On September 8, 2001 — note the date — I was asked to do a reading as part of a program entitled "The Art & Sound of Peace." The line-up for that prescient evening included music, dance and readings. My reading was interspersed with absolutely lovely, peaceful music by a master shakuhachi (Japanese nose flute) player.



Since our theme is celebrating "The Art and Sound of Peace," I'm going to share with you some of the sounds, sights, smells and memories that are my own images of peace:

When I look out my window, I see lush, tropical jungle stretching all the way to the dark blue sea some three miles distant. Beyond the giant, feather-shaped banana leaves, the green and rust-colored leaves of the avocado trees, and the ruffled fingers of the ho'i'o fern whose delicate fiddleheads we blanche and eat, the blue of the ocean lightens and becomes the blue of the sky, and the puffy, brilliantly white fluffs of cloud float silently above. "I never realized you could see the reflections of clouds in the ocean," said an 11-year-old girl, as she stared out that same window. When you look and truly see, as an 11-year-old girl does, you notice that the lighter, hazier, cloud-shaped sections of the ocean exactly match the clouds above.

[Shakuhachi]

The long, straight highway that runs up the coast cuts through that wild jungle of tropical plants and trees, but I don't see the road from my window, and I can't hear the cars whizzing by, because they're hidden somewhere beneath the palms and coconut trees, and guavas and coffees and macadamias, and the mango trees, thick with common mangoes that my grandmother used to turn into tangy, mango chutney every year. I can't see the OLD road from the window, either: the narrow, winding one that meanders slowly along the ocean following the contour of the island -- the one my grandmother walked along as a young girl when she left this same house every morning, heading for the old Pepe'ekeo School. On her way to school, my grandmother used to climb up and walk along the concrete sides of the bridges. "Imagine!" she told me when she was 85. She shuddered as she looked at those same concrete walls suspended high above the river and boulders, and I imagine she was remembering the fearless young girl she'd been, protected by her innocence. I love knowing that my grandmother did this when she strolled to school in the early mornings, at peace with her world.

[Shakuhachi]

I can't smell the salt of the ocean, we're too high up the mountain for that. But I smell the mixed fragrance of overripe fruit that's fallen and of sweet flowers, and sometimes through my window I can smell the heavy, damp, clean smell that promises rain is coming. When the rain falls, it strikes the green tin roof and makes a satisfying, steady, comforting sound, and sometimes it gets louder and louder until it becomes the only rhythm we hear, drowning out the slack key music that's playing. When that happens, we relax and listen to the rain, instead.

The rain nourishes the bright, colorful flowers I see everywhere outside my window, which were planted by my grandmother and my great-grandmother. There are fresh white gardenias that my great-grandmother picked to make fat, fragrant leis when it was a birthday. My grandmother taught me to pick white and yellow ginger blooms early in the morning, before they open up. When I was young, she sat me on the living room floor, ti leaves arranged in front of us, and taught me to calmly string the still-closed ginger flowers into beautiful, sweet-smelling leis of aloha that blossom as the day goes on.