Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

It's Valentine's again time to lay down the law. no long-stemmed roses. no garish birds of paradise or alien heliconias no heart-shaped coffins for sicky-sweet cherry cordial chocolates no pre-filled cards a general ban on all things red and pink. no fancy over-sauced restaurant meals not a drop of cheap champagne All I need is a mountain a river a lifetime. That's all.

I'm on a tropical island with you. Whales breach, dolphins spin, seals sun themselves, turtles surface.. We could go beach... The canyon is every shade of red and orange and green-- waterfalls are white streaks on cliff faces rainbows arch into the misty sky... We could go mauka... Friends and family throng the pavilions at the beach, barbecue smoke and sunset ocean views, Slippers in a sandy pile, fish sizzling in the wok oil wooden hashi snap and scrape We could go party... But let's us You and I Stay home Light the candles And keep the noise outside at bay. (Another class assignment! This one is based on "In Paris with You" by James Fenton, which is a funny anti-romantic poem about all the things the author will NOT be doing Paris. My prompt to the students was-- Write a love poem about all the things you DON'T want to do.)

On Avoidance My to-do checklist multiplies like protozoa osmosises and mitosises into       things to procure       things to discard       debts to pay       mundane tasks The list glares at me from my phone       an unblinking eye             a high pitched tinnitus of             adult obligations.       so I subvert my list,             add nonsense: "sit in the sun: five minutes." "sample 3 kinds of chocolate." "draw a seabird." "sketch a mad genius." So between the sandpaper-on-bone tasks       of "callthebank" I can dutifully check off whimsey accomplish nonsense procrastinate responsibly       and with great satisfaction             avoid the doing by doing       and play a counter-harmony ...

Heaven + Hell are estranged sisters eyeing each other across uncrossable distances. Each gathers her allies    mutters darkly about the other.    Envy might glint, sometimes, in their eyes. Heaven plants her roots, sends up fronds    sweet green shoots    and harvests ripe. Hell skims lightly over the world    undoes bindings. Heaven seals     with honey and wax. Hell dissolves,     molecules sigh into their component parts. Heaven keeps a tidy yard,    bakes fresh bread,    remembers. Hell, she walks out the gate,    leaves salty footprints (no backward glance)    in her wake.    She forgets. (From a classroom prompt based on X. J. Kennedy's fantastic poem, "Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought." I had the kids brainstorm connotations and denotations of heaven and hell, and compare them to the Hawaiian concept of the afterworld, Keao...

   The hollows and rough edges on elm trees    the startled up-look of a deer    the shallow whisper of the creek Come with me and see!    200 tones of green    from emerald to scum whitegreen underside of oak-leaf greenblack shine of dogwood slick green rocks softgreen moss    Come with me    lift the stones suddenly      if the crawdads    will startle us    prod the soft rotten log come with me and    whisper secret names into the hollows    half-glimpse fairies    half-hear gnomes Come and follow the narrow path Swing a stick-sword    swoop away the spiderwebs or else they'll snag our mouths and eyes invisibly tiny spiders jeweling us Come and hear the complete quiet    the hush of high-up branches in the air    the careful step of our own small feet over the earth Come and greet the forest o...

So I had conversation with some of my students the other day that left me a bit bemused. They were talking about going to the beach and getting cordoned off because there was a monk seal basking on the sand. There was a collective growl of irritation. One kid voiced it: "Just these STUPID endangered animals! And don't even get me started on the Shearwaters!" I.... didn't have an answer to that. And we were really supposed to be talking about Macbeth. And scanning iambic pentameter. So I filed "My endangered Hawaiian students hate endangered Hawaiian animals" to my mental Think About Later shelf. So now I am thinking about it. And I'm a bit stumped. Why do my students, who are striving with all of their might to preserve an indigenous language and culture on the brink of extinction, have nothing but contempt for conservation efforts for indigenous plants and animals? Is this something just with my students? Is this a local vs. non-local problem? Is th...

