In the Glorious Later

​A joy moment at the end of 2019

We're driving down the Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway, my son and I. There's no vog at all, and there hasn't been since Kilauea stopped erupting for the first time since 1983, almost like a miracle and certainly a gift, one week before our 2018 Volcano writing retreat and just when I was about to cancel because Tutu Pele wasn't giving us permission to enter, and then she was. But, of course, that's the least of what she gave back when the eruption ended... our small writing circle. Still, we were filled with gratitude to be witnesses to the volcano goddess rewriting the story of an island.

Sean is playing the ukulele in the passenger seat and singing something in his long-ago tenor, the one of back then when he still lived on this island and his voice was high like that, and Hawai'i, driving down the Queen K from Waimea towards Kona, looks like a sculpture with distinct edges in shades of brown/red lava, the rough ʻAʻā kind, and the verdant mountains, and turquoise ocean, and if a juxtaposition can wipe you out in its sheer splendor, this one can.

At this moment the Big Island of Hawai'i, the place at the end of the Earth where I somehow landed, is as glorious as anything one could dream up, and I think about a prompt I give, a prompt I repeat so the writers who've heard it before nod, understanding that this prompt will return, like the morning returns if we're lucky, writing under a gnarled tree at 69 Beach where Annie from Portland wrote in what looked like a nest, a story-nest where you can hide with a notebook and pen, giving birth to the story of what it means to write in Hawai'i, on this remote volcanic island.

It returns, if we're lucky... like my boy, here and gone from Hawai'i, and then coming home, that circle of how we live - a push/pull, hello/goodbye thing, and now the island spread out in front of us as we drive down the highway, so sweet in its reminder that we've been here before, we've seen these mountains and this lava, this endless Pacific, and he was a small boy in a faraway place and now an almost 23-year-old with a ukelele singing in a remembered voice, and I try to hold on to this... and to the image of my girl in San Antonio living her fullest life, even in my longing for her to be here today, in Hawai'i, even in knowing that it falls through our reaching hands like the black and green sand of this island, and the harder we try to grab it, the more it slips through because of endings, because of loss, because of loved ones no longer with us, because of our own mortality, grabbing at the endless life in front of us that's not at all endless.

But on this day, my boy plays the ukulele and Hawai'i is a sculpture, and that prompt I give, the one that returns, the one you can start the story with or weave into the story, "In the glorious later..." it's all around me, reminding me that I need only to see, to remember the words of Ram Dass, now lost to us but never really lost because he left a legacy of story, of words we can hold in his books, in that so-familiar purple book on my shelf, "Be Here Now."

Right now.
     
And that's the moment I turn the corner and the lava and the ocean and the memory of whales just a month ago with the writers - the whales that didn't swim down when we approached in their ocean; they stayed with us - and the day I stood at the edge of that same ocean, surrounded by black lava, the smooth pāhoehoe kind, the kind that tells the tale of a volcano, and my boy is home and all this beauty, and the story of what it all meant. The words to say what it meant.

In the glorious later I'm driving down the Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway, on the Big Island of Hawai'i. It's December 29th, 2019 and the island is spread out in front of me like a miracle. Like a gift. And that envisioned paradise of the glorious later is here.

Right now.

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