Life Power Now - for gay men

Aloha,
A friend emailed me and asked what my life was like on the Big Island. And that kicked me into gear to finally write something...anything!

Life on the Big Island is busy, stunning, beautiful, joyous, uncertain, ever-changing.... a lot like Washington, DC..... <grin>

The flowers and plant life are beautiful, the rocks are beautiful, the clouds are beautiful, the ocean is beautiful. There are dolphins in the bay....

the weather is strange for this time of year; it is raining 12 times a day with interludes of sunshine, people are actually putting on an extra shirt sometimes in the evening. You have to wrap yourself in a towel or put something on your naked body after swimming in the silky, delicious blue water...

The moon here is as full as you could possibly imagine, and lately there's been a red glow at night in the west from a strong surface lava flow...

the people are like orchids, no two the same, some wildly extravagant, some calm and purposeful; each playing out their own life... beautiful....

amazing place, amazing life I've gotten myself into. The house where I am living has just been put on the market by my housemate who wants to move back to California. There's probably time yet before I need to decide anything, but if it sells quickly, then I'll just have to do something! <grin>

And there's always Kalani, I could move there in the next half-hour if I wanted to. (I'm gonna hold out for my own cottage though, which is proceeding, but at a tropical pace). In six months I seem to have become established as a bona fide anomaly, which means I fit all categories and no categories of employee. I don't officially work here, but I attend the managers' meetings. I have no position, but the days are completely full with a myriad of interesting tasks. Right now I'm learning the wiring and management of the local area network and the website.

There are interesting people to take pictures of, and I hope to organize the art collection and create an art gallery, partly so that I can show my own work. I help with renovations and do creative paint treatments on walls. I help with designing the new cottages, and facilitate a new community group for the Puna Coast. If everybody in the group is complaining to me, I guess I must be doing something right. When they start complaining ABOUT me, I'll find a replacement!

Hanging out with a local painter has changed my whole sense of color. Arthur Johnsen is so good at capturing the intense, writhing energy of the Puna coast. We've become very good friends, and sometimes I have a lot of fun helping him re-arrange his art gallery in Hilo.

A couple nights ago, 29 of us from Kalani went on an eight hour lava trek and hoped the rain would hold off and give us the full moon to see by. On the way out we marveled at the complex patterns of the cooled lava: ropes, sculptures, fractures, fissures. When we arrived we made an offering to Pele, the goddess-spirit of the volcano, and watched the dance of the lava flowing into the sea and the waves creating fantastic sculptures of steam.

The trek back was a completely interminable four hours. The lava is so uneven that every step is difficult in the dark. We saw new lava flows break out of the ground and flow down the hillside, and saw a rare moonbow (actually, an even rarer double moonbow!) caused by the full moon, finally appearing from behind the clouds and refracting into a rainbow through the mist.

The last hour was both the hardest and easiest. We were all tired; with flagging energy the group divided and divided again in the dark, until there were people strung out all over the lavascape. But in the last hour the full moon finally gave us light to see by, and we waved our flashlights back to the folks behind us so that they could see what direction to follow. Each one of us, on seeing the red beacon that marked the end of the trip, breathed a sigh of relief. Actually, some of us shouted, others laughed out loud, and still others simply dropped to the ground.

But none of us would have missed it. To see Pele's lava dancing with the sea is a sight worth seeing.