Valley of Enchantment
Recognizing Divine Will at Work
For those of us who pay attention to such things, and even those who weren’t, the eclipse less than two day ago was intense! In traditional lore eclispes are interpreted as harbingers of malefic events, and the more visible the eclipse the greater the effect will be. In Hawaii the sun opposed the moon exactly at 12:59am, pretty much directly overhead, and although I didn’t stay up to observe it (day job) I was jolted awake at 1:02am and had a difficult time going back to sleep.
We will see exactly how that plays out, but for a preview you can get access to regular political mundane ingress chart interpretations here in exchange for a small donation. Judging by the results of the American mid-term elections yesterday it would appear the Archdruid’s prediction of a stalemate until 2024 was pretty spot on so far.
While it’s difficult to understand why the gods would favor the Science Worshippers who mocked our sincerely held religious beliefs and turned many of us into second class citizens, maybe it’s a good time to explore the possibility that as humans we simply aren’t qualified to run the universe. When the neighbor crosses the property line and cuts down your favorite ulu tree (oopsie!) maybe it was time to plant a garden with the newly available sunlight.
In that spirit I’d like to share some words by Samuel Clemens (that’s Mark Twain for the search bots) who visited our neighborhood back in 1866. Of course when he toured the valley there were no monster homes, invasive vegitation, or giant lifted pickup trucks with train horns and mud terrain tires roaring down the Likelike. While those things can definitely distract from the natural beauty, I’d say that the underlying spirit he described is still present and holding on for dear life despite all the conformist pressure that asphalt and concrete has exerted upon it.
Maybe the paradise he described was changed to our present form for a reason, to show us what happens when “The World Is Too Much With Us” and we forget where we came from and why we are here. But then could it also be that’s why the divine presence holds fast in the back of some valleys that were never fully conquered, waiting for us to see the error of our ways and return with renewed and much deeper appreciation?
All citizens talk about the (Pali); all strangers visit it the first thing; all scribblers write about it-but nobody talks or writes about or visits the (Pali’s) charming neighbor, the Kalihi Valley. I think it was a fortunate accident that led me to stumble on this enchanted ground.
ANOTHER PARADISE
For a mile or two we followed a trail that branched off from the terminus of the turnpike that leads past the government prison, and bending close around the rocky point of a foothill, we found ourselves fairly in che valley, and the panorama began to move. After a while the trail took the course of a brook that came down the center of the narrowing canyon, and followed it faithfully throughout its eccentric windings. On either side the ground rose gradually for a short distance, and then came the mountain barriers- densely wooded precipices on the right and left, that towered hundreds of feet above us, and up which one might climb about as easily as he could climb up the side of a house.
It was a novel sort of scenery, those mountain walls. Face around and look straight across at one of them, and sometimes it presented a bold, square front, with small inclination out of the perpendicular; move on a little and look back, and it was full of sharp ridges, bright with sunlight, and with deep, shady clefts between; and what had before seemed a smooth boulder, set in among the chick shrubbery on the face of the wall, was now a bare rampart of stone that projected far out from the mass of green foliage, and was as sharply defined against the sky as if it had been built of solid masonry by the hand of man. Ahead the mountains looked portly swollen, if you please- and were marked all over, up and down, diagonally and crosswise, by sharp ribs that reminded one of the fantastic ridges which the wind builds of the drifting snow on a plain. Sometimes these ridges were drawn all about the upper quarter of a mountain, checking it off in velvety green squares and diamonds and triangles, some beaming with sunlight and others softly shaded--the whole upper part of the mountain looking something like a vast green veil thrown over some object that had a good many edges and corners to it--then a sort of irregular "eaves" all around, and from this the main body of the mountain swept down, with a slight outward curve, to the valley below. All over these highlands the forest trees grew so thickly that, even close at hand, they seemed like solid banks of foliage. These trees were principally of two kinds -the koa and the kukui-the one with a very light green leaf and the other with a dark green. Occasionally there were broad alternate belts of each extending diagonally from the mountain's bases to their summits, and here and there, in the midst of the dark green, were great patches of the bright light-colored leaves, so that, to look far down the valley, along the undulating front of the barrier of peaks, the effect was as if the sun were streaming down upon it through breaks and rifts in the clouds, lighting up belts at intervals all along, and leaving those intervening darkened by the shadows of the clouds; and yet there was not a shred of a cloud in the whole firmament! It was very soft, and dreamy, and beautiful. And following down the two tall ridges that walled the valley in, we saw them terminate at last in two bold, black headlands that came together like a V, and across this gate ran a narrow zone of the most brilliant light green tint (the shoal water of the distant sea, between reef and shore), and beyond this the somber blue of the deeper water stretched away to the horizon. The varied picture of the lights and shadows on the wooded mountains, the strong, dark outlines of the gate, and the bright green water and the belt of blue beyond, was one replete with charming contrasts and beautiful effects--a revelation of fairyland itself.
The mountain stream beside us, brawling over its rocky bed, leaped over a miniature precipice occasionally, and then reposed for a season in a limpid pool at her base, reflecting the dank and dripping vines and ferns that clung to the wall and protruded in bunches and festoons through breaks in the sparkling cascade. On the gentle rising ground about us were shady groves of forest trees--the kou, the koa, the breadfruit, the lau hala, the orange, lime, kukui, and many others; and, handsomest of all, the ohia, with its feathery tufts of splendid vermilion-tinted blossoms, a coloring so vivid as to be almost painful to the eye. Large tracts were covered with large hau (how) bushes, whose sheltering foliage is so thick as to be almost impervious to rain. It is spotted all over with a rich yellow flower, shaped something like a teacup, and sometimes it is further embellished by innumerable white bell-shaped blossoms, that grow upon a running vine with a name unknown to me. Here and there were wide crops of bushes completely overgrown and hidden beneath the glossy green leaves of another species of vine, and so dense was this covering that it would hardly be possible for a bird to fly through it. Then there were open spaces well carpeted with grass, and sylvan avenues that wound hither and thither till they lost themselves among the trees. In one open spot a vine of the species I last mentioned had taken possession of two tall dead stumps and wound around and about them, and swung out from their tops and twined their meeting tendrils together into a faultless arch. Man, with all his art, could not have improved its symmetry.
Verily, with its rank luxuriance of vines and blossoms, its groves of forest trees, its shady nooks and grassy lawns, its crystal brook and its wild and beautiful mountain scenery, with that charming far-off glimpse of the sea, Kalihi is the Valley of Enchantment come again!
Mark Twain, Letters from Hawaii