You can’t remain asleep
in the presence of something you genuinely
recognize as beautiful.
Beauty enlarges us, and that can be uncomfortable
for some people.
Discomfort has a way of stripping away
our best-laid defenses.
And if we’re attached to our armor,
very little will convince us to set it down.
This may be more true than I would like to believe.
Over the years, I’ve taken friends to some of the most exquisite places
in every part of the world I’ve called home.
Once, two friends from Asia came to visit.
He was a Daoist elder.
She was his new wife, a young woman accustomed to city life.
I hadn’t realized how brave it was of them
to travel so far,
to our small town,
our small plantation home,
on an island in the middle of the Pacific.
They slept through the night,
while overhead, stars blazed across a seemingly endless sky.
But for all they knew,
there was nothing remarkable enough
to warrant stepping outside.
The house was familiar enough.
The darkness beyond it, perhaps not.
Morning came, and he asked,
as he was the one who spoke English,
if I could direct them to The City.
I offered to do one better.
Though they had their own rental car,
I would take them myself.
We arrived on Aliʻi Drive,
a place I’d scarcely visited,
never to stroll, to shop, or to eat.
To me, it was rather like visiting a carnival.
Where would you like to go first? I asked.
Oh, they were happy just walking.
No destination in mind.
No particular desire to shop.
They simply wanted to be among the throngs of people
I do my level best to avoid,
here and everywhere else.
I finally asked him why.
He explained that his wife
just wanted to feel something familiar
in this strange, exotic place.
And there it was.
What I had hoped to share with them
was precisely what she needed to escape.
The quiet. The darkness.
The extravagant indifference of a sky
that had no need of our attention.
She wanted people, pavement,
the reassuring bustle of commerce.
A world she knew how to inhabit.
I couldn’t fault her for wanting that.
But I wondered how often we travel
to the ends of the earth
only to search for what we’ve left behind.
How much beauty passes before our eyes
while we are busy looking
for something we already know?