Managing with Aloha

Ho‘okipa, the Hospitality of Complete Giving

I know of you.
I know that there is great wealth to be shared between us.
I have been very eager for July’s arrival, giving us a stage on which to do so.

“Wealth, thought the people old, is found not so much in your possessions, but in the ability to give generously of what you possess… The primacy of giving is best shown by two of the most important values in Hawaiian and other Polynesian societies, namely generosity, or lokomaika‘i, and hospitality, or ho‘okipa. The essential nature of both is the liberal giving of what you have. Such an act of generosity deserves the name lokomaika‘i, which means good heart.”
—Dr. George Hu‘eu Sanford Kanahele, scholar and historian, and author of Kū Kanaka, Stand Tall, A Search for Hawaiian Values

When I reflect back on the too-short time I had the great privilege of studying with Dr. Kanahele, the kupuna whom I credit most for catalyzing my own journey in learning the Hawaiian values, two of his teachings consistently emerge as the most insightful and long-lasting for me. One is how he defined sense of place, and his open-arms embrace for all who wanted to be of Hawai‘i. He was a welcoming and receptive man. The second is captured best in the quote above, taken from his seminal book about the value of hospitality. It is quite closely connected to the first, for his welcoming and receptive nature was an inseparable part of his aloha; his spirit lived from the inside generously shared outside.

As a result of Dr. Kanahele’s teaching, itself lokomaika‘i and given to me with the unending generosity of his good heart, I would define ho‘okipa with these words when it came time to publish a book of my own about the Hawaiian values;

Ho‘okipa is the hospitality of complete giving.
Welcome guests and strangers with your spirit of Aloha.

What I have learned in my practice of what I was taught, is that in sharing Ho‘okipa with others, we gain our own joy and we invest in our own well-being. “One of life’s greatest laws is that you cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening your own as well.”

Ho‘okipa, the complete giving of hospitality

Ho‘okipa is the value we will visit this month, intent on having it receive and bless us as both intentional learners, and as those who want more of this splendid gift to be ever-present, vibrant and giving in our lives.

A lifetime of living in Hawai‘i learning about Ho‘okipa has impressed this upon me; the key word in my own definition for Managing with Aloha is strangers. Aloha must be present and offered to others freely, no matter who those ‘others’ may be, and no matter how little you may know about them. You know of them, that is, of their humanity and therefore, of their greater capacity. You must trust in the good which innately resides within them, even if you have not yet experienced it. You must believe they are supremely worthy of all you have to give them until they prove otherwise. Even then, it may be they are not yet in their own place of best receivership, and if you are Mea Ho‘okipa, the host or hostess who embodies the lokomaika‘i of ho‘okipa, you can trust their time of best receivership will come.

Kamehameha the Great; King of my Ancestors

Today, June 11th, is a holiday in Hawai‘i.

It is Kamehameha Day; the day we celebrate the greatest king to have ever ruled our islands.

Growing up in Hawai‘i I thought of myself as more American than Hawaiian, for I was in kindergarten when my home became the 50th State. “Old men” still talked about the bombing of Pearl Harbor all the time, to impress on us what it had meant to them; all us kids had a story we’d heard from our grandfathers. If asked, we were expected to tell it with reverence.

One of my clearest childhood memories is of watching my teacher cry when John F. Kennedy was assassinated; she was a Catholic school nun, black habit and all, and I had never seen one of them cry before. At first we all just stared at her, equally shocked into silence. One by one, we started to cry too, because it just seemed like the right thing to do. Even the boys.

My parents were teenagers when World War II ended, and my dad fought in the Korean War before returning home to make my mom his bride. My mom would always tell us kids that our being born got him to be different, and whole again. He served in Viet Nam when I was in high school, relocating our entire family to Subic Bay in the Philippines to help with the war effort from there, until the last of our American troops left Viet Nam in 1973. As you can imagine, I went kicking and screaming leaving all my friends behind, but I was to be an American patriot same as my parents were, like it or not. During my school breaks I candy-striped in the hospital on base, and I’d listen quietly to the stories of the POWs that had made it to us for care; part of my responsibilities was simply to let them talk, receiving it as well as I could.

Today, one of my brothers is a Lt.Colonel in the Army, and I had written of his Red, White, and Blue Values when he served in Iraq.

