I am not a patient traveler. Hours before my flight would leave Lihue, I was packed and out the door.
The airport shuttle driver was friendly. I asked if he had lived on Kauai all his life. He said that he was born on Oahu and moved to Kauai in 1974. He told me that his large family would camp at Anahola Beach for a month in summer. Beach camping is restricted to three days, but the brothers and sisters and aunties and uncles would line up to reserve a spot for successive stays.
He talked joyfully about their time together. He said that his kids, age three and five, adored the beach. Hawaiian families are close – Kauai’s TV stations feature endless children’s events, filmed in the manner of home movies: keiki (kids’) surf contests, hula performances, and beach gatherings of various civic groups with children featured prominently.
A clerk at Hawaiian Airlines told me that I could take an earlier flight to Honolulu, and I accepted gratefully, feeling that I would rather spend the time there than in Lihue.
Arriving in Honolulu, I checked my bag and asked about shuttles to Waikiki. I wanted to buy a handmade t-shirt for a friend before leaving Hawaii, and I figured there might be good crafts shops near the beach. A sky cap said that I could take the airport shuttle for $7 or the city bus for a dollar. I chose the city bus in honor of my mother, a spunky traveler who would always explore new cities by boarding a metro transit bus, often making friends with women her age and being invited into their homes.
I caught the wrong bus, realizing my mistake as we passed the Pearl Harbor Memorial, and scrambled across the highway in time to catch a bus going the other way.
The ride to Waikiki was ten miles of dilapidated wartime housing. Downtown Honolulu was scarcely more appealing: all skyscrapers of steel and glass, with views down cross-streets to the lovely green hills beyond.
I sat in the back of the bus, vibrating with the motor, an unshaven geezer to my left, a Japanese boy and girl straight ahead. The young couple looked about twenty. The boy closed his eyes and sat meditating straight-spined until the girl signaled their stop. No one paid him the slightest attention. I breathed deeply and slowly to calm my mind, which tends to get jumpy when traveling. It takes me a long time to get inwardly quiet and focused. Yoga breathing helps.
In Swami Kriyananda’s autobiography, The Path, he relates how someone asked Paramhansa Yogananda to pose for a photo. “Wait a moment,” the Master said. “Let me go into samadhi (ecstasy).” Half a breath later, and he was in the trance state.
Give me a few lifetimes.
The bus wound through an awkward tangle of downtown streets, turning unexpectedly, finally reaching the harbor at Waikiki. I got off and wandered through a tiny mall in search of Hawaiian crafts, but found no joy. Shoulders aching under a backpack laden with fruit and my laptop, I felt disappointed and far from centered in heart and mind.
I found the bus stop and sat gratefully to continue Kriya Yoga breathing. Soon I was feeling quiet inside. I strolled back to the shopping center, without finding a gift but enjoying the shops with relaxed mental focus. The clerks I spoke with were more guarded than on Kauai.
On the bus back to the airport I renewed a lesson I’ve learned a thousand times: when you’re looking for peace, start with the body, then move to the heart, while involving the mind only minimally.
The return route was no less ugly. As we inched through the downtown streets, throngs of office workers climbed aboard. I did Kriya, praying with eyes open while I people-watched.
The bus stops were crowded with the fantastical Hawaiian racial blend of commuters: Chinese, Japanese, Caucasian, Polynesian, Filipino, Hawaiian, and black. Two women in the seat ahead chattered in an unidentifiable tongue. A young man swung aboard in the untucked white t-shirt and flared pants of a Hawaiian stud, virile and aloof, talking with the driver before swinging off with a cheery “Nui mahalo.”
Breathing Kriya I sank gently to a center and began to see the radiance of people’s essential goodness. How wonderful to breathe joy, to rest in that perfect love while riding…anywhere. Inwardly I wondered if it was “real practice” – whether God minded that I was riding around blissfully doing Kriya Yoga in the Temple of Everyday Life. I couldn’t help but feel that my Guru Paramhansa Yogananda was pleased. God is center everywhere, not only in churches and formal meditations. Yogananda, in fact, considered institutions a necessary evil – evil, as his disciple Swami Kriyananda explained, because they tempt people to think in terms of outer forms, when the real divine search is within; and necessary, because the Spirit requires forms to function in this world at all.
I’d worn a hat with the logo of a well-known ultramarathon. Back at the airport, the bus carried it away. Its time had come. I imagined a young Hawaiian finding it. “Dat some pokey hat.” (Forgive my shahkbait attempt at Pidgin.)
At the airport, the agriculture guys wanted to take away my fruit, so I sat on a bench and ate a couple of bananas and an apple, then gave the rest to a porter who didn’t thank me.
The Hula Heiau, Hawaii’s most sacred shrine. Someday I’ll reveal how I embarrassed myself here hilariously — a memory that makes me grateful for reincarnation.
