Abundance in Maui

The Garden

I'm into my fourth week on Maui and though the pace, the people, and the weather are still new to me, they've all become a little more comfortable, a little more homey. I live in a community of people who are mostly Krishna devotees with their own individual eclectic beliefs tossed in. Mostly these people believe in constant compassion for other beings - human, vegetable and animal - gratitude, and joy. They talk to me with an intimacy that still catches me off guard and made me uncomfortable for about a week. When speaking we look each other in the eye. When greeting and parting, we embrace, always. When we ask each other how we are doing, we really want to know. I live in a house with Angelina (aka Prama which means love), Gaia, Kalia, and his daughter Luna. Angelina went with me to the emergency room last week in the middle of the night. Kalia makes me eat right and invites me to come swim with him and his daughter at Ho'okipa Beach when I feel lonely or homesick. Keone, whose on the mainland right now, does bodywork and massage therapy. He works in the garden. He showed me how miraculous plants are. He took me to the basil bush and showed me how to harvest the seeds before collecting them and placing four into the palm of my hand. He said one seed produced that huge overflowing basil bush that feeds us everyday and now there are hundreds of seeds which came from that one. So together we planted the four new basil bushes which will make hundreds of thousands seeds more. Everyone here has there own story too. Angelina is here to reunite her family. Kalia is here to kick start a super food product called "Maui Peace Bar" that comes in 24 different flavors (they're really good!). Gaia is here for healing and to do peace work, which involves combing the knots out of bright red fluffy microphone covers. Keone is here to heal others.

The living is simple here, and yet it is abundant! The garden is overflowing with spinach, kale, basil, onions, lettuce, papayas, peppers, mint, avocado, lilikoi and more. Everyday I find a new musical instrument hidden in an outdoor shed, under a couch, on the bottom shelf of a bookshelf. When I moved into my room I found a hammer dulcimer under my bed! If you know anything about me, you know that this is personal heaven for me. Outside of the house I live in (there are two houses with several rooms and a few studio units) there is a car port area made for creating and baking pottery. In front there is a large porch with Christmas lights hanging all around. Shell dangly bits and wind chimes hang everywhere among dozens of massive spider webs that no one will knock down. Buddha and Krishna and Shakti statues sit at the bases of trees and on the banisters of the porch with offerings of beads and quartzes and seashells beneath them. There is a cotton tree. There is a tree that looks like a dancer, and there is a tree that has been carved into a totem pole

There are animals everywhere. We had several chickens when I first moved here. There was Sita and her 13 chicks which the mongoose have trimmed down to a slim five. Today they were taken to a bird sanctuary because we couldn't keep them out of the garden but caging them wasn't an option. There's a rabbit, and several cats. One follows me around like a dog. There are the wild chickens that come in early in the morning which I have to chase off the property most mornings. There are the dogs that chase them. There are toads, and geckos, and lizards, and cane spiders. There are giant-leafed plants with leaves so big you think you could just sprawl out on top of them.

New Life

I like this little nook of people that I have landed into almost by accident. I think about why I am here. Why I left everything behind to come to a place where I know no one when I had everything and everyone before. I think about the struggle to get here and wonder if it was really worth it, if I'll make it here or leave in a couple of months. I think about the dreams I have and the pains I still feel. I think about the words I still want to write. I think and acknowledge that out of anywhere on this island that I could've landed that I couldn't have come anyplace better. What better place to infuse clarity, confidence, and self-love than in a community where compassion and support is abundant and where my creativity will have room to grow? I think about the dozens of reasons that I gave my family and friends for why I absolutely had to come to Maui. I was told I was being rash, even reckless. Maybe so. Now I'm here and I can barely remember half of those reasons. I believe I needed to go somewhere where I could just be. I needed to be somewhere quiet so that my self could take center stage in my life. Now she's here. I'm here, watching and waiting for whatever is next. Now, I want to have a job that doesn't define me so that my words can freely flow when I come home at night. I want to plan my trip to the next destination now, because I acknowledge and accept my inherent need to move freely and lightly between places. I want to make my own individual path towards saving the world. I want to help others write down their truths the way I have always striven to write down mine. Today, this is all I want.

