FINDING THE PEARLS FROM MAUI IN DAY-TO-DAY EXPERIENCE
Over the span of eleven years I visited my brother and his family in Maui on three occasions. Each time I returned home with what I called “A pearl of wisdom,” – something I really needed to know at that particular juncture in my life. The year was 1980 and my husband and I were at a plateau in our life. Three of our children were still at home and our business was doing well. We had accumulated enough funds to warrant a first trip to see my family in Hawaii. It was a glorious ten-day jaunt and we fell in love with the Islands. One day on the beach, I lay sun-bathing and watching the waves roll over the sand and recede again.
To my surprise, the sand constantly shifted and was reshaped beneath the impact of each wave. Suddenly the obvious dawned on me, “Everything changes. Only change is constant!” Pearl Number One discovered! I brought that pearl home and examined it many times in the months that followed. Those months brought profound changes: a severe financial recession; two grandchildren born to single mothers in our family; and a move from a home we cherished and hoped to occupy the rest of our lives. Many a night I clung to my “Everything changes” pearl, and its luminous wisdom comforted me.
Three years later I had been assigned to teach sixty-three kindergarteners a day. By Christmastime I was “burned out” and just needed to lie on a beach and “unwind.” My teenage son and I flew out of a snowstorm in the East to the sunny climes of Maui.
Over two weeks, I walked long hours alone exploring rocky coves, and sun-bathed long afternoons. The hours and days seemed to expand in time as I made my way through them. I made fudge with the ancient grandmother who presided over my brother’s household. I breathed in the unparalleled beauty that is the unpopulated eastern end of Maui. And I remembered a saying I had once seen inscribed on a wall in Yosemite: “Breathtaking beauty heals!” It was true! Two weeks of immersing myself in the breathtaking beauty that is Maui had drained me of anxiety and fatigue. Pearl Number Two lay at my feet.
Fast forward to 1991. Two years before that I had found a lump in my breast, had surgery followed by radiation treatment, and was rebounding when unexplained pains pointed to a recurrence of the cancer. My husband and I and our two young-twenties offspring headed west to Maui for perhaps “one last look” at a place I had come to treasure and to be with a family I dearly loved.
Again it was Christmastime, and Christmas morning four generations of my brother’s family gathered for laughter and the opening of many presents. Pearl Number Three unfolded before me. I thought, “Life goes on,” and whether I’ll be here to witness it, I don’t know. But deep in my heart, I was reassured, “Life would continue. The history of our family would go far into the future.”
Through the ensuing years I have held and looked at the “Maui pearls” whenever I have needed to steady the out-of-balance parts of my life. “Everything changes.” After twenty-five years living in the East, for health reasons, we moved back to California eleven years ago. Two other unanticipated but necessary moves to new homes have taken place during those eleven years.
“Breathtaking beauty heals.” The gorgeous high San Gabriel Mountains that look down on my Altadena home are bathed in the last rays of each day’s sun. To look at all that rosy golden light is to soothe my soul, no matter what my day has been like. To gaze at the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that graces the center of our apartment complex reassures me daily that “Life goes on.” The mountains and the tree will survive our eventual deaths and their beauty will bless many. That’s comforting to know!
We just celebrated our forty-fourth wedding anniversary. And now we know what Alfred Lord Tennyson meant in his dauntless poem, Ulysses:
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
“Everything changes.”
“Breathtaking beauty heals.”
“Life goes on.”
Blessedly two years ago one of our sons gave us the gift of a return visit to Maui. Though we were there for only two days, we reconnected with family, visited the top of Mt. Haleakala and saw sites on Maui not seen before, like the “Needle” in Iao Canyon. The pearls were re-discovered!
The beauties of Maui, a brilliant California sun, a cloudless blue sky, the rugged rocky mountains, an ancient tree--all these will survive my certain death someday, my eventual departure from the earth. But somehow, knowing all these manifestations will persist, will outlive me -- I find that recognition very comforting. It has meaningfulness for me, so that looking at my own predictable demise in the face, -- not dwelling on it, but being aware of it, -- I can carry on until my final exit takes place. Poet Robert Frost sums up this abiding awareness so well:
“We may take something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.”
Dear reader, I cannot name nor find for you the specific pearls of wisdom that you need to hold onto. That is your life’s task, and only you can undertake it. But, in doing so, it is well for you to remember how pearls are created in nature: somehow an irritating grain of sand slips between the shell halves that hold the meat of an oyster. What does the oyster do? It responds to the irritant by overlaying it with something beautiful, something luminous and glorious to behold: a smooth pearl takes its own unique shape, and waits to be found! It becomes the “pearl of great price,” for which you may have paid by bitter experience, but once you have split open your experience, there it lies at hand for you to treasure. Happy searching for your own priceless pearls!
HomePage C.A.'s Essays The Kennys Related Links Archives