Light your fire

"So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us."   - Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Reverie)

The miracles of everyday make up more and more of my life. I'm glad for the company, integrating the research of my curious mind and the mantra 'Eli'eli Kau Mai. "Dig deep, deepen the revelation." My belly is warmed and satisfied after a bowl of freshly toasted quinoa laced with smashed and minced garlic steamed with string beans. A side of plump red grapes made a beautiful breakfast. The Abascal Way eating approach is calming the inflammation brought to a head because I was eating my way through grief. It happens, perhaps not to all of us, but maybe many of us reach for the comfort of old habits. Habits that used to work needed to be let go: giving up the sugar, wheat and bulk of cereals. Reaching for food to comfort was the response of a girl-child who had not (yet) been initiated into the rituals of lighting her fire.

The internal fire of creativity needs a base. The metaphors of a fire-starting base today come from my study of the mana'o of Pualani Kanaka'ole Kanahele. Her TED-X Talk "Living the Myth, Unlocking the Metaphor" has fed me for the last couple of years. I watch her body language, listen to her words, and make space within me for the stories and lessons that tap my personal kuleana my life's gifts. In a couple days, I will re-tell a version of Kanahele's exquisite story in my second annual The Safety Pin Cafe's storytelling event. The Safety Pin Café is the virtual café created when magic showed up in winter -- a season only a duck could love. With the webbed feet of a creature who is facile with crossing the mythic realm of imagination and soul retrieval The Safety Pin Café grew an adventure with life; and the community from which it was born entwined itself in a grand medicine story. Setting up a storyteller's tent, involving friends and family in the making of treats, props, and an environment of welcome for the ancestors and audience ... that is the offering.

The space, the time and the story is now. The base ... that lives in the backbone where the quality of courage resides; the funny bone where the quality of humor plays; the wish bone which carries the quality of hope; and the hollow bone like that of birds who have the quality of trust that carries them(us) into flights of fancy because we trust.