Evolution in Hawaii: A Supplement to Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science

Five and a half million years ago, Ha'upu mountain was the molten heart of a new caldera. Kipukai was  another erupting core.  When the oceanic plate shifted, and the hotspot venting lava with it, Waialeale became the active volcano, and Ha'upu began to succumb to the wind and waves. Two million years later, as the volcanic activity settled down, pu'u-- or small cinder cones-- erupted from the volcanic plain all around. Enormous sand dunes piled up on the south shore of Kaua'i, in the wet shadow of Ha'upu-- no longer a living volcano.  The years layered the soft round sand, and the rain leached the minerals out. The dunes lithified into limestone. Ribbons of minerals twined under the sand: olivine and silicates. Cathedrals beneath the hard packed mineral protected hollows full of ancient ocean sand. Ice ages came and went-- the polar ice caps grew and froze the earth's water. Water leaching through the limestone formed intricate stalactites under lithifie...

Butter Mochi   Rated: Submitted By:  Lea Photo By:  RoseFalles Prep Time:  15 Minutes Cook Time:  1 Hour Ready In:  3 Hours 15 Minutes Servings:  24 "Butter and coconut milk flavor this sweet, baked, Japanese treat." INGREDIENTS: 3 1/2 cups sweet rice flour (mochiko) 2 1/2 cups white sugar 2 tablespoons baking powder 5 eggs 1 teaspoon coconut extract 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 cups milk 1 (14 ounce) can coconut milk 1/2 cup melted butter DIRECTIONS: 1. Preheat an oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 9x13 inch baking dish. Whisk the rice flour, sugar, and baking powder together in a mixing bowl. 2. Beat the eggs, coconut extract, and vanilla extract in a mixing bowl until the eggs are smooth. Whisk in the milk, coconut milk, and melted butter until incorporated. Stir in the flour mixture a little at a time until no lumps remain; scrape into the prepared baking dish, and smooth the t...

So a long time ago, when I first moved to Kaua'i, I took my tiny adorable little 18 month old baby to the library. The automatic doors slid open, we smelled a blast of air conditioning and book mustiness, and my baby gasped, "YAY, BOOKS!" The librarian, David,  stage-hissed, "If she can't be quiet, she's going to have to leave." I was so offended. I didn't want to ever go back. But I realized something. This was MY library. I could walk there. There wasn't another one-- I had to get over it. So I trained my kids to be terrified of the librarian, to be SILENT in the library, to gather as many books as we could and get OUT OUT OUT GO GO GO under his unflinching sniper eyes. And now... DAVID the MEAN LIBRARIAN....  he likes me. We are allies in a moldy, sandy, short-attention span, book-hating world. My kids are perfect library patrons for him. He gives me book recommendations. He will help me, with that hyper-vigilance, find obscure texts. I ...

I left Hawaii. Not forever-- just for two months. Just the day school got out-- all my book shelves pushed into one corner of my classroom, all the partitions folded and desks stacked and supplies boxed up. I got on an airplane-- actually three-- and left Hawaii behind. I just got back Sunday. I learned a lot. Some of what I learned I should probably write about. But not today. Today, I went back to work. And the day sort of embodied everything that is sacred and amazing, and everything that is enraging and crushing about this rock in the middle of the pacific. I left the house at 4:30 am. I drove my truck through the dark-- down the mountain, along the coast. Just knowing the black ocean was right there, invisible and inky on the side of the road, lapping at rocks in the dark-- gave me chills. The ocean is big and powerful-- a force to be acknowledged and respected. Good morning unseen ocean. By 5:30 I made it to the beach. Many of the other teachers were already there, stand...

