Over the past decade I have come to know Hawaiʻi through stories of people, places, and situations that are unique to the tropical archipelago. These stories have formed my understanding of Hawai’i. There is a connection that I have to the islands that comes out of a profound sense of peace found there, and that it is something I have been looking for my entire life. I can only imagine what that place is for my parents who live there; who have made it their home and struggled to remain there. My family has always been migrating, moving from one place to the next, but we have always found ourselves closer and closer to the ocean and its warmth. For the first time ever, my parents have stopped moving and stayed where they are: a small island in the Pacific surrounded by endless blue, Maui.

Hawai'i is not a paradise; it does not form some sort of ideal escape from reality, but quite the opposite. It is grounded in reality –it can be a challenging place to adapt to for many of those who move there. It can be quite boring, slow, overwhelmingly quiet, and removed from the pace that is ubiquitous of modern American cities. The Hawai'i I have come to understand from those who live and work there and my own time spent on the islands is from an active relationship to the land and with its people. Island life is removed from life on the continent. Similar to small, isolated towns, attitudes and values become interchangeable in a community. Each island community forms its own sense of culture with family often at the center. The word Ohana is used in Hawai'i to express a deeper sense of family, which extends to friends and guests. On the smaller islands, such as Moloka'i there is an even greater sense of togetherness, family, and respect that is almost unheard of today.

The definition of Aloha according to gohawaii.com, a website which promotes tourism for Hawaiʻi goes as the following:

Aloha - a word in the Hawaiian language that has numerous meanings both as a single word and when used in context with other words. The most common uses are as a greeting, farewell or a salutation. Aloha is also commonly used to mean love. In addition, it can also be used to express compassion, regret, or sympathy.

Aloha is ineffable, indescribable, and indefinable with words alone, to be understood they must be experienced. Deeper meaning and sacredness is hinted at by the root words used in combination to create aloha (alo: presence, front, face / ho: breathe)(or as "divine breathe")

Over the years I have come to know the word having many meanings and no definition. It is used to describe a way of life (philosophy), a relationship with the land and its people, a feeling of being, respect one has for his or her surroundings, as well as love which no amount of words could describe and so one word falls into a gesture of something greater. And perhaps it is just a word when written or talked about which creates a suggestion for further understanding by investigation and experience.

I first met Phill Merkel on Baldwin Beach at sunset. I had been watching the sun slowly fade in the sky and far away by the crashing waves there was a silhouette of a man balancing a large stick. I had never seen moves so fluid, so in tune and at peace as he was in that moment. That was how I first came to know him, meeting him at sunset at Baldwin, a place and time he was guaranteed to be everyday.

Since then I have come to know Phill. He is love, kindness, and understanding. He knows and practices unconditional love and is at peace with the world around him. He accepts and understands people for who they are before they introduce themselves to him. He also has a smile that can cut flesh and reaches the soul and each time he says aloha feels sacred to me.

I asked Phill what Hawaiʻi was for him and he told me he found a deep sense of peace here and that it helped him find balance. Witnessing Phill at sunset that day seemed to define what he meant by balance, and it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen and so I grew curious about what Phill thought was one of the most beautiful things he had seen in Hawai'i. What follows is my paraphrase of Phill's story:

On July 11th, 1991, a total solar eclipse occurred which started its Path of Totality above the Hawaiian island chain. Phill was camping on the Big Island where he and a few friends were gathering to witness the eclipse. It had been particularly cloudy those past few days. The ocean stirred with white tips and the water was cool. The wind rushed by with small droplets of water, which could've been rain or seawater or both. Only moments before the eclipse the clouds parted to reveal the moon colliding with the sun as the world around suddenly turned dark as night. The ring of sunlight created a glow of light similar to light from a full moon and in my own memories of witnessing the eclipse several thousand miles away it felt as if I was in some strange dream-like world. There is no other reference to such a surreal and sublime experience, nor is one likely to witness another total solar eclipse in their lifetime. If one isn't careful one can mistaken the experience for a dream, but for Phill he had his friends and photographs to prove this moment against his memory.

Hawaiʻi has a large number of endemic species but low biodiversity due to the remoteness of the islands. The natural rate of introduction in Hawaiʻi is one species every 30,000 years. The method by which they arrive is by wind, water, or wing (birds acting as carriers to seeds). After the arrival of the first human settlers (Polynesians), the rate of naturalization increased to 3 to 4 species every 100 years. After contact during the Western Era, an average of 20 – 40 species were introduced every year. Today the rate of introduction is 5,000,000 times greater than the natural rate. Out of one hundred species, only ten of those will be able to naturalize without the human influence and out of those ten, one will be classified as invasive.

The first invasive species introduced to the islands was the rat, which quickly outnumbered the human population. In 1883, the small Asian mongoose was introduced to several of the Hawaiʻian islands in hopes of reducing the rat population. Being the largest land predator, the mongoose succeeded in naturalization and is a considered a pest. Today it threatens the bird population and is reducing many of endemic species close to extinction. The state of Hawaiʻi has taken measures to prevent future invasions and to preserve the ecosystem. All imports to the islands have to go through the Department of Agriculture, which carefully monitors any introductions. In one recent case is the fireweed moth, which is used to reduce the invasive fireweed, took a total of fifteen years for it to be introduced into the environment.

