Ingesting.Aloha.

I am deliciously in love with my life right now.  With Hawaii.  With food.  It started with the fruit.  Farmer’s markets stacked with rows upon rows and boxes upon boxes of drippingly ripe fruit.  At first I was naïve enough to believe, to hope that it was all locally farmed.  Then I heard a vendor muttering beneath his breath to the back of a woman complaining about the prices, “Eh Lady, I buy it from Costco youknow, I gotta make da profit somehow.”  My dream was shattered just a bit, but I am so headily enraptured with the fruit here that I blaze forward, recklessly buying abundantly more than can fit in my backpack or my little muscles can carry.  I am in lust with fruit.  The smell of passionfruit is intoxicating.  I feel luxurious scooping out the soft, pink-orange-red flesh of papayas every morning.  I wake up to the view of a pineapple on my counter, it’s sharp poky leaves silhouetted from behind by the fuzzy light of early dawn.  

Daily, I treat myself to an avocado the size of a child’s football.  Mashed with onions, cerranos, cilantro, and lime, it is heaven.  Or simply sprinkled with salt, I scoop it from it’s shell with a spoon while standing in the kitchen – I can’t even wait the two steps to the table or couch.

I began a love affair with coconut.  To be fair, this obsession started in Colorado; I was in the hospital for four days from a terribly mean stomach bug, and my electrolytes had taken a dangerous turn for the worse.  Coconut juice was my savior, pouring potassium into my system with each drop, it became like crack to me – I was a coconut water fiend.  Here, I want coconut in everything – coconut milk curries, coconut milk folded in to the rich and creamy carrot-ginger soup I made yesterday, thickened coconut milk drenched as a sauce over raw zucchini noodles.  I have started cooking.  I pour over recipes on the internet, my mind piecing together ingredients into combinations like an artist painting a canvas.  And my creations have been good!  

And then, there is Hayashi’s – the sushi heaven nestled into a shack in the back of an alley.  Rolls that are decadently large, crispy fresh, oh-so-satisfying.  The spicy ahi roll with avocado – eight humongous pieces crammed into a little plastic container – the most perfect lunch a girl could ask for (when paired with coconut water to drink, of course!). 

Here, in the land of Kona Coffee, a delicacy the world over, I am somehow infatuated instead with chai.  I have a little morning ritual that I look forward to all day - pouring the warm chai into my mug, stirring in thick cream and pungent, local, raw honey.  I slowly breathe it in and am surrounded by the opulent aroma, savoring each slow sip.  I could luxuriate in it for hours.

This petrifying thought keeps scurrying through my mind: only two months left.  I want to catch it, to smash it with my shoe, but it’s too fast, hidden in some dark crack before I can get to it.  Hawaii has slipped into my soul and taken up lodging there.  Already, in one short month, it feels a part of me.  The never-ending colors of the ocean, the salt and the sand stuck to my skin – skin so sensitive that I couldn’t contemplate getting wet without a bucket of lotion on hand to soothe away the resulting irritation.  But here, my skin (and everything else) is deliciously free.  Years of defensive, protective layers sloughed off in an instant of contact.  Facing me, stripped, hasn’t been easy – at times I’ve wanted nothing more than to crawl into the comfort of my usual masks and defenses.

But the sense of peace that has pervaded my soul since we landed has held me steady, has held me afloat as each rush of waves pounds at me, threatening to pull me under.  I feel sheer awe for the power, the mana here—it is in the waves, pounding the shore and thundering my ears.  It is in the lava, Pele’s goddess verocity coursing through the island like blood through veins.  It is in the mountains and the cliffs of Waipi’o, rising majestic above me, housing secrets and whispering sacredness.  And it is in me.  I breathe it in from the island, from Pele, from the sand and the salt and the sea and the fruit and the coconuts.  It awakens the mana within, dormant these many years.  I have waited and prayed for and evoked my mana, and now, finally, I feel it pulsing through me, deliciously flavoring my blood.