Hawaiian view of prosperity: on evoking wealth
Sometimes the writing in the blogosphere is so strong we simply want to share it.
Such is the case with my good buddy Joan Conrow’s very first post in a new blog called Kauai eclectic.
Never mind that it centers on an instructive exercise for anyone…looking through the eyes of a different culture.
The point about this piece is its pointing us toward fundamental notions of real value.
Here’s how Conrow crafts it:
“Prosperity isn’t even a word in the Hawaiian language, Ka`imi said. It’s an entirely Western concept, that idea of making good in a way that sets you apart from others; accumulating possessions with an eye toward achieving status; attracting money and material things to be stored up, hoarded.
But there is wai, she reminded him, the word used interchangeably for water and wealth, and she’d experienced it herself at Aliomanu, just recently. Walking to the beach, after a month of heavy rains, she’d noticed naupaka leaves, plumped and swollen; ironwood needles, a tender pale green; springy moss, clinging thickly to gray pohaku.
The red soil had darkened deep brown with a surfeit of wet; heliotrope seedlings had sprung boldly from the sand.
It was suddenly all so rich, so plush, so luxuriant, that drought-parched patch of east Kauai coastline, restored to vibrant life by rain alone.
That’s when she saw with her own eyes, she told him, that wai truly is wealth. Because everything in that moist scene was so lushly abundant, it seemed wholly ludicrous to value anything more than water.
And you can call the rain, he reminded her. You can evoke the water; you can turn the trickle into a torrent. Isn’t that prosperity?”
Tasty, no?
Perhaps this helps to explain how some of us islanders have never been more poor, in a material sense, and yet never felt more wealthy…as long as the water flows.
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