ka piko ke aloha o ka ʻāina

I stood trying to steady myself on the sloping southern flank of the puʻu, the red ground, ancient and uneven under my feet, throwing up giant hills of cinder and rock. The puʻu, the silent sentinels of the mountain, were named long ago for their lofty heights, named for the beloveds. 

Here was Puʻu Līlīnoe and there over her western shoulder - Puʻu Wēkiu, and away to the east, across the rugged and rust-colored landscape - Puʻu Poepoe, Puʻu Ala, Puʻu Mākanaka. And here, just in reach, not a puʻu but a lone monolithic stone known for its connection to Līlīnoe and her powers of healing – an ancestor stone who had received millennia of pilgrimages before my own.

The voice of our alakaʻi, Uncle Ed Stevens, was carried up-slope to where I stood. He was talking to the rest of the group, a captivated band of cultural specialists and professors, anthropologists and archaeologists, about the power and sacredness of the stone and its key to the puʻu beyond. Just minutes before, Uncle Ed had calmly instructed me to “go and touch the rock,” so here I stood as instructed, my hand hovering in hesitation. 

Here I was a twenty-two year old aspiring archaeologist, a product, in part, of the Papahana Kaiapuni Hawaiʻi, a recent college grad who had majored in History and Anthropology with a focus in Pacific Studies. Here I was all of these things and still I had yet to make my own deep and personal connection to the mauna.

Fast-forward seven years to the morning of April 2, 2015. For many people in and outside of Hawaiʻi, the eruption of events that would happen that day would seem, at first, like a spark in the dark - a sudden flame catching everything and everyone on fire. For many others including the aloha ʻāina that gathered in the road that morning, this fire had been burning for weeks, years, some among them had been stoking the flames for decades. There were embers here whose smoldering stretched back over a century. 

Then came the arrests, thirty-one of them - the singing, the chanting, the shouts - ʻauē! - ringing out into the atmosphere, out into the webosphere. This was the moment. This was the feeling of being ripped awake – the sudden welling up of pain, old and deep, and along with it an incredible rush of awareness – the thrill of suddenly seeing, with great clarity, the way to go, of finally naming the greatest yearning of our hearts. Aloha ʻāina. Aloha ʻāina.

The arrests would spark the kind of intense inquiry whose answers not even a $1.4 billion dollar telescope would be able to find. For weeks the questions poured out and suspicions mounted:

What is this Thirty Meter Telescope? How many acres will be added to the science reserve's death toll? Why did the governor sign off on an EIS that determined that the TMT would most definitely add to a growing list of substantial adverse impacts on the mountain?  How could the Board of Land and Natural Resources approve a Conservation District Use Permit for a project that clearly violates regulations on conservation district use? When is the University of Hawaiʻi's prostitution of this most precious cultural, environmental, and spiritual resource going to be stopped? What does any of this mean in the context of the continued illegal occupation of Hawaiʻi? As a society, can we allow scientific privilege to render our sacred ʻāina and the people who revere it inconsequential?

These scientists and their friends, they were unprepared. For all their far-off gazing into space, they were blind. They are still blind. This insatiable desire - to fathom the deep darknesses, to annex the uncountable myriad of stars, to quantify for the dull of the wit what our emotional intelligences already know - has made them lose sight of the most essential, the most precious - the soils, the waters, the hallowed ground on which they stand. 

This kind of sightlessness cannot be tolerated, not on Mauna Kea, not in any sacred spaces. But the mountain will endure. It is older and wiser, after all, stronger too with an immortal patience that will wait out any of our flawed endeavors. The mountain is our piko. It will pull us always into its gravity, teach us as many times as is necessary the greatest lesson we have to learn – connection, connection, connection.

