MAP QUEST

I've landed on an island and been magically transported to never-never-never-land, but I need to know: where in the hell am i? -- geographically -- in space -- on this planet earth.
As I recall, at the time, Kutira was kind of proud of the fact that google didn't have them placed right on the map: I think the Maui Retreat was actually in the ocean when you looked at google maps in 2010. Even this week, searching a property near Hana, the google earth map was so black and dark I thought it must have been photographed at night.
And I thought: GOOD, if I go there, they'll never find me!
But my need-to-know personality led to the acquisition of 5 maps when I was in Maui, each revealing another hidden layer of the truth of the place.
The first one was the for-tourists map. You can pick it up at the check-out in Walmart in Kahului while you're buying your cheap souvenirs--or any place that wants to keep you on track with where they want you to go. They tell you how to get to a place quickly, buy stuff and get back to your hotel on the dry-side (west Maui), where all the haole-tourists go at night while we're up in the jungle under star-and-moonlight, ringed round a fire, playing drums. Good, they'll never find us: this is KAPU - STAY OUT! They would never drive off the Hana Highway at night, in the dark, down a dirt and gravel road, over a plank bridge. GOOD. STAY OUT of our paradise!
But I had to know more: I needed facts, spatial facts, lines that related to the roads I already knew. Not just names with so many vowels in them and the same consonants over and over: K, H, N, L, that you got dizzy trying to understand the Hawaiian language with your English toolbox. (The language was never written down until the haole-missionaries came and did so. After all, if you can pilot an over-sized canoe thousands of miles by celestial navigation bringing animals and plants with you, your need for a paper map or a written language pales in comparison to that achievement.)
I knew there were many more roads and places with actual names than appeared on the for-tourists map, so when we went on our whale-watching excursion, feeling flush with the fact that I could afford to pay for it, I sprung for a paid-for map, Franko's Maui Guide Map (http://www.frankosmaps.com/). It had a lot of "facts" on it. I was impressed that it even mentioned Huelo as a place and I remember it highlighting the historic church on Doors of Faith Road (a favorite-name place) although I can't be sure since my copy has a mouse-eaten Oahu-shaped cutout where that "fact" used to be. But it still, basically, showed only the main highways to lead the tourists to certain places and then quickly back to Lahaina for cocktails, dinner and whatever they do in their hotel rooms at night (probably pretty much what they do at home on the mainland: watch TV, argue and fuck).
The next map I picked up was what I call the "Oprah Map"--because it had a picture of Oprah on the back with a company who does a helicopter fly-over tour. I don't think it had much more information than the usual "off-the-beaten-path" places like the Lavendar Farm (http://www.aliikulalavender.com/) and Tedeschi Winery (http://www.mauiwine.com/). Of course, everyone on Maui knows Oprah has land there but exactly where....that's not on the Oprah Map! According to a recent conversation with my friend Jon on Maui Oprah had her own road put in between Kula and Kihei, but it's gated and private (like many such on Maui), so all the poor regular folk have to spend a lot of gas driving the long way round because of the ownership of large tracts of land by a few individuals or corporations. (I wonder if she bothers to have the driver pump bio-diesel (now available in Paia and Kahului thanks to Pacific Biodiesel.)  (www.biodiesel.com).
Finally, as I got in deeper and explored on my own further I found my last two maps: the wayfinding tools I was seeking to help me find the truth of the place: past, present and future. Maps, though of place, also tell us about time: history is always and everywhere under your feet along your path. These two maps tell you the story of two Mauis: one is for seekers like myself who want to know and share and the other is for acquirers who only care to buy and sell.
My MAUI VISITORS ATLAS (An educational reference guide to the Valley Island of Maui) (mailto:envd@hawaii.rr.com)  is a wonderful laminated treasure: on one side are four different maps: one for Climate (Maui has so many different weathers at the same time a short distance apart), one for Geology, one with the meaning of all the wonderful place names (Lahaina-"cruel sun", Hana-"rainy land") and the most wonderful to me, the Archeology Map, with sacred fishponds, holy heiaus, sites of former sugar mills, shipwrecks and petroglyphs--and most important of all, the ancient land divisions, the ahupua'a, an amazing early true human understanding of the need to live in a complete ecosystem.
The final map I acquired was a book with many pages, bought in Borders or Barnes and Noble, probably in the last 2 weeks I was there and probably also never used although I intended to. It's what I call The Realtor's Map. At last, I had in my hands the type of map I was used to owning in New Jersey to navigate my way around these dense overpopulated counties in which I must work. But in Maui--and on this map--there was still undeveloped space, yet this map-book was full of keys, clues, indicators. There were roads with gates that were private and not accessible (to tourists or locals), lots of dead ends and blind alleys as it were. And there were all kinds of places with names (and apparent intentions) that did not yet even exist: lots of developable real estate, ripe and ready for those with the funds, the will and this map to transform my magic mental Maui filled with sacred sites and natural land divisions into something that can be owned, gated, walled, sewaged and maybe barely lived in. Well, not lived in at all, even if occupied.
Maybe that is the message in my Maui map quest. You really know where you are if you just look up at the sky, stand firm on the earth, feel the wind and the sun and the rain on your skin. Do you really need a map to know where you are right now? The illusion of ownership of land is probably the first evil and upheaval that has ruined, ravaged and wrecked the planet. If we really understood the need for sharing, if we tried to live together in a mutually beneficial ecosystem like the ahupua'a, we could draw maps with sticks in the earth and look to the stars for direction. Instead we stay small thinking we are big and never really knowing where we are at all.

