Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Under the Hula Moon | July/August 2006

Under the Hula Moon
By: JOCELYN FUJII

The Ocean Is the Road

PHOTO: KENN BRINER / BIG ZEN PHOTOGRAPHY

Two years ago on Maui, I heard Kahu Lyons Naone, a native of Kïpahulu, describe what the ocean means to him. A respected Hawaiian leader, he discussed the stages and levels of healing: olakino as the healing of the body, hāmau as spiritual health and ano, the special, sacred plane of being that some would call total alignment. The wellness of the body alone, he said, requires food, exercise, relaxation and joy—and “the ocean provides all that.”

He talked about ho‘ohau‘oli, happiness and pleasure, “which go as far as the ocean will take us.” He pointed to the ocean as a place of cleansing, both physically and metaphysically. “The ocean provides salt, used in our medicines,” he said. “And in hi‘uwai, the ocean is purification: We enter the ocean, symbolically die, and emerge pure in form.”

The previous morning before dawn, with teeth chattering, huddled under a bathrobe, I had been among the faithful gathered on the beach for the hi‘uwai, an annual ceremony at LifeFest Kapalua, Hawai‘i’s upmarket wellness festival at The Ritz-Carlton Kapalua. Clifford Nae‘ole, the hotel’s cultural adviser, explained its meaning and led us. We each entered the ocean in meditative silence, according to our own readiness, each in our own universe of thought and surrender, the ocean and waves a psychic massage. Some of us swam, some bobbed, some waded, some simply stood in the water. After we emerged, fresh and unencumbered, we faced east and chanted E ala e—to awaken, to arise—until the sun appeared over the ridgeline.

The wind blew softly over a hill behind us, an expansive green mound enclosed by a lava-rock wall. The site was Honokahua, where, nearly 20 years ago, extensive Hawaiian burials, dating back to 800 A.D., were discovered in the clearing of the land and eventually reburied. As a witness, I remember how Puanani Kanemura Van Dorpe, the world’s unparalleled master of kapa, the bark cloth of the ancient Hawaiians, gathered some strong Hawaiian women, had tools and implements made for them, and created with them over months, more than a thousand pieces of kapa to wrap each set of bones for a proper, respectful, traditional reburial. I remember how Pua scraped the inner bark from wauke trees with the sharp edge of an ‘opihi shell, and how she bundled the bark in ti leaves and submerged it in the ocean in Lahaina, secured under a rock for weeks, until the bark was pliable enough to pound. I remember the women of the hālau in their pareus, beating the bark in a small wooden building in Kapalua, their knees bruised and swollen from months of sitting on a hard floor, their pain empowering and ennobling their work. I can still hear the dreamlike rhythms of the beaters striking the anvils, reverberating through the village like a primal, centuries-old call from a time when such sounds were commonplace. When finally formed into sheets, some of the kapa was buried in the mud of a taro field, where the minerals of the soil reacted with the sun to dye the kapa black, the color of highest honor. I remember the stunned silence when the women were told they could stop, that there was enough kapa, that they had fulfilled their obligation to their kūpuna.

I think of these women often, still, two decades later. At LifeFest that day two years ago, Lyons Naone’s chant, in honor of Honokahua, evoked strong memories of Pua and her faithful, resolute women, their rhythmic beating like a tribal heartbeat, carried across the ocean by the winds. “We transfer our thoughts, feelings and culture over the ocean,” Na‘one reflected, “either personally, or by sending our messages…

From the deep, blue ocean comes our wisdom. They say the sky and the stars are the road map, and the ocean is the road.”

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