Kahalaopuna

In the Bible, a rainbow appears to Noah after the flood, when God said, “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.”

In the Iliad, the goddess Iris personifies the rainbow, carrying messages from the gods to the human world, thus forming a link between heaven and earth.

From Wikipedia, “Rainbow”

Rainbows appear in every continent and every culture and are as miraculous as a covenant and as simple as the spray from a garden hose. As Kermit the Frog put it, in his wise and froggy voice, “rainbows are visions, but only illusions”. Knowing that rainbows are just a trick of light, we have forgotten how to see the vision. What if: when we stopped listening to the messages, we let down our end of the covenant with Spirit.

I think about rainbows a lot because I live in Hawaii, the Rainbow State, where there are more rainbows than anywhere else on earth. Scientifically it’s because of orographic rain, which is when mountains scrape the bottoms of passing clouds, releasing frequent daytime rain. Cool ocean temperatures; tradewinds; a general lack of particulate air pollution (aside from Vog and H-Power) and being the most remote inhabited location on the planet are what make Hawaii the Rainbow State.

All of these conditions are changing as the climate collapses. Hawaii will experience changing tradewinds and muggy days of Kona winds, when you can really feel that wool blanket enveloping the earth and trapping the infrared rays. Days will be drier, and hotter, with increasing ocean temperatures and shifting el ninos that will widen the bullseye range of hurricanes over the islands. We know from Iniki what a Cat 4 or 5 will wreak, and the more recent brush from Hurricane Lane remined us that it’s not a matter of if, but when. I have followed this science for twenty years as a professor, feeling an ethical duty to break the news to my young community college students. They know that climate change means no more native birds, no more elepaio, no more o’o, no more Happy Spider. It also means no more coral reef, no more beaches…and the extinction of rainbows.

How to tell these students about the broken covenant of their future?

How the Floods will, in fact, return to destroy the earth:

Worst case scenario: six feet of sea level rise by 2100. Best case: 1.5 by 2030.

Eight years.

I learned about climate change in a sudden vision in 2003. I can only describe it as a sudden knowing while walking over a footbridge near my home in Manoa. After reflecting on this experience for twenty years, I think it was Kahalaopuna, the rainbow spirit of Hawaii who told me, “this is what’s happening, and everything must change.” It was a pivotal moment in my career and life, even though I was told by a Native Hawaiian colleague never to speak of this vision, because I did not speak Hawaiian. He said that this ‘aina would not speak to the likes of me, just another haole, not a missionary but a teacher just the same, preaching education and the written word.

I live ten minutes walk from Waiakeakua, said to be the very home of the rainbow, Kahalaopuna.

At Waiakeakua, we plant koa trees that will take a hundred years to grow into canoes, and ulu trees that in twenty years will produce food, and kalo which in six months you can harvest and propagate at the same time, replanting the huli which is how it becames a plant ancestor.

When we meet Uncle and Aunty at the Ulu tree, Uncle voluntells me to oli for the group, announcing our presence and requesting permission to enter the forest. I am nervous but do my best.

Welina Manoa I ka lehualoha
Aloha ua tuahine
Mai luahine a I Waikiki
Ki’ai ke kahaukane

In these few lines of this chant, we are welcomed (welina) and introduced to the tuahine Rain and the protection of the kahaukane wind. These are the elemental parents of Kahalaopuna, “the beauty of Manoa”, who in the mo’olelo of this valley was murdered by her bethrothed, Kauhi, and resurrected by her aumakua, the owl, and murdered again and resurrected again until Kauhi became a shark and she no longer had a body and that’s how she became a rainbow.

The story of Kahalaopuna is requisite to any discussion of Hawaiian rainbows. The Wa’ahila ridge, which I view from my lanai, becomes the body of the jealous chief Kauhi, feet at the University and head towards the peak accessible in a hike called Mount Olympus. The ridgeline is a sleeping giant in the form of Kauhi, the jealous chief who killed the pure and innocent beauty, multiple times, and now lies here, forever, facing the gods in shame.

When I first moved into this house, I had so recently viewed my father in this very repose, in a casket, his waxy hands folded over longstem roses on his chest. Later, the giant would become the body of a lover dead from suicide. I’ve never meant to project my personal sorrows onto the landscape, but there they lie.

The morning when I’m writing this is a day of funerals for 19 children and two teachers who died at Uvalde, the most recent tragedy of this mad epoch. I can’t bring myself to imagine the children in their caskets, but I do wonder if the troubled young gunman with his AKs, his dead cats and online threats towards women is lying facing some god somewhere, in shame.

And I wonder, what good does it do? Shame doesn’t bring the children back.

Kahalaopuna, what do you have to say about this?

The violent affair of Kahalaopuna and Kauhi can be read as the love-hate affair of Hawaii and American haoles. It is a marriage consummated in violence when Kauhi the bully murders Kahalopuna with a hala branch. She is revived, she survives, but is constrained, hiding at her home. She can’t go in the water where Kauhi, as a shark, lurks, stalking her beauty which he devours and destroys, just as America has devoured the land, covering it with concrete selling it bombing it putting telescopes on the highest point and poisoning the water of the deepest aquifers. It is a terrible story about a terrible story.

And yet, Kahalaopuna appeared to me, again this evening, in a slanting rainbow with no top, a rainbow called a Po’o muku, said to be the path for a demigod to walk. She is transparent and glowing like rain shot through with light. She has rainbow colored hair flowing over her body clothed in a white cloth knotted at the shoulder. She is as young as she needs to be and as old as she needs to be. She shimmers in and out, greeting me with enthusiasm, accepting the clumsy ti leaf lei that I have made for her. I am awkward in my offering, but she loves it and embraces me with joy.

She revealed some things to me, in that way of not-knowing then knowing, but I paused to eat a simple dinner before writing them down, a quick meal of fried rice, hastily made with a random carrot and part of an old zucchini. As I ate the bowl of rice on the lanai – view of Kauhi again, the constant companionship of his shame – I found a nail in my food, in my mouth.

There is a nail in my mouth as write this.

The nail is a warning, but also a reminder that impeccability of speech means speaking.

A rainbow appears, and there is also a nail.

Love and hate, murder and magic, remembering and forgetting, forgiveness and shame.

Because Kahalaopuna is made of light, she shows me,

Way way up in the lewa lani leva, (the outer layers of Earths troposphere)

The invisible carbon molecules filling up the dome of sky:

infrared light,

how the blood eye rainbow predicts a storm,

and that the akua are watching.

Up she showed me that there are these filaments, like fishing lines, with barbs in them that are connected to other people, maybe just one, or five, or ten thousand, you just don’t know but each barb is a connection for healing. The point is to be alert to any opportunity, wherever it is, to meet that particular healing in an appropriate way: not to feel good about yourself, and not out of pity or altruism. The barb is removed. Sometimes it might be five dollars or giving someone directions, or a smile, and sometimes much, much more (very much more) is required. You don’t get to choose. You have to do what is reciprocal. This releases the hooks.

The last thing Kahalaopuna told me was this: it’s not that Hawaiians want the land back, but that the land wants them back.

He Ali’i Ka ‘Āina; He Kauwā ke Kanaka.
The land is a chief, the human is a servant.