Having a blessed and amazing time in Puna on the Big Island. Extended my stay till Tuesday as four days was not enough. I have been communing with Pele as she makes her way closer and closer to Pahoa town. From my bedroom window in lower Puna at Kalapana Seaview, I smell her burning pathways as she cuts her way through forest and pasture with her red hot fingers. I see her smoky upland plumes and taste a slightly putrid sulfur on my lips as she permeates the air with her volcanic essence. It is not quite like the vog we experience on other islands from time to time. It is more...real, more...visceral, much more...foreboding. Every day as i go exploring i have occasion to enter or exit Pahoa town at its northern end. I know that the road i drive on, the homes and schools i pass, and some of the businesses where i have made purchases, will all be gone...and in just a matter of a couple of weeks! So hard to imagine them gone, POOF, just like that! Such a surreal experience...I am committing a visual memory of them to my brain, and to my camera lens. Here today, gone tomorrow. I have quickly grown a deep respect for Madame. She is at once, graceful and fearsome, beautiful and dangerous. I am humbled before her presence... Ironically, with a few exceptions, the newest businesses in town, which are so 21st century compared to the early 1900s look-and-feel of the rest of the old town, are the ones first most likely to be gobbled up by Pele. She is heading straight for them. Her path thus far has been fairly straight and narrow. Is she trying to say something? Is she asserting her right over progress? Or will she eventually clean out the old too as she did with Kalapana...time will tell! The last big flow which took away Kalapana Town and Black Sands Beach to the south was an embrace of her right arm, cradling Puna from the south. And right now she is extending her left arm around the opposite border of Puna...cradling her aina from the north. When her flow reaches the sea, somewhere along the north side of Hawaiian Beaches neighborhood, she will have fully embraced Puna, leaving the eastern facing ocean side open to the trade-winds and crashing surf along the lava sea-cliffs. Is she reclaiming this old land, which she has visited oft before? Will she take all of the prolific growth of flowers and fruits, trees and shrubs, and vines and grasses, along with the houses-which-are-homes and the other accumulating detritus of civilization that has grown up on her Puna lands since her last visit? And will she spill lava into the special warm ponds and champagne pools just as she lava-filled the Queens Baths and the tide pools in the recent past? Only she knows her plans...only we can guess...and desperately pule to hopefully save what has become beloved and treasured of this old aina. But alas, creation continues in its ebb and flow of life and death, the inevitable change that turns Mother Earth on her axis. Pele shows us our vulnerability. And also shows us our immortality, as we, like the fiery Phoenix, and like the tenacious lava lands, do resurrect into new life...only to repeat the pattern, until we decide to not!
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 09:11:38 +0000
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