Kuleana

Gray morning today, warmer than the last two or three weeks. Winter in full tilt. Finally got some rain over night and the streets are again dark and wet. I've filled the bird feeders and they seem to be a hit with the the wrens and chickadees.

Dreams too, last night. All I remember is something to do with sailing. Just a feeling remains, a sensation like moist air or an echo of dissonant music far away. It is of an ordeal, though I can't place the nature of it or the content. There were people, disparate colors and sounds. There was talking and a ripe scent, too. There was an off-kilter angle of view, as if I were shooting film with a hand-held camera. It was a dream of imbalance, movement and transition, nothing established. Nothing defined.

And no wonder. I'm about to engage in a very busy term with five classes and what may be around 70 students. I will need to be organized and deliberate. I will need to be ready for odd angles and cross-shots. I will need to be ready to learn from my students while engaging them, and this is the big trick: to listen and to challenge in the same moment.

This could also be a