Mama Sita and Five

Hoshi Kashiwagi and American Autobiography

Today, memoirist Hoshi Kashiwagi spoke to my Genre: Nonfiction class about autobiography, family, secrets, and what it means to own your own story. But we can't really own our own stories can we? As I "write down my own bones" I find that every single one of them has touched or is attached deeply to someone else. While Dr. Kashiwagi talked about Japanese internment during the second World War, the useless feeling to which he succumbed while imprisoned, "no-no boys," half-owned half memories, and theatre art in a veritable jail, I thought about my mother, half siblings, our fathers, Alabama, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Can I morally tell my story when more than half of it belongs to someone else? Memoirists debate over the need to be true to their familial allegiances and there indescribable need to tell a true story, their story. Some have insurance to deal with the discrepancies, some take their chances, others have severed ties. There is no easy answer, no way to compromise desire with sometimes flimsy obligations. So I will try to write the truth. I will try not to hurt your feelings. I will try not to hurt my own feelings.  But tell the truth, tell the truth.

In the spirit of autobiography, which I've been working with a lot of lately, I picked a neat prompt to motivate some writing. In a week or so I'll post my own response to the prompt. Please feel free to post your own response in a comment which I can put up if you like, or just share your experience in a comment if you decide to write something. (I found this prompt in the article "Writing the Memoir: A Practical Guide to the Craft, the Personal Challenges, the Ethical Dilemmas of Writing Your True Stories," by Judith Barrington.)

Pick a day or part of a day from your memory and assign it a color. Describe that time, returning to, and developing, the theme of color and showing the reader why you think of it as a "yellow day" or a "purple afternoon."

Remember to pick a strong memory...

Swimming in the American: A Memoir and Selected Writings

By Hoshi Kashiwagi

Legally Own Your Work: How to Copyright Your Stuff

I've put some poetry on here but stories are my thing. I'd like to put some up but the main concern holding me back is that this is a public venue and there is no legal protection of my work. I asked a professor of mine, Hans Ostrom, who regularly puts his poetry in his blog, about the copyrighting process and his peace of mind. I thought I should put what I learned regarding the copyright process up here for the benefit of other creative writers.

There are two ways to go about copyrighting your work: Go through the U.S. Government. There is always a fee if you do it this way. You can go to this site and check it out: http://www.copyright.gov/. Here you can find everything from long winded descriptions of legalities to hokey anime animations that break down the whole process for you. Doing it this way is expensive, especially if you have a lot of pieces that are not part of a larger collection. 

There is a much simpler and cheaper way to go about this that will cost only as much as your work's weight in postage stamps. Mail the thing to yourself. Just make sure that it has a clear date stamped on the envelope. When you receive your present in the mail, don't open it. Keep it as proof that you have in fact copyrighted your work. You can mail novels, stories and poetry to yourself individually or together as a large collection. It's really up to you and what your own ideas are about how your work should be published. For instance, if you send a collection of short stories to yourself but a year later add two more stories to that collection to make a new edition, the new stories are not copyrighted. To be considered a part of the whole collection you would have to re-mail the collection to yourself with the new stories included. The new date stamp is the new copyright date. Of course, this information is heavily informal and should be researched again before you consider copyrighting. Here is an interesting site that debates the issue (because it is an issue): http://www.copyrightauthority.com/poor-mans-copyright. Copyrighting your work protects your work and makes sure that you lawfully receive credit whenever someone other than yourself publishes it. Which ever method you use, make sure you understand all of the laws associated with that method and above all, make sure you are comfortable with using that method for something you worked hard to create. 

"How to Write Good"

Here is a list of some rules about fiction writing and writing in general. I don't know where this came from, but some items on this list are pulled from William Safire's Rules for Writers. Some I agree with and some I don't. Most make me laugh.

"1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

3. Employ the vernacular.

4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

6. Remember to never split an infinitive.

7. Contractions aren't necessary.

8. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

9. One should never generalize.

10. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

11. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

12. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

13. Be more or less specific.

14. Understatement is always best.

15. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

16. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

17. The passive voice is to be avoided.

18. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

19. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

20. Who needs rhetorical questions?

21. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

22. Don't never use a double negation.

23. capitalize every sentence and remember always end it with point

24. Do not put statements in the negative form.

25. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.

26. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.

27. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

28. A writer must not shift your point of view.

29. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)

30. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!

31. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to the irantecedents.

32. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

33. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

34. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

35. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

36. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

37. Always pick on the correct idiom.

38. The adverb always follows the verb.

39. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; They're old hat; seek viable alternatives."