Daily writing prompt

What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

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It’s astonishing to realize that a year and a half has passed
since we found our way back home to Hawai‘i—
and exactly one year on Thanksgiving
since we stepped into this new old plantation house.
Long enough for the land to greet us again.
Long enough for us to answer back,
a quiet echo of that day devoted to remembering blessings.

The house itself carries its own history:
once perched down by the ocean, then moved uphill
by the sugar plantation in the mid-twentieth century—
one of the few gracious things that the plantation industry did.
Homes were sold to workers for five or ten dollars
and hauled to three small clusters of dwellings:
one lining the main highway, and two set along the quiet roads
running mauka to makai—mountainward to seaward—
as so much of life sensibly flows here.

We’ve lived in this community for twenty years now.
We’ve learned the difference a few hundred feet can make—
first at 300 feet elevation, twice,
and now at 800, where the air shifts
in a way you can feel in your bones.
Where the trades pour in from 2,500 miles of open ocean,
cooling the days, scrubbing the sky clean,
filling the lungs with something that feels like grace.
Only rarely does vog drift in from the volcano,
when the winds forget themselves and turn Kona.
Mostly, the air is pure enough to feel like medicine.

To think we nearly left all this—
to imagine exchanging this moist, generous climate
for the high desert of northern New Mexico—
was not error, but guidance.
We followed it faithfully,
lived four good years among raptors and the wild animals
we had long missed on the islands.
But in the end, the land itself revealed the truth:
it was not our home.
Not in the bone-deep way that matters.

Coming home deserves its own chapter.
I’ve written toward it all year because it continues
to open inside me. Some people are travelers.
Chris and I are not. Not anymore.
This past year made that plain:
the world grew stranger, noisier, more distressed,
and paradise—this particular one—offered a steadiness
we could not do without.

People arrive imagining they can simply
step into Hawai‘i without stepping into its culture.
But the winter rains come,
and come again.
Folks born and raised here resist change,
and we, after two decades, understand the why
even more fully than we did at the start—
though we saw it clearly then, too.
Local memory is selective:
the brutal plantation labor fades,
while the stories that remain are of music, laughter,
and the joy of pau hana at day’s end.
It’s a resilient optimism,
and one that has been good for both Chris and me.

If you want positive events in your life here?
Reciprocate.
Soften.
Slow down.
Fill the gaps instead of widening them.
Don’t manufacture disturbances where none existed
before you arrived on these blessed shores.
Live Aloha—not as a slogan, but as breath,
as the daily practice of belonging.

And that, for me, is the greatest blessing of this year:
coming home not just as a place,
but as a way of living that keeps teaching us
how to be here, how to be human,
how to be grateful for the life that fits.

Dipped in the ocean upon our return ~ bj