of mere being

I was sitting in a bar near Kihei on Maui with two beautiful Hawaiian women — sisters. The place was loud with rock ‘n roll and blues, and we drank a few beers.

“I think you need a Hawaiian name,” said one. “‘Daniel,’ you know, could be ‘Kaniela.'”

“Hmmm, yes he looks like a Kaniela,” said the other sister after a moment’s thought, “but maybe….” She paused, her dark eyes drilling down to something more important.

She asked: “So who were you named after?”

“Well, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, from the Bible,” I replied, speaking from the shy child inside me.

“Yes, I thought so,” the second sister said. I knew this one less well than the first, but she was very intuitive (they both were) — and willing to take a few risks. “And what was Daniel from the Bible like?” she asked.

“He was a soothsayer. He was an interpreter of dreams. He was a courageous man, but he wasn’t just a courageous fool. He could see into things.” I said something like this, although I cannot remember exactly.

“Then you are not Kaniela,” the second sister continued. “That is just a phonetic transcription of Daniel. You are Kaniala.”

The first sister, said “Yes, that’s right” and smiled.

“And what’s the difference?” I asked, in my introverted, mild embarrassment.

“Kaniela is just a name,” the second sister told me. “Kaniala means ‘caller to the path.'”

And so it is. I smiled, too. It was right.

My Hawaiian dictionary has long paragraphs on both kani (a cry) and ala (a path). I look at these words, associated as they are in my mind with the feminine beauty of the Islands and with my own personal journey to fulfill my purpose, and am ever so grateful to the sisters.

What a gift

that we should hold for one another

a deeper name

even as we know

no name will ever do.

~Kaniala~

As I scanned in more photographs from my family of origin’s past, I thought about how magical it is to have these memories present, however rearranged in my mind by time’s passage.

I cannot describe exactly the feelings I have looking at these photos of my mother, grandmother and uncle, grandfather, father and brother — and me, the youngest son. They are like things dredged out of a canal; an archaeological dig. They bring up everything that happened in the past. They bring up all the incongruences of childhood. They define a time, many times, and they raise the question of why they have come back now into my life. I look at them as if they were shards of pottery pulled from the earth, and it is my job to find them all, to reassemble them into a whole.

A few months ago my brother and I cleared out some boxes from storage that my parents will no longer be needing. In one of them was a ziploc baggie stuffed full of hundreds of old negatives, some from as far back as the teens and nineteen twenties. I bought a new scanner today and brought a few of the negatives back to life. This is my favorite, a picture of my mother and her younger brother. It must have been taken some time in the twenties. My uncle died many years ago from complications of a heavy equipment accident, but my mother is still in good health for someone her age — 95. She is still the sweet person she ever was, just a little forgetful, and once in awhile she has trouble speaking.

For some reason looking at this photograph I feel some sadness. Maybe it’s the look in their eyes — like all kids complaining about having to stand there and wait for the shot, and maybe also feeling too old to have their arms around one another; possibly not liking each other or the guy taking the photo all that much at the moment. And maybe that’s all my own projection, just reflecting the passage of so much time and my capacity to create a story. I imagine the photograph was taken in early summer, about June perhaps. There are some stakes in the background, probably bean poles, and when the photograph is enlarged you can also see some small roses growing there. I can almost feel the warmth of the day in the soft light illuminating their faces. The slant says it’s evening. Undoubtedly, this was their yard and my grandfather took the picture. But discovering it, bringing it up onto my screen almost felt as if somehow I had taken it myself, as if it had been in my body waiting like a dream to show up now, today.

Time really doesn’t exist, does it? Only this timeless stuff: this memory, not even my own, waiting in a drawer year after year until it is ready to be played over again.

I am startled by the depth of my feelings.

~Dan~

PS: You can see a recent picture of my mother at the end of this post on my other blog.

When I found this doorway, I stood back. It was too perfect to enter. It held the promise of too much paradise. I was not “wealthy” enough to open such a door. I could feel my own resistances, my own judgments about who I am and what I deserve. It symbolized too much. Now, looking at this and other photographs that represent “a way in,” I can see that each is only a mirror, only a glass. I cannot reach for the latch without asking, “Am I ready?” Is this really who I am ready to be?

No one of us knows for sure — not just what is on the other side of the door, but really what is yet on this side of it. We carry the unfinished, the uncompleted. We are still as dark to ourselves as we are light.

We are never ready for our own perfection. And yet…and yet…my hand goes forward, asking the Limitless what I may find just beyond.

Dare I discover myself? Dare I knock?

I cannot help it if I am this (crazily) curious.

~Dan~

I have been to El Santuario de Chimayo north of Santa Fe many times. A very old church, it is always a quiet, sacred place, even though there are many tourists.

You can’t escape the meaning, if you know — and you do know — there must be a spiritual aspect to life. It is full of the lives lived in the high desert and hills of what is now New Mexico. Lives lived in the privacy of canyons where there is only the thinnest dirt track to follow and under a sky from which no one can hide. It matters little what “faith” is represented by the church or how homely the setting, which includes a few nearby restaurants where you can buy souvenirs — a French word, meaning “remember.” You see the sanctuary and you become quiet, quiet in spirit. Mortality is here, full of generations. All the stories of families are here: the fights and reconciliations, furtive trysts and endless partings, accidents of fate, childbirths, child-deaths, a hundred — a thousand differing pains, men and women in love, despair or both; the lost ones and the found growing old equally as they come to this same place still believing. Your ears buzz with the the celebratory noise of marriages and the silence of losses, of funerals, of innocence, of all the living fables of trust and betrayal — and finally, especially, healing — everything, united in one place where the pigeons now roost in the rafters and the dry leaves of the trees rattle in the wind like so many lessons about this strange state of simply being alive. You cannot come here without thinking about who you are, about relationships past and present, and what you yet must do in your life. You are dust here. You are the art of dust. And you cannot stand here for long without acknowledging that there is something unfathomable at the center, a deep acceptance of you so much greater than your own acceptance of life or suffering. There is only an ocean that fitfully laps in a dry, cold space at the edge of a tiny village called “the human.” And by this you know you are home.

It can’t be photographed or written down, no matter how good you are. It is the medicine.

~Dan~

He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?

There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sand-knolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of evening might still the riot of his blood.

He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.

He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than other.

Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.

He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.

~James Joyce~