Passing the time in an airport gift shop, I talked with a sales clerk who said that he had “been through the Sixties and Seventies” and complained that mandatory sentencing for marijuana users was putting growers and sellers in jail while murderers and rapists were being released to make room for them.
When an elderly tourist couple approached, he helped them with sweet aloha. He told me that the best place to wait for my flight was in the airport garden. He said that a big white bird had built its nest there, and that he had often seen it drop through the trees to settle in for the night.
I toddled downstairs to the garden, which was lovely. It was large and meandering, darkly lit with Polynesian lanterns, filling fully two acres in an arc between the airport office buildings. The middle section was a tropical rainforest, with small Japanese formal gardens at each end. I sat on a bench in one of the Japanese gardens, watching a large brown shorebird stalk the banks of a pond morosely, looking like an elderly billionaire whose young wife had taken his money and fled. It eyed a giant carp greedily, seemingly conflicted by its size.
Sitting in the balmy Honolulu darkness, my thoughts turned to the bus ride. I had not reached the blissful state only by prayer; it had taken lots of breathing. Basic yoga: calm the body to calm the heart, and by extension the mind. Find a deep calm center to open an inner portal to blissful silence.
I remembered a senior monk in Yogananda’s ashram, Brother Bhaktananda, who explained meditation to us: “You do your breathing exercises until the mind becomes calm. When the mind becomes calm, you feel God’s presence automatically, and you love Him because He’s lovable. You offer that love back to Him, and He gives you more love, and you offer it back to Him, and so it keeps growing.”
I had practiced Kriya Yoga to calm my mind in the noisy, crowded bus, and had ended up feeling wonderfully grateful and filled with love. No strenous effort was involved, just a relentless insistence that brought a gushing spring of inner communion with God that radiated outward to others of its own nature.
I’ve never felt inspired in places where I was supposed to. When Swami Kriyananda returned from Europe, he spoke glowingly of the inspiration he had felt in the cathedral at Chartres. I, of course, felt nothing there, though I was deeply inspired at the cathedral of Notre Dame and the church of Sacre Coeur de Montmartre.
I find that I cannot feel God’s love unless I can “gear down.” I ripped my body with drugs more than fifty years ago, and the ravages linger. Two spinal surgeries in my youth, following three years of paralysis from the chest down, didn’t help. The yogis say it can take incarnations to get over the effects of serious drug use. Yoga breathing helps tremendously, and I find nothing more powerfully centering than Kriya. I don’t mind if it takes a while to settle my heart and get interiorized; the rewards far outweigh the effort. I went looking for a t-shirt for a friend and found riches that I couldn’t put a price on.
The gardens at the airport are more than just token green patches, thrown together by civic architects “because we think it might be a good idea to soften this concrete monstrosity, but let’s not go overboard.” They are the real deal – masterfully designed to create a restful mood for the weary traveler. I found it puzzling that just two other people were enjoying the lush oasis while hundreds walked busily overhead. A handful of airport workers stood on the outskirts, quietly smoking and drinking coffee. A young Japanese man sat nearby, head bowed, pecking energetically with chopsticks at a carton of rice.
I wandered to a dark, jungly area where I lay on my back on a concrete bench and did spinal stretches. As I unrolled and lay resting under the dark sky, the white bird feathered softly down through the trees and dropped out of sight in a thicket. I snapped pictures of the palms overhead.
I got up and walked to the boarding area. The music system was playing “Every Child a Promise,” a sweet mele by Robi Kahakalau:
In every child there lies a promise
There’s great potential in their hearts and minds
They only need a little kindness
Patience and guidance to help them fly….
In every child a promise
Give them a chance and see
Each one is very special
Be part of their dream.
In every child lies our future
Teach them the past so they can find their way
Life’s greatest lessons come from sharing
Each child through knowledge will shine one day.
In every child a promise
Give them a chance to see
Each one is very special
Be part of their dream
In every child there lies a promise.
There’s great potential in their hearts and minds.
So if we show our love with kindness
Patience and guidance they will fly.
In every child a promise
Let’s show them we believe.
Each one is very special.
Let them live their dream.
Not the sort of music you’re likely to hear at LAX, SFO, or JFK.
On Kauai, the locals often asked if I lived there. When I mentioned this to my landlady, Judy Roth, she laughed. “Yeah, you look like a typical laid-back Hanalei type.” I wondered if the days I’d spent on the beach, drifting in the heartfelt strains of Keola Beamer’s slack-key guitar, had changed my vibe, or if my aura had shifted while cruising face-down in Tunnels Lagoon, soaking in Hawaii until my fingers puckered. At any rate, Kauai was healing, but strangely, Honolulu was bliss.