick succession. First Carman called with news. Whitney Houstonʻs team had decided to extend her brand with new initiatives, among them building a recording studio and starting a talent management company. They wanted to represent Carman and his groundbreaking work, but he would have to bring his own manager to Brownhouse Management. Their support would include access to the recording studio and funding for recordings and performances. Would I be willing to talk with them to see if we were a good fit? Of course I would.
Then an additional possibility showed up. One of the business magazines I purchased in our Borders binge had an article about a lawyer named Peter White who had become an advisor to families of multigenerational megawealth - the kind of families who were the clients of JP Morgan when I was working with my mentor on a turnaround of their Private Banking division. A group of family office managers had approached Peter to help them establish a consortium to share best practices and metrics for the operational side of things. But the conversation quickly turned to the area in which these professionals felt least equipped: the human side of inherited or sudden wealth. Often their principals expected them to provide education and counseling, especially to the younger generations of the families. Out of this need, a membership organization providing innovative educational programs was born.
All my senses tingled. Here was an avenue through which I could bring together my Wall Street background and understanding of finance with my teaching and mentoring skills - and build on my commitments to philanthropy, social justice, environmental protection, and transformation through the arts. I wrote a letter to Peter White and mailed it to his office address. Several weeks later he responded with a phone call. (Does this pattern sound familiar?) After a 45 minute conversation, Peter made me an unusual offer. He wanted to give me the organization, International Skye. Subject to us meeting in person and working out the details of the transition, of course. He had been hoping and praying for someone like me to come along.
These were two compelling gigs. I was ready to wrap up and return to New York City.
During the final month alone in the Kula house, I was also spending more time with Kili and the family, ironically initiating a process that would increase my pilina or relationship with Hawaiʻi, as people and place, just as I was preparing to leave. One day Kili called on the house phone, waving at me from the facing lanai across the gulch. Did I have plans for Saturday? The family was going to a Baby Luau, a traditional way to celebrate a childʻs first birthday, and they thought I might like to join them. Of course I had no plans but I was hesitant to accept. Wouldn’t the babyʻs parents think it was rude or at least awkward for the family to bring a stranger to the party? Did she need to clear it with them first? Kili laughed as she explained. I was no longer a stranger - I was ʻohana. I was automatically welcome.
When we got to the park for the party, the three children immediately disappeared into a crowd of a couple hundred people. I turned to Kili and her husband with concern in my eyes and asked if they were worried about the kids taking off like that. She gently laughed again. “Every adult at this gathering considers themselves aunty or uncle to every child here - and every child here knows they have to listen to whatever that aunty or uncle tells them. Our community is responsible for all of our children. And they feel secure in that.”
I took a deep breath, finally realizing that I had been invited to know a level of Hawaiʻi that had been invisible to me before as a visitor. Just as I was preparing to leave, in a profound way I was being given a new home.
The day came for me to fly out and practice saying a newly learned phrase, a hui hou. Kili pressed a paperback book into my hands as a parting gift. The book was perfectly chosen to acknowledge the time spent at her home while on my spiritual journey and the stories Iʻd shared of that journey. She gifted me the writings of someone who was brought up in a traditional Hawaiian way, but who also turned to teachers in other traditions in her search for Truth. The card I found inside the wrapping still serves as a bookmark for my re-readings of Change We Must: My Spiritual Journey by Nana Veary. On the cover of the card is an image of a woman dancing hula kahiko. In the handwritten message inside, Kili thanks me for staying in their cottage and adds, in part, “Please know that you have a Hawaiian ʻohana here on Maui…Aloha pumehana - Kili Michael Kiana Kālia and Kūākea.”
That message reflected the greatest gift of aloha with which I left Maui in 1997, a makana I treasure as my pilina to this family and to Hawaiʻi continues to unfold.