When you can’t do what you want, do what you can. All of these are ways we can help each other to survive times of trial and tribulation.
Hawaiians have a saying: “In the word, is life; in the word, is death.” As a poet and a writer, I believe in the power of words. It’s a part of the nature of the scribblers in the world, that. We believe our words make a difference. No, I lie. Real writers and poets believe we are magicians who remake the world. When all is said and done, it seems to me, all of us humans are little more than…
Very often it is the little things that make a big difference in lives that are lived on the edge. In poorer parts of a city, where people’s homes often do not have access to reliable electrical service and where windows that let in light might be a bad idea in terms of home security, people either spend a lot of time outside their unlighted homes or use open fires, candles or oil lamps as light sources. These can be…
The Light of My Life likes to tell a story about how he learned one of the most important lessons an artist can learn about doing line-work well. In the village of Masset in Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia), Mathew happened to wander into the studio of a local artist, Wayne Edenshaw, who works in the Haida Indian traditional style. In case you’ve never seen Haida art, here’s a short YouTube teaching video, “Haida Art!!,” uploaded…
“Sanctuary” is a word derived from the Latin, “sanctarium,” which means “a container that keeps a cherished or sacred thing safe.” The word, as used by the Greco-Romans referred to places of holiness or safety. Even though the word is often traced only as far as the Greek and Roman empires and their temples, the concept of a place of refuge is universal. It appears in almost all of the cultural and spiritual traditions from all over the world and…
Nipun Mehta walks his talk. He’s been doing it for over 20 years now and his walk has been highly successful at helping other people walk theirs. Mehta was a UC Berkeley computer nerd and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who witnessed and participated in the peak of the DotCom madness. By the time he was in his third year at UC Berkeley, he was at Sun Microsystems doing work that gave him what he says was more money than he…
And now…we interrupt our regular post-building for an important public service announcement: As Hawaii trudges through the COVID-19 pandemic, PBS Hawaiʻi is reaching into our vast video archive to share pearls of wisdom about living with and getting past adversity. This campaign features brief but potent manaʻo online, on social media and on-air between regular programming. The non-profit, statewide television station, with support from the Kamehameha Schools, are building what they are calling “a community resilience program.” They are calling…
In the spring of 2020, world paradigms changed. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that the Novel Coronavirus Disease, Covid-19, was a pandemic. This came after China reported in December, 2019 that there had been more than one instance of a weird life-threatening respiratory illness in Wuhan, the capital and major industrial and commercial center in Hubei province. The health-care professionals at WHO watched how the new disease spread and the effects it had on…
So, I’m sitting there grousing about how dizzy I’m making myself trying to get a handle on the paradoxical concept of “Surrender”. The Light of My Life does his Mysterious Mystic grin and tells me, “Surrender is the seed of beginning to see that you are the source of your world. IF YOU ARE FIGHTING AGAINST YOURSELF, YOU LOSE.” My jaw dropped. He retells one of my favorite stories, about the time when he was a youngster living in a…
It is heartening for me to see the world-wide burgeoning of another sort of rebellion against the very real effects of the post-modern aftermath of our narcissistic phase of dominion and domination over nature, where we humans felt entitled to willy-nilly pave over the world and dump our stuff all over the place to make yet another ugly. They call it “guerilla gardening” and it continues to expand all over the globe.
Consistently over the years, assorted research has shown that job dissatisfaction is a problem for about two-thirds of the people in America. This “disengagement” has wide-ranging effects. Gallup tells us that this job irritant issue has cost as much as $350 billion a year in “lost productivity.” (It can also suck a soul dry, and turn your life into a desert, but nobody scientific ever mentions that.)