Aloha

There is such a wealth of expression in that word that many people overlook - it's the first word I hear when I step off the plane after a grueling 9 hour non-stop flight, just after the soft air perfumed with that indefinable something that welcomes me with open arms back to my home-away-from-home. It's last word I hear when the cabin door shuts and I see the tiny cluster of lights below the wing growing fainter & blurred as some unknown grief at being torn away once again wells in me & stings my eyes with unshed tears.

Sure we all know it's that cutesy word that means both hello and goodbye in the Hawaiian language; if you're a linguist, you'll break down the phonetics into Alo meaning "presence",and ha, meaning "breath of life"; using the Hawaiian language grammatical rules, it will translate literally as "The joyful sharing of life energy in the present" or simply "Joyfully sharing life".

Nice, huh? Especially from a stranger smiling at you at the airport gate or behind the hotel bar at the plush resort? Or as you hand your debit card over at the friendly little ABC store to purchase your tourist gifts for all your acquaintances back home?

I think I'm trying say something deeper here, something I found in that little string of Islands in the Pacific that I didn't expect to find at all.  Like most things, it seems there's layers of meaning, like an onion with layer upon layer of crisp pungent flesh, or a lotus bud, the hundreds of soft spikes imbued with the sparkling translucence of living cells as they unfold. Maybe I'm trying to express something more profound, more akin to taking in a breath of the present moment and blowing it out; after so many years of non-expression, I want to make something come to life, and maybe, just maybe, if I put it out there, say it out loud, it will come to life.

The Hawaiians say aloha is not just a greeting, its a way of life, the recognition of the spirit within each other, the way of giving without thought of return, never leaving the giver, but flowing freely and continuously between giver and receiver.  The word could not be thoughtlessly or indiscriminately spoken, for it carried its own power; it cannot be spoken unless you feel it in your own heart.

That's what keeps me coming back time and time again; that's what keeps me sane  in a lifestyle that seems total insanity somedays; I keep listening to that quietly welcoming ring, whether it is from the lips of the most beautiful man I'll ever see in my life at Magic Sands who accepted my blushing offer to tend his bleeding foot, glimpsed in the face of a Kona cherry blossom of a girl who merrily told me watching her little brother play with the lizard in the coffee bush made her feel old, or in the smile of the ex-surfer who walks with a limp who challenged me to find the hidden Hawaii on my one-and-only circle island tour.

That might be more like it - expressing the hidden meaning of a greeting, bringing an intent to life, giving something I feel that I don't feel anywhere else on Earth, a lovely transient moment of life, all wrapped up in a single breath and three liquid syllables and a chime of recognition in the heart. 

Aloha.