Life Power Now - for gay men

Aloha,
I've been here on the Big Island for a month, and what a month it has been...

Things are getting sorted out, slowly but surely... my motorcycle arrived yesterday, and seemed one more clincher that I really live here on the Big Island. The rest of my stuff should catch up with me in another two weeks. In between trying to figure out how I fit in here with different groups of people and what, exactly, I'm going to do here, are moments when the light and wind and color fill me up to overflowing and I can't believe I am finally now living on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. Here and there I catch echoes of other islands I've loved: the long volcanic curve of Santorini, the moonlight of Caribbean Guadeloupe, the restless yet soothing sky of Polynesian Moorea.

As exciting as it all sounds, changes of this sort of magnitude are not glorious marches forward into the sun with trumpets blaring and all your whims fulfilled! My personal life, my living situation, my job situation, and day-to-day tasks have not all of a sudden taken on a glamour - they are just so different as to be almost unrecognizable.

Instead of the urban office routine, I am now spending 4 days a week literally hacking my way through jungle with a machete. After being tripped by vines for the umpteenth time this afternoon, and actually losing my balance and falling onto a pile of rocks and rotting trees, I had the good sense to call it a day. My clothes are now one-of-a-kind couture, embroidered with paint, dirt, stains and vine sap, not to mention eau de mosquito repellent.

Going to town to run an errand takes all day, or least a half a day. Solar panels and rain-catchment water mean a lot of tasks that never occurred to me in my Washington, DC apartment, such as taking the sudsy grey laundry water out to water the banana trees. Prices for daily commodities can make you do double-takes in the store, stopping you in your tracks as you try to absorb the fact that cheese slices can actually cost that much!

A lot of people struggle here on the Puna Coast. Most everyone rents rooms to help the cash flow, and many, if not most, houses are in some state of construction/ repair/ finishing, not unlike the houses of urban pioneers. The houses reflect the different styles of coping with island life. Some are walled and fenced and greatly disciplined, some relax and ride the flow of the landscape, others look like they can't quite keep up with entropy...

Being uprooted so recently, I am very concerned about entropy. New lives can be tricky things, requiring water, and mulching, and weeding and pruning. A time to sow and a time to be patient. After a month, I am still accumulating new impressions every day, seeing how people live, feeling out the rhythms here which are so different from my previous life, and trying to figure out how to braid new and old rhythms into a flow that feels right.

Of course, I'm hacking through the jungle with two really fine people, and we work together to clear the path and mark the beautiful monkey pod and lama trees to be saved from the bulldozer. And the clerks at all the stores are sweet, and smile at you, and seem to think that bagging your groceries is something that they really ought to do for you. And nobody cares how you are dressed, because they are looking at you and not at all at your clothes.

And so time passes. It seems as if there is so much I haven't gotten done, even though I know that a month is hardly any time at all, not even in the city. Things keep happening... like watching rare Hawaiian birds at dawn in a rain forest, or stopping on the way home this afternoon to sit and look at the ocean. The ocean is a deep blue ruffled with wind, with uncountable white wave caps and an energy beyond entropy.