Additionally, the Department of Agriculture has a specialized department for each county that works with the community and park services to reduce and eradicate invasive species as well as educate the community. With each island comes its own situation in terms of import/export regulation, ecosystem, agriculture industry, community cooperation and resources, which are based on per capita income. On Maui, there is MISC (Maui Invasive Species Committee), and the most threatening species to the island is the miconia plant (originating from Central America) and the little fire ant (originating from Central America). Whereas on the Big Island, BISC (Big Island Invasive Species Committee) no longer focuses on miconia, which has become widespread, but targets Molucca albizia due to its threat on human lives and property damage they cause.

(sections transcripted from a conversation with Lissa Fox Strohecker, MISC)

On April 15th the state of Hawai'i celebrates a day of remembrance for Father Damien. Born as Joseph de Veuster on January 3, 1840, in Belgium, in 1858 upon entering the novitiate of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary in Louvain he took on the name Damien. After six years of service he was sent to the Hawaiʻi where he ordained into priesthood on May 24, 1864. During this time in the state, Hansen's disease (leprosy) was an epidemic. Those who were infected were exiled to isolated peninsula of Kalaupapa on Molokaʻi. The state of Hawaiʻi passed a quarantine law in 1866 that isolated the colony until 1969. Seven years after the establishment of the colony, Damien volunteered to establish a parish within the quarantine zone. There he ran the church, built housing, and took care of the residents. In 1885, Damien contracted leprosy after inadvertently putting his foot into scalding water which caused his skin to blister.3 He continued his work in the colony to spite the disease until the final days of his life. On April 15th, 1889 he succumbed to the disease.

Damien was buried on Molokaʻi for forty-seven years. In 1936, the Belgian government requested for his remains to return to his native land. The sailing ship Mercator returned Damien to Leuven where he is presently buried, as well as the ship remains permanently stationed. On June 4th, 1995, Pope John Paul II beatified Father Damien. Shortly after in the same year, his right hand returned to his original grave where it remains today at his shrine in Kalaupapa.

Damien's legend carries on today through the continuous celebration and remembrance of his act of selflessness on Molokaʻi. There have been numerous films, books, statues, monuments, even churches in dedication to him. In 2009, after the account of two miracles4 relating to Damien; Pope Benedict XVI3 canonized him as a saint.

“God is love, that is what guides me in life.”

Since 1981 Joe has been walking, running, and jogging with a cross almost every morning. His daily routine starts at Joe’s house in Paia, goes westbound on Hana Highway passed Baldwin Beach, and ends at Holy Rosary Church, where Joe works as a groundskeeper. Joe’s son, Damien, has been running with his father for the past three years.

This project is about beauty – the beauty of the everyday. What first strikes one as beauty can be simply the preconceived idea that one brings to a place such as Hawaiʻi. Everyday beauty in Hawaiʻi is less defined through form and so it is formless. At first you might point in awe but eventually you look on humble and silent for it is a thing of beauty that no words can describe. Each of the stories in the project ALOHA describes beauty, from a beautiful act of humanity to beauty that draws people to a place and to the beauty that is love, all these memories, moments, and events speak about something that cannot be captured as an image. They are all gestures to beauty and express the intermingling of this unique and isolated archipelago called Hawaiʻi.

It all starts here, with the final image to this project. It is a photograph of an older couple outside of a house that is obscured by palm leaves and vines revealing the very top of the plantation bungalow. The people in the photograph are my parents and they moved to Hawaiʻi in 2005. Throughout my entire life the ocean has played some significant role. It was a destination for numerous family road trips. When we lived in Toronto we made the annual pilgrimage to Florida, when we moved to New Mexico it was California, and in Texas it was Galveston, South Padre, or Pensacola. We all longed for the ocean but we never lived close to it until Hawaiʻi.

People often asked me why my parents moved to Hawaiʻi, and every time I tell them, "Why not". I'm not entirely sure why they did move there and a part of me knows but cannot convey it into words. How do you explain something you never had to define or convey to others, something you've known your entire life? I have never tried to properly articulate the answer, nor had I really proposed the question to myself. It just made sense that they moved there, or rather my mother's desire to be there, by the ocean and in the warmth. There is no way to properly answer that question, at least not without saying, "Long story short..." But there is no long story short, just long story.

If one were seeking out the presence of the ocean their entire life then what better place than a remote island? There are few places in Hawai'i, especially Maui one cannot know of the ocean's presence, let alone its sight. It is so ubiquitous that there is a reversed proportioning of land to sea: where as on the mainland there is the ocean as a shoreline and opposite is a land that continues far greater than one can see to the horizon over the ocean. In Hawai'i, the land rarely forms a horizon. And when land does it is often a neighboring island in the horizon, to which one can always see how dwarfed it is by its scale in a vast infinite sea which surrounds its edges.

This is about adaptation; plants find their way to Hawaiʻi from the traffic of humans and birds but most fail to naturalize and some are harmful to the environment, and people find their way there by a lure of its charm, but most don't succeed in remaining there for long. There is a six-month period in which people move to the islands only to leave; those who remain there for longer often establish a lifelong relationship to Hawaiʻi. They find something there that cannot be explained, as it becomes a part of them and their way of life. It is not a salutation, a tropical allure, the charm of the exotic but a state of mind. It is aloha.

ALOHA
2009 -

This project comes out of a dialogue with various organizations and individuals who were willing to share their stories, research, and time over the past five years.

Mahalo nui loa

Lawrence Aki
Big Island Invasive Species Committee
Vid Ingelevics
Springer Kaye
Denn and Yu Sum Ko
Maui Invasive Species Committee
Phill Merkel
Damien and Joe Soliven
Lissa Fox Strohecker
Kim Tomczak
Shannon Wianecki

And the many anonymous contributors that shared their stories and aloha with a complete stranger.

Aloha oukou