Wind Has Something to Say About Belonging

Do you know the name of your wind?

The words want to race out as I sit down to type today, so let me dispense quickly with my usual preliminary words of greeting. Mahalo for reading. Mahalo for thinking rather than just cruising on autopilot. Mahalo for your openness to new ideas or perspectives. Mahalo especially to those who let me know what you think of what I have to say.

Photo by Eugene Chystiakov on Unsplash

I have a notepad with a sequence of essays I intended to write this year, a list like the one I began with last year. Best laid plans. What actually happens is much like what actually happens in life. It is not that I get distracted, not exactly. I think of it more as coming across other topics that need to be included, discovering side paths to be explored, or in some cases like today I might best explain it this way. Other beings show up with something to say.

Other BEINGS? Yes. For example, when my young gelding Kūkūilama wandered into the script, I realized it was time to write about lessons I learned from horses as teachers instead of lessons I learned from humans as teachers. And a few times, the elemental being FIRE has shown up. As lava, as tragedy, as Pele. When you are required to follow the omens, you pay attention to what shows up with echoing insistence.

And so the story of Wind goes like this.

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In the essay I wrote about grief, I mentioned in passing that the Reverend Carlton E Smith came into my life through my brother Craig. I turn to my friend Rev Carlton each morning before I get out of bed - in the sense that I keep his book Try My Jesus¹ on my nightstand and read a daily reflection from it before my feet hit the chilly floor and my day begins.

Because I started this practice when I bought the book rather than on a January 1st, this past Tuesday was Day 136. That morning I read:

And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm.”

-Mark 4:39

Part of the Reverendʻs commentary reads: “If Jesus did calm the wind with his voice, I like to think it was with a whisper. No need to show force or dominance.”

That hit me hard. Because the next P-word in the paradigm of belonging that is on my notepad to be explored is Power. And I needed to find some fresh distinctions around Power.

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The typical winds of the Place to which I belong are legendary, especially the one known as apaʻapaʻa. Legendary for their fierceness, their Power - and also renown as maikaʻi, as good, as beneficial. We welcome these winds, these familiar winds, however much they howl - and raise eyebrows in alarm when the unfamiliar wind comes from the west, from the leeward or Kona side. The winds remind us Power is not something to be feared, is not automatically either “good” or “dangerous.” And force or dominance is not the only source of Power - exactly the moral struggle I had in my relationship with my mare Zara.²

It seemed to me there was a strong hint for me here worth a detour, as I have been sitting with the question of whether the Voice I am called to be at this moment is what singers call a “belt” - or a quiet whisper that requires the listener to become still and lean closer.

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The thing is, I can feel somatically, from having learned how to drop into a space of stillness to connect safely with a horse that is in flight or fight mode, that deep inner stillness Jesus could have accessed, an inner calm that had Power to calm external stormy winds and seas. That prompt for Day 136 reminded me of two lines of a chant, an ʻoli that is offered to the sun just after it has risen, or just before it sets. E Kanehoalani E is often included as part of a longer protocol. The two lines of the ʻoli that I have thought about the most say:

He wahine lohiʻau nānā i ka makani

He makani lohiʻau hāʻupu mai o loko e

With scriptures, prayers, chants, poems - easy, literal translation is not the point. I have seen lohiʻau translated as “inert” or even as “retarded.” But when I read Rev. Carltonʻs suggestion to imagine just how inwardly grounded and calm Jesus would have been to influence the raging wind and sea, I imagine the inner state of the “wahine lohiʻau” as she watches the wind - the wind that might also be in powerful seemingly held back readiness within.³

That was plenty to chew on through the course of that day. And another connection wove itself in the back of my mind. My two most recent essays looked at dimensions of belonging to a Place - and in this one I mentioned, in a footnote, the book Remembering Our Intimacies⁴ for adding to my understanding of how malihini (a newcomer) becomes kamaʻāina (literally child of the land). The author elucidates Hawaiian thinking on the process by looking at old newspaper accounts of the moʻolelo - the teaching story - of Hiʻiakaikapoliopele and her journey to retrieve her sister Peleʻs beloved, Lohiʻau.

As Hiʻiaka journeys across the island chain from the siblingsʻ home in Kilauea on Hawaiʻi Island to Haʻena on Kauai, at each place she stops, she is challenged in two ways. She feels the sadness of being estranged from her land as she is required to travel to Places to which she has no pre-existing relationship. And as she arrives at each Place, she is challenged by those of that Place to develop a relationship of mutual knowing and responsibility, to earn her right to remain there and claim connection.

According to the stories, both Pele on her initial journey in spirit form, and Hiʻiaka on her journey in physical form, call on the winds of Kauai by their names to demonstrate their pilina, their relationship to the Places of those winds.

What is it with Wind? And why (I asked myself absolutely for the first time shaking my head as to why I had never wondered before) does the gorgeous aliʻi of Kauai, kane of Pele, carry the name Lohiʻau - the same word that in the dictionary translations seems to have unflattering connotations? Is the wild elemental Fire of destruction and creation drawn to partner with a generative well of stillness? When I think of moʻolelo as what I call “teaching stories” - I think of my own arduous pilgrimage to find and integrate (bring home) that ability to “hold the frequency” as my teacher Velvalee termed it.

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One more teaching story about Wind showed up in my musings. I recalled that the final, life-threatening, challenge the boy Santiago faces on his pilgrimage in The Alchemist, is to transform himself into the Wind. I encourage you to read - or reread - the exchange between the Boy and the Wind for yourself. Because, the book says, “the winds know everything” - but only in the sense that they see everything on their journeys. Through his personal journey Santiago has realized something that the Wind knew nothing of - because it exists invisibly in that quiet place inside those of us in human form. That one essential thing: that the limitless possibilities of people and the winds come from the Power of Love.

Shall we return next week to talk more about Power as Love - and the answers that are Blowinʻ in the Wind?

1. You can order your own copy: Try My Jesus. You have to understand I have never studied the Bible. That does not mean I donʻt find lessons in it, but I need a bit of help in seeing the universal messages.

2. You can find the episodes of Zaraʻs story in this set of memoir essays.

3. Another essay on my list is about a kind of observant attention for which the Hawaiian word is kilo, what my Equine Guided Education mentor Ariana calls OLNO “open listening, neutral observation.” That is how I envision the woman in the chant is observing the wind.

4. You can order it here: Remembering Our Intimacies.