I came late to the faculty meeting yesterday. I walked in with my laptop and planner but the conference table was gone and everyone was sitting on the floor in a circle. Kaina, the Hawaiian language teacher and charismatic force of nature, was sitting shirtless at the front of the circle, with three large wooden bowls in front of him. At either side hovered a shirtless teenage boy. To their left sat our two graduating seniors. Ah. A Kawa ceremony. Cool. I mentally changed lanes. Last year's kawa ceremony was out in the school garden one evening, in the handmade hale, and was followed by a hi'uwai-- a purifying dunk in the ocean to symbolize letting go of the old and embracing the new.  Apparently this time it was in the social studies homeroom, on the carpet. I noted the three bowls-- one full of the stringy dried Kawa, one full of murky grey-green liquid, and one full of clean water with many little coconut bowls bobbing around. Kaina whispered to the boy helpers, di...

It's easy to write when something awful grabs my brain-- or something annoying buzzes in my ear and needs expression to be silenced-- but today I am feeling raw and grateful and I want to write it down. Gratitude is so fragile-- a wet tissue paper feeling-- and I want to feed it, like drops of nectar to a thin-winged moth. So here is what I'm grateful for today. This moment: the girls are falling asleep together in my bed. They have twisted the sheets around their feet and around the quilt that Matt's dad recently sent us-- an heirloom from Vietnam-- a deep blue, hand embroidered piece of functional art. They are listening to an Aesop's Fables audiobook  on youtube. They are freshly showered, teeth brushed, stories read, and fully dressed in tomorrow's clothes: RJ in a homemade "bra"-- the tattered remains of a tiny satin dressup and black leggings with two meters of fake leopard tail pinned to the back-- and MP in a stylish pineapple and hello kitty...

Dear Men At That Party, You are laughing-- a baritone staccato-- outside on the porch. The beer bottles have begun toppling over the ledge into the grass below, to be discovered the next morning in the dew like eastereggs. The cadence of your storytelling rises and falls, and you jostle and jockey for center stage-- interrupting and verbally shoving others out of the way. To us inside the meaning is lost, but the ruckus remains. One of you begins slamming something again and again-- the door? The sound is nearly drowned in the answering laughter. It sounds loud out there. Competitive. I've only met one of you before; the rest of you are strangers. I meet all of you eventually tonight, except one of you-- the guy who passes out on the couch. One of you, one of the two single guys, apologizes to me for using foul language in front of my kids. I wave away his apology-- I tell him my kids are so hung up on "stupid" and "shut up" being the very worst words in the w...

My heart is a little broken today. I know it's the right thing to do-- to let go, but it still hurts. A part of me still wonders if I should say, wait! Stop! It's worth saving! I'll do better! I'll change-- I won't let things that are important to me disintegrate anymore-- I'll make time, I'll try harder. I'll make beautiful things.  But no-- I won't. I need to let it go. What's all this about? My wheel. My kiln. My pottery wheel deserves a new home, a better life. Someone who will take care of it the way it deserves. Who even knows how to use it properly. Maybe I'll be a better person at some point, and then I'll be prepared to bring another pottery wheel into my life, and this time make none of the mistakes I've made with this one. But-- not soon. When I'm ready. I'll know, next time, before jumping in. When I was sixteen, my parents gave me a birthday card with our traditional birthday breakfast in bed. The note said, ...

Today us the kind of day that shortens my life by five years; that parches my skin and carves the jagged lines around my eyebrows and mouth deeper into a scowl; that makes me want to escape or run or fight. Or write. So right or wrong, I need to write it out. Yesterday I read the Ramayana to my students. I have a short graphic novel version, and the kids got all swept up the the grand drama of princes, princesses, gods, goddesses, demons, gurus, bears, and monkeys. They imagined how they would retell the epic Hawaiian myths in their own styles and sketched Hawaiian gods and goddesses in sarongs and swim shorts, with Disney princess faces as they listened. And today I loaded them up into two school vans and took everybody-- all of the secondary teachers and students-- up to the Hindu temple and monastery in Wailua. I was impressed-- every kid followed my instructions to bring their permission slips and wear modest pants or skirts. I quizzed them in the van-- Rama and Sita, Jambavan and ...