December is the time of year that I play the spring is coming-and-I am-waiting-game. I accept that cold is a reality (well fifty-ish degrees cold) and that the color brown dominates the outdoors. I do love the brown. It can highlight and hide signs of winter life: the annual grasses sprouting, the leaf fall covering the soil that when you dig through, reveal the not yet green sprouts of bulbs and seed leaves. And for the perennial plants who struggled to survive the fall heatwaves. You can almost see their gratitude for the moisture and cool temperatures of this time of the year. Until the frost sweeps through. Will they make it? Are their roots hardy enough? Is this part of their lifecycle? I am reminded of Emily’s poem:

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play —
In accidental power —
The blonde Assassin passes on —
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God.

For complicated COVID reasons, in mid-December, my family and I took a vacation to the Big Island of Hawaii for 11 days. It’s complicated because we (like everyone else) wanted to escape what is a horrible time for everyone. No, we are not ‘all in the same boat.’ We are not doing the same things at this time. Wearing a double mask and teaching outdoors in a disaster zone tent six hours a day 5 days a week since September in the cold, wind, rain, hot, dust, with tweens, are you? As if all things COVID are equal. They’re not. I needed a light at the end of the tunnel and in a series of self-protective acts, I accepted the opportunity to escape. I fiercely went after the guidelines set by the state of Hawaii (desperate for tourism). I jumped the hoops and barrels and came through on the other side. I risked getting COVID to have a break in a place that is far from fifty-ish degrees and brown. Yes. I would have taken daily enemas to be here. Hawaii only requires we come to the island COVID free, stay masked and 6-feet apart, and remain COVID free. I will do that.

On the Kona side, the South Kohala coast, I am in one of my favorite places on my small earth. Being here feels like my ancestral compass, calibrated somewhere in Africa, gets activated. I feel drawn to walk in the lava fields, that dry moon-scape-that surrounds our resort. I want to walk for miles alone for no reason. Like a balm of Gilead to pandemic dystopia.

The Crotons, Dracenas, and Bromeliads are not carefully placed in the lava fields and tended by local workers to appear natural. There is crushed lava rock, neatly lining the roads that border the fields of lava cooled over from two centuries ago. But just on the edges. The rest is unmanaged and only changed by time.

Someday, after the pandemic apocalypse, I am going to leave for this kind of space. Take off on a desert moonscape. I don’t mind wearing masks and distancing. I don’t mind the forced acts. (Hey, dumbass. You ARE the worst if you think that your liberties are being infringed. Be human gov’ner. Care for your neighbor for they might care for you.) Some of these performances are intimate and tell me to believe in something without evidence of things seen or known. I think of Hanuman in the Ramayana. Coming to the rescue.

You are as powerful as the wind;

You are intelligent, illustrious and an inventor.

There is nothing in this world that’s too difficult for you;

Whenever stuck, you are the one who can help.

~Jambavantha, the King of Beaqrs, self affirmation to Hanuman in the Ramayana

What do I want (or need)? Is it a place where the pleasure of my company or the words of my conversation are deeply understood, respected and known? Maybe in this moonscape island far far away is just that place to measure off another day, alive, sun-kissed, and well.