So even for me, living in Hawai‘i all my life but for that brief stint in the Philippines, it is often hard to imagine that we were once a monarchy, under the rule of the amazing Kamehameha the Great. In Pauahi, Story of the Kamehameha Legacy, author George Hu‘eu Sanford Kanahele writes,

“No one surpasses Kamehameha the Great in leadership, historic achievement and lasting impact, or in having a transcendent vision for his people. He personified many of the qualities and skills that his people esteemed from ages past: physical prowess, fighting spirit, excellence and achievement, industry, integrity or pono, courage, discipline, wisdom and intelligence, or na‘auao. He demonstrated abiding faith in the sacred traditions, yet understood the forces of change; he brought about political stability and national unity; he maneuvered the ship of state skillfully through the turbulent seas of Western technology and commerce. Giants among men are recognized everywhere, so it is no wonder that this “Ka Liona o ka Pākīpika” or “Lion of the Pacific,” as Joseph Poepoe, the early twentieth century Hawaiian historian called him, has been ranked by foreign visitors and writers alongside Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and general Marquis de Lafayette.”

Other times, it is easy to see our heritage everywhere I look, and today, Kamehameha Day, is one of those reliable, and undeniably comforting times.

I do wish that all of you reading this could be here to celebrate with us. I will be outside most of today ignoring my phone and my computer, and enjoying this amazing place I call home. The child Kamehameha, was born only 36 miles from where I live, and you can imagine the celebration there today!

About King Kamehameha on Wikipedia.

Sources, Nudges and Elemental Truths

There is a beautiful posting at Elemental Truths, written by Reg Adkins of our Ho'ohana Community, and as the weekend approaches, I hope you will spend some time with it.

It is not too long, and you will be able to read it quickly. However before I offer you the link to click over, get out your favorite journal and a pen you love writing with, for you will want to capture your thoughts about it before you read, or do, anything else. That is why I say, spend some time with it. It is one of those kinds of opportunities that come to us for the learning of our Nānā i ke kumu:

Literally translated, Nānā i ke kumu means ”look to your source.” Seek authenticity, and be true to who you are. Keep your aloha at the surface of what you do daily, and celebrate those things that define your personal truths. In the Hawaiian culture, sense of place factors very deeply into this value, sense of place being defined as both the feel of a place, and the feel for a place.

Pronunciation Guide: Nānā i ke kumu (Nah-nah ee kay koo-moo)

The chapters in Managing with Aloha are meant to build on each other for best understanding of them, and Nānā i ke kumu is second to last because I felt it would mean more to you by the time you reached it. Many people have told me that it is their favorite one, (particularly those who are not managers, and I've often wondered about that).

Nānā i ke kumu is about self-awareness; about understanding who you are at a very elemental level. I would have chosen that last adjective had I never met Reg Adkins, and so perhaps it is very fitting that in thinking about Nānā i ke kumu today, I would send you to him, and to where he writes his own Elemental Truths in this way:

I’m not sitting with you to share with the expressions of my face, the gestures of my hands, the rise and fall of my voice and to put my hand on your shoulder. Because of this, I must build shared understanding between us with words, constrained by my limitations as a writer. If I choose my words with great care and you read with patience, we can come to be of one accord.

If I do my task well it will be as if I am gently nudging you along. In this way I can weave the in the cultures from which the message gets meaning. The meaning is only relevant in that context.
~ Reg Adkins

After I read his posting, I opened my own journal, and in part, I wrote a list of questions that I want to continue spending my own time with. As I wrote them, Nānā i ke kumu took hold of all my thoughts, claiming them, defining them, and making them perfectly right for me. That is what looking to ones source is; trust in your own elemental truths.

These were my own questions; I am happy to share them with you, however I'm placing them in the extended box of my home page here so that they will not influence you too early. I would recommend you read Reg's posting first to capture your own opportunity with Nānā i ke kumu. So here is that link;

Elemental Truths: A Gentle Nudge

Managing with Aloha and Sense of Place

Place.
It’s a powerful word.
More than that, Sense of Place is a powerful instinct and kind of emotional intelligence.

Place is much different than ‘location’ for it’s not just where we happen to be situated, or where our feet alone happen to be planted. Place moves as we move, and it reaches some very loving tendrils up into our souls and allows us to keep the very best of what it offers us. Then, we start to wear Place like we wear our skin; it is now becoming to us. Our new attachment to Place has been this gift of deeper character.

“The definition he shared with us for sense of place has always struck me as being concisely intuitive: He said that sense of place involves both the feel of a place, and the feel for a place. In our classes, he taught us that place (wahi in Hawaiian) is personally defined for people by their own “locational experiences.”

— taken from page 205 in Managing with Aloha. The “he” I refer to here is the late Dr. George Kanahele, a highly respected scholar and civic leader of the Hawaiian renaissance of the 1970’s, a renaissance which is still alive and thriving in Hawai‘i today.

Sense of Place is about feeling it.

Place is our context for so much of our lives, and it involves all our senses. It is in fact, very sensual. We feel it deeply, and therefore, we can also share it both instinctively and intimately.