I am a huge fan of the Dalai Lama. I read an excellent biography on him when I was a teenager and was hooked. I was distressed when I found out that he was here on Oahu, had been for two days already, and would only be here on more day. It had not been widely advertised, it drove me crazy that I hadn’t heard about it, and it was worse when I found I could not get into the last day lecture.
I had to watch bits and pieces of his visit on the local news. When I first came here to Oahu I felt I had been given a new lease on life, Hawai’i is a wonderful place, with wonderful people. I came here to work on the Monorail project, which will start in Kapolie and run all the way into Town, and I was really shocked to find when I got here that there was opposition to the project.
When I watched the excerpts of the Dalai Lama’s visit, one audience member asked what could have been considered a controversial question about being an oppressed people in what is basically an occupied land surrounded by ones oppressors. Now, the Dalai Lama is uniquely qualified to speak on that exact same issue, having been through a hostile Chinese occupation, a near genocide, and the subsequent Han-ification of his native Tibet. He gave sagely advice about keeping ones cultural identity in the face of adversity, and was glad he had answered with such wisdom and compassion, but I was saddened that there could be people on these Islands who might think of me as part of an invading force, just one more Haole face in an ocean that only brings more and more of us with each tide, and that there are people on the Island who view modernization and infrastructure improvements as the destruction of their old ways only to make room for even more invading haoles, and so, are against modernization on principle.
One of the reasons I feel saddened by this, is because I feel a profound spiritual and Karmic connection to this place. My birthday is July 18th, 1971. I spent most my life being a tumble weed, driven by winds that were not very kind to say the least. Eventually, I wound up in the same place as most tumbleweeds, Las Vegas, Nevada. Most people around the world have an idealized image of Las Vegas in their heads, and for the most part that image is accurate when the economy is good and people have jobs and tourists just keep coming in, but if the jobs have dried up, and economy goes belly up and the tourists aren’t coming anymore, then Las Vegas becomes a pretty nasty place. I had been laid off from my technical career of 6 years and took a series of jobs that were each worse than the last in terms of dastardly, devious, and flat out dishonest things that were expected of me to keep my job, and it was made clear to me that if I didn’t do these things, the company(s) had no problem taking this difference out from my hide. They were pitting my own desperation against that of others, just like a hobo sandwich fight (which, sadly, do exist).
So, on my birthday, July 18th, 2011, my partner whom I love dearly brought me my birthday cake, with a big blue “4” candle next to a big blue “0” candle, blazing away. I inhaled, closed my eyes, and wished with all my heart —in exactly these words—“God, please please please, if you grant any wish for me, please let it be for Joe and I to get out of this awful place and be happy, you pick, anywhere you want, if you could—let it be someplace GREEN!” and I blew out my 40th birthday candles.
It was only a very short while after that I started the phone calls and the interviews, and only a week or so after those that Joe and I had plane tickets in our hands for Hawai’i! To live and work for what looked like at least ten years. Never before in my life had I had a prayer answered. Whats more, I don’t think I wound up in Hawai’i just because its GREEN, I think it was because of Aloha, and how I needed that to help heal my soul too. I know there is two parts to every equation and that I must learn what Hawai’i needs from me as well, and I am learning, but for me Aloha is an answer to a much deeper and more profoundly impactful question, “how do we heal the sickness that is ravaging our world?” The same sickness of people using each other that I escaped from in Vegas and is spreading across the world, I honestly believe the answer is Aloha. I already love this place, and I wound up here for a reason, I’m not an invader, but want to help defend it, and spread its medicine.