MAUI SUNRISE

6:10 a.m., late winter, 2010
The moon is a little fingernail in the eastern sky. I map the constellation overhead, a descending zigzag of blurry stars. The horizon below, framed by two palms and a row of christmas berry trees, is flat and horizontal, a zen line. The sky is layered like ice cream, deep dusky blue for the ocean layer, fluffy light blue filling. Above, lava black clouds. I await.
It's cold. I'm shivering. This is winter, after all. I go get a blanket.
Orange creamsicle ice cream is now spread out--"ono-licious!"--behind the lava clouds which have now become the same dusky purple as the ocean below, but with white primer mixed in so that's it's chalky. The shape of the middle cloud is like an Asian hut with a roof: a yurt. One solitary bird flies. Then the clouds start to separate from the sea--a thin line of mixed mango and chalky blue dust. The clear horizontal line of the ocean is constant, a constance, a permanence that gives the grounding peace that only horizontal lines can.
Now the ocean's texture begins to be visible. Blue frog-back. The moon sliver remains in the same place, but the stars are all gone, replaced by a Renaissance-blue sky with puffs of slow but steadily moving clouds, white with gray rouge. Now the lower horizon below is brighter, but all forms keep their places. Pale old yellow, a wash of Chinese sky-silk. A thin veil of soft sheer palest grey is held gently across the whole horizon: a band of sheer Indian silk chiffon held taut against the sky masking the clouds behind. Below the still blue sea. The central charcoal hut-cloud never leaves me. The Renaissance-painting clouds that passed below the moon sliver are now gone. The scene lightens, but so gradually, like a computer screen image that has slightly less power.
It feels fresh and old at the same time. Like me.
I have water and sky, air and wind. I have everything I need.
6:41 a.m. Now it's clear and light enough out that other people will be getting up. Now I'll have to work.
I look at the Chinese cloud-hut: it's still there but now it has windows. Wherever I go, there I'll be. Wherever I am, I am home on this earth. I have my hut. I have my sky-hut.

UPDATE & FLASHBACK, June, 2011

I left Kutira's Kamp on March 15, 2010 & returned home to New Jersey. I was emaciated & undernourished & weighed in at about 113 lbs. But I was ecstatic about my adventure & what I had felt, seen, experienced & fallen in love with in Maui. One month later, my high crashed & then I struggled along hoping to return to paradise. My plan was to work on a Bamboo Farm in Hana the next winter, however, fate intervened and on October 22nd, my 60th birthday, sometime after 1 a.m. as I slumbered from my birthday meal of food & wine, the windows of my 2nd floor office blew out, shattering from the heat of an electrical fire that started in the ceiling below & quickly flew up the balloon-frame of my old wooden Victorian house, engulfing the entire area in black smoke. I was unconscious & unaware of what was happening. But, by a twist of fate, a young off-duty firefighter was in his 3rd floor apartment down the street & heard the glass breaking. Looking out, he saw the flames & ran down the street, calling the alert to the fire station. He kicked my locked gate in, ran up on the porch & into the house. He determined there was no one downstairs & heard a sound upstairs. Crawling under the smoke, he pulled me out, wrapping me in a red quilt. I woke up on a guerney at East Orange General sometime after 3 a.m. I had that red quilt (& still do), but little else remained.

INTO THE LAND OF OZ

You stand on top of a mountain and an owner of the land, Raphael, spins a fable about Avatar and the Wizard of Oz--and he's the Scarecrow. You look at him and go "He is the Scarecrow." That's when you know you're Not in Kansas anymore. Here in the Land of Oz the Puff the Magic Dragon generation got off the boat from the Mainland in 1969 and they never went home.
I'm here in Maui for three months as a "woofer", short for "Willing Workers on Organic Farms" (http://www.wwoof.org/) but how willing & how workin', well, that can vary from place to place. My particular location is a "spiritual retreat" (http://www.mauiretreat.com/) and with the strong-willed female owner, Kutira, a work day might as likely be spent moving an array of goddess figurines from garden to garden as planting seeds of flowers that may sprout & then keel over in the first big wind from the ocean or get nibbled by the adopted pre-domesticated stray duck.
So I begin this blog to tell the tale of a Woodstock Generation-era hippie who did NOT stay on the commune but lived among the Others for 40 years and now returns to the wilderness to explore the new FUTURE PRIMITIVE (a term I gratefully steal from Ben, a new local supplier of organic gardening products in nearby Haiku (www.ecoislandsupply.com).
Come along with me and travel the yellow brick road...