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Sunday notes and freewrite
Well, its 10:30 and lloyd aint on so i figured id just flip in case some sort of an emergency happened and lloyd wasnt able to flip his weblog (he'd go postal if somethin happened to his steak, im sure)... Lloyd, just delete this and write somethin over it for sunday's entry--5000
An emergency, Trev? Like what, being snacked on by a shark? *chuckle* seriously though, one of the more intriguing reefs that I intend to vigorously and thoroughly get familiar with, Olowalu Reef, had a serious shark attack just this October. While traffic fatalities on Maui are more common by many orders of magnitude, shark attacks are, of course, much more dramatic and newsworthy, with the hapless victims memorialized on the front pages of The Maui News and the gruesome details of their demise recorded for posterity.
Therefore, I'm re-thinking my strategy for remaining on the reef for hours... which was to use a boogie board for a portable flotation device. I think I should go look for a good used kayak instead. Viewed from underwater, the profile of a boogie board with human appendages looks very much like one of the tiger shark's favorite delicacies: a green sea turtle. So yes, losing an arm or a leg (or worse) to Dah Braddah in da Grey Suit (local Hawaiian humor) would constitute an emergency, Trev. And chances are, I'd miss flipping my weblog if that happened, haha. But grounds for going postal? I think not. I wouldn't even go postal on the shark, which in my view would just be doing a thing in complete accord with its shark-nature... and in fact it would be me infringing on its turf. And in any case, I have not one but two 'insurance policies' in the event of my untimely absence from this space.
Not that I was out snorkeling or diving today, which I wasn't, but that's another thing entirely. I just wanted to unnecessarily provoke the imaginations of readers here and leave you with a glimpse of my life here, which embraces a greater possibility of death and dying than the comparatively tame life I lead in Berkeley. ;-)
 The notion is not accidental. I have been thinking of issues having to do with mortality, recently. Not out of a sense of the morbid, but just because the breathtaking geographical panorama of life here invokes it in me. Every single day here in Maui, here in Hawaii, is so staggeringly beautiful. I'm not being perverse and saying this knowing that most of you reading this live in colder, wintry latitudes; I'm just stating a fact. It is so easy, though, to take such physical splendour so much for granted. Those who live here year-round tend to do so. An exception that proves the rule are my family members, who are nomadic and thus more observant of what's around, and hence keenly appreciative.
At the heart of this appreciation is the wonder of being simply alive and, ironically, it is also then an acceptance of death and mortality. That is, of the brevity of life itself.
My family always thought I took unnecessary risks, while going on one adventure or another, when I used to live here in Hawaii or when I came home for the Christmas or summer vacations during my undergrad years at Berkeley. I often went by myself on long runs or weeklong hikes through the wilderness of whatever island struck my fancy then. Hiking alone is, for the most part inadvisable, for fairly obvious reasons; but for me those experiences were also a kind of test of my fortitude and stamina, and of a clarity of a certain kind of vision.
As I will be left to myself this December, with most of the family going to our clan reunion in the Philippines (why I am not going is another story for another weblog), I am feeling those odd pangs again, of testing my (now older) self against what is out there. Those who know me know I'm not a daredevil, though, and am reasonably careful when planning an excursion to the wilderness. And yet the intrepid soul in me insists that without a quantum of risk, an adventure ceases to be one. So, watch this space for detail, in the weeks to come.
[ above photograph: enjoying one of the last sunsets from our upcountry home... 75 Hoopalua, Pukalani. taken around 5:30 p.m., yesterday. click on it to enlarge. ]
In other news, I was finally able to do a weblog sweep of the long weekend's writings, and though the effort was uncharacteristically hurried, I did note the following weblogs on the things you are thankful for, germane to last week's holiday... (apologies to any I missed, and no it's not too late to join the list either ^_^):
 Talkback...
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Oct
Dec
{ net.casting }
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