So I go back to that day again and again, the day I touched the stone at Puʻu Līlīnoe, the day I ascended the summit of Kūkahauʻula with my heart stretched open as wide as its great vistas that overlook our paeʻāina out to the blue-rimmed edges of the world, the day I learned that which can not be taught in our books, in our discussions, that which can only be learned alone and small at the foot of the mountain, the unshakeable thing – that we are one, the mountain and I, that we share a mother, that we share a knowing of what has come before and what must continue to be, and that if I ever begin to lose sight of these things, if I am ever hesitant, I need only look to the mountain, to go to the mountain, to stand at its feet, to touch the rock and Mauna a Wākea will remind me of all I need to know.

Thousands have made this personal connection and they are standing now, WE are standing now and we will continue to stand with aloha in our guts, with fearlessness in our countenances, until the last song, the last stand, until the very last aloha ʻāina!

Eō e nā kini, nā kū kiaʻi mauna, e huli i ka piko, e kūpaʻa ma ke aloha i ka ʻāina. E kū, e kū!

e hoʻi i ka piko

A piece I wrote for Mana Magazine last October.
  
"The word piko, like so many in our mother tongue, is layered with meaning. Shedding its thin veil can unlock deeper levels of understanding demonstrating its importance in Hawaiian culture.

Piko names the belly button, and much like the navel- softly domed, shyly cupped, entirely unassuming- it whorls inward with deeper significance. It tells the story of our mothers and how we were once wholly connected to them through the umbilicus, the lifeline, the heartstring. Its story spirals deeper still, naming our mothers’ mothers and their mothers before them, whispering genealogies of wombs and women.

Piko identifies the fontanel, the mystic opening of skull through which strings the visceral umbilical cord connecting us to our aumākua, our ancestor spirits, ever hovering above. Piko refers to the maʻi, the genitals, that teem with the promise of new life and continuity. Piko is the summit of the mountain, the weaver’s first plait, the springing forth of leaf from stem. Piko designates the center and the source as well as describes the way in which we are connected to it.

Piko speaks of beginnings, which seems, to me, the most befitting place to start. I am a mother. I also write, read, paint, cook and sing (and sometimes clean), but all of the latter seem only to serve the first.

Over the past six years in which I have carried and coaxed three little children out into the world, being a mother has come to shape and color all of my doings. Being a mother has caused me to approach everything I do more thoughtfully. Every song, every prayer, story, practice, custom carries a message, and regardless of how many times and how many others have perpetuated that narrative, I feel the need to look at each thought through new eyes, through my own mama­-lens, and to decide whether or not to pass that on to my own children. Luckily, I come from an ancient and powerful lineage whose cultural memory is full of the kind of knowing that I can confidently and lovingly bequeath, one of which is the significance of the piko.

In generations past, our ancestors venerated the umbilical cord (as well as the ʻīewe or placenta) as the connection between mother and child. This connection did not belong to the pair alone; rather, it was a connection that extended to all blood relatives, relatives who sometimes affectionately called one another, kuʻu piko, my umbilicus. The stump of cord that falls from the infant’s navel shortly after birth also held significance and the burying of all piko, whether belonging to the high-born babe or the humble, was of great consequence.

The manner in which the piko was buried varied from place to place and from family to family. Each held slightly different meanings, but whether buried in hallowed ground, in areas with auspicious place names, near sacred stones, in the crevices of branching koʻa, or simply in the family’s yard, the deeper intent each parent had for their child was very much the same. That intent spanned generations - that their child’s life be long and full and never starved for connection - connection to family, connection to place, connection to the land and to ancestors past.
 
As we prepare to bury the piko of our muliloa, our newest little one, I think back to all the piko that our ʻohana have planted together over the years. I remember all the piko we have tucked away into the earth for safekeeping, all the quiet prayers and well-wishes that are interred there with them. Her piko, the tiny withered vestige of her time in utero, becomes my talisman. 

I see that at the heart of the piko concept and at the core of parenting is this same journey of connection. Piko is connection.
 
As parents, we are always and only teaching our children and ourselves of this truth - that we are our mothers, our families, our ancestors, that we are this place, the hills and the waters, the leaf and the fruit, that we are of this time as well as the time ahead and the time behind, and that from this place of connection, from the seat of this knowing, we must strive to move, to act, to sing and dance and live.
 
E hoʻi i ka piko."