Our Island’s Journey Around a Star

By Virginia Beck

Miloli‘i sunset. Photo by Léo Azambuja

That first spark of a new day. That first green flash at sunrise is a love letter from the universe reminding us of our beginnings and the good fortune to still be alive at this time. You made it!

Life continues to unfold across our magnificent green island, and our local universe breathes a sigh of relief.

Here you are on Kaua‘i, however you got here, and you are entitled to breathe our tradewinds, scented with salt spray, flowers and mountain greenery, and cleansed during its ocean passage. You can enjoy and love everything you see, especially the people. It is good practice for the rest of our lives.

We are all equally entitled to the day, as a New Year begins here on our small blue planet, slowly tilting as it spins around the star at the center of our island’s journey through the solar system.

After the New Year, relief from long nights and cooler weather is a reassuring promise of a life with more to unfold. We often believe we will know what will happen, a comforting story we tell ourselves. Believing that “sameness” is real, when the events on both global and local scale show us that people and random natural events are not predictable.

Neither are you, unless you want to believe that you have never changed or learned or grown. A new day invites you to enter the dance of your life newly, even if your work hours are the same. Visitor or local resident, you all have the power of your heart’s rhythms, self generated to dance, work and play with great flexibility, even in seemingly locked in daily routines.

Let a vacation be that. A visitor has created a vacancy in their life, an opening to be filled with relaxing, refreshing and renewing activities. Locals can take a few minutes to enjoy the scenery and each other.

Such moments of full awareness are timeless and heal us in a heartbeat. Despite the frustrations of your life, you do it in the most beautiful place in the world, not freezing and suffering with cold and ice, the brutality of northern winters.

At least you are not in Chicago, or Alaska, or Canada anymore. You are here surrounded by a vast ocean and more trees and flowers than you can see in a life time. And the most beautiful people in the world.

Let go of your frantic lifestyle, the addiction to the screens that hide your real world from you. Look into the beauty of the environment, and the eyes that meet yours. See the spark of life, the curiosity of humans wanting to connect, that is aloha, which is love and respect for all life. It is reflected, shining back at you from the faces of those around you. Waiting for you to recognize it and reflect it back in kindness, good will and generous tips if you are dining out.

Virginia Beck

We hope that someday, time and space will free us from routines, reminders that we are alive. Not machines, eternally chained to the tick-tick clock. This is someday. We have our own internal tides, times of growth and fulfillment, or times of turning inward, to heal, or grieve, or contemplate which part of our life needs more attention and love.

Even our work can be an expression of great love, made visible in the world through the quality of what we do. The grace of our interactions with others. Smiles very naturally lift our faces from the mask of ordinary, to the miracle of noticing an extraordinary light, a moment of life, sparking between individuals.

I always try to set matter and affairs in order at the so-called end of a Tick Tock year. But my inner clock moves under a clockless sky, and the more I respect it, the more I receive from the gift of another day.

• Virginia Beck, NP and Certified Trager® Practitioner, offers Wellness Consultation, Trager Psychophysical Integration and teaches Malama Birth Training classes. She can be reached at 635-5618.