Was thinking about the start of my obsession, or, um, interest, in Hawaiian cultural astronomy. Where and how it began. How I read everything I could get my hands on, some scholarly, some educational, some ancient, some ridiculous. How I taught myself about the earth-centered universe and horizon astronomy. There was, still is, very little material on this stuff. And thank goodness I was obsessed, or I would never have had the persistence to muddle through. Anyway, I used Sharpies to draw the equator on an orange. Then I rammed a sharp pencil through the orange to form the earthʻs axis, and stuck it in the ground at an angle. It fell over. And over and over. I scratched diagrams in the dirt in my yard. I turned pebbles into planets. I put a cardboard circle around the orangeʻs equator. I drew a universe. And a flat earth – a circular one, a rectangular one. I put a tablecloth on the lawn and sat in the middle of it and made believe I was the earth in the center of the universe. I held a bamboo stick upright against my chest as my axis, then I leaned trying to approximate 23.5 degrees. I thought about ordering a bunch of hula hoops to turn into orbits. I wasnʻt trying to learn astronomy. I was trying to learn how our ancestors saw the sky. I woke up laughing this morning. Iʻd been dreaming about poking pencils through oranges.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:04:23 +0000
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