One Perfect Maui Moment

My faith that life's blessings fluctuate and come full circle have come to fruition.

Someone once told me that the path to spiritual enlightenment can be attained just by spending a few moments every day in genuine awe. Boy, am I in awe.

I have been having a blast here (of course). What has been going on?

A beautiful full moon party in Kaopo, on the other side of the crater/mountain from where we live, between mile marker 30 and 31 on the Haleakala highway. Look for the unmarked dusty trail and you see a beacon of light, green light, not that intense blue light of the moon that the clouds are diffusing over you in a way that you would imagine clarity would manifest itself as haze.

Kaopo is the desert in Maui, in case you ever lived on an island and wanted to know what a desert was like. Three inch-long spikes portruding from angry bushes turned my sandals into swiss cheese and the palms of my feet into throbbing reminders that blood pulsates from my legs to my heart via the stomping pressures of my uncontrollable dancing.

Gabriel and Zelis are spinning like vampires into the night, luring you in with their irresistable jungle rhythm and hypnotic sounds of broken, beaten, electric honey for your ears. Fire dancers are flinging wild lances and chains dipped in lighter fluid and casting the most intense shadows on the enraptured faces of everyone who's come out to this secret party, which is advertised only by word of mouth on the night of it's fruition.

A wild dust storm howls over the ravine and giant lava rock cliffs hang over us like guardian beasts. We dance with our eyes closed, mud-streaked tears, the wind blowing, pulling on my silk skirt like mother nature's puppet strings.

I find that I can't breath and no matter how good Gabriel's amazing DJing is my eyes sting from the intense dust storm. I feel like a character in Dune, hood over my head, scarf over my face, running out to the ocean, three inch thorns threatening tender toes.

The ocean, like all of the things in Maui's desert, is harsh and intense. The sand is made of coconut-sized boulders. You threaten to twist your ankle if you try to walk on it so you crawl, tangle of arms and legs, Gollum-style and then sit there under monochromatic fullmoonlight, contemplating the possibility that the boulders are really sand-sized, and you've just grown smaller. Suddenly we are such small humans, on such a huge beach.

The waves are monstrous, miniature tsunamis towering overy our head and crashing with full force against the rocks. The spray makes you feel like it's constantly raining. As the waves pull back, those billions of gallons of water-strength pull the boulders with them as if they were tiny pebbles, and the rumble of all those heavy rocks rolling into the sea is enormous, like a stampede, or a cavalry. You feel the earth move under you and you hear it all the way until the boulders drop into the muted depths of the pacific ocean.

The next day driving through Hana and back to Huelo we emerge from the desert into lush, rainforest, waterfalls at every turn. On the side of the road are wooden stands everywhere, full of fruit and flowers with cardboard boxes for you to deposit money in, full of good faith that you will pay the good farmers the amount written on the coconut in Sharpie marker. A woman gives us as many liloquoys as we can carry, and a few papayas for a dollar.

We have a feast picnic of fruit and cheese on Red Sand beach, which is an intense hike to a beautiful lagoon of water, protected from murderously turbulant waves by a barrier of lava rock. Three sexy male fire dancers from the full moon party the night before are swimming naked by the rocks, hunting for shellfish and fish. They come to us with tasty clams and feed them to us by hand, and we talk and sunbathe and laugh and lay.

Moments like these are few and far between but will always remain, in my memory, perfect. A perfect moment, forever.