About this ka'ao

 ka'ao. Hawaiian. Legend, tale, novel, romance, usually fanciful; fiction; tell a fanciful tale.

I began writing tales sitting on the floor of a basement kitchen. Outside the thick sliding glass door I watched as Pete, my husband, began piecing together a dream we'd drawn into sand: a wheeled home, small, safe-enough and made with more imagination than reality; there was no blueprint for what we imagined. We began by believing in magic, and looked for it everywhere. Grounding our magic in the belief that small spaces, built with respectful relationships with place and processes we began creating 'home' anew. 

As Pete built our vardo, I researched materials and gentler building practices and wrote my first full-length tale Wood Crafting the tale. It began when I found a a piece of rusty scrap metal. After the excitement of my beach-walking treasure hunt settled, I looked at it more closely. A tiny, and living barnacle had made her home on the rusty scrap. How could I miss that? The question led to growing a legacy of tale-telling and blogging. 12 years and 35 stories later Hand Tools is born! 

Terri Windling was, at the time, my virtual guide in the the world of myth and legend. I came to the pages of her blog regularly to check my senses, touch wood for luck, and venture into the place where stories became tinctures for what ailed me. What good lucky indeed to be led to the blog Myth & Moor for gentle yet fierce company and consistently rich resources for a creative life!  Windling quotes many writers of myth describing the deep forest. I picked the one that follows to lead you from that first tale written to save an old woman's life to this most recent tale -- a ka'ao, begun with the inspiration from new births and the unexpected memories that temper and transform.

"Sara Maitland compares the transformational magic in fairy tales to the everyday magic that turns caterpillars into butterflies. "[S]omething very dreadful and frightening happens inside the chrysalis," she points out. "We use the word 'cocoon' now to mean a place of safety and escape, but in fact the caterpillar, having constructed its own grave, does not develop smoothly, growing wings onto its first body, but disintegrates entirely, breaking down into organic slime which then regenerates in a completely new form. It goes as a child into the dark place and is lost; it emerges as the princess, or proven hero. The forest is full of such magic, in reality and in the stories."

Many of my tales include words, cultural nuance and language flow from my birth islands of Hawaii. Writing apart from those sands of my birth, distances are crossed in transformative pace. The story of Hand Tools is laced with lightning, in the form of a a lightning bolt. The back and forth nature -- stepping across time -- in this ka'ao is marked with the 'high voltage symbol' ⚡ to  prepare you, the reader, for a step into another time. A being must pay attention to the sounds and senses of all senses for they are the markers, bread crumbs and voices of the potentialities for life. Flow is all connection.

The story began here, written in installments published on or near the New Moon as the dark sky witnessed how potent Moon Light truly is. As my oli teacher reminded us, not everything photosynthesizes in the sun. Those monthly installments were raw thought, edited and infused with both dark and light, sun and moon during a month's time. to conclude I brought the ka'ao here to signal my belief that life, all things considered? Is a very very sweet place; and miraculous opportunity.

Well, actually ... what happened was I chanced to bump into Wonder Woman. No, really! I was reading a poem by Jane Yolen (a Wonder Woman of the finest kind) and found my way to Jane's website where I found Wonder Woman reading one of Jane's lastest books (she's written 400 books in her 85 or so years of living!) to her 3 year old daughter.

I was writing the tale end of the story and knew I needed some sort of tie-up. I was not expecting it, but that's how things so often happen. Unexpectedly. Here's what I found Wonder Woman doing. I'd never known of the actress who played WW, but went searching some more.

I found Wonder Woman doing this:

It was her lasso that gave me the image to tie the story up.

A tale comes from so many different threads of possibilities. At 85, Jane Yolen has written and published 400 books. At almost 74, I've written 34 stories and an uncounted number of blogs. As the New Moon in Leo prepares to rise with the Leo Sun, tomorrow morning just imagine the magic you could do with a magic lasso.

 

⚡😎Mokihana

Related:

"Reseeding the Food System" an interview with Mohawk Seed-keeper, Rowan White

"... In this movement, we advocate for communities to have seed banks where there’s a backup of the seeds. But so much of the importance of seed restoration—people want to call it conservation, but it really is restoration, because seeds are always changing. They’re forever changing, and humans are one part of helping those seeds to adapt and change to the ever-evolving Earth that we live on. They’re dynamic. They’re ever-changing. So, the seeds need to be a part of our daily lives, because they’re forever adapting, not only to the external conditions of the world around us, but they’re shaped by our hands, and by our aesthetics, and by our creativity as humans. We’re continuing to shape and change them, and they’re continuing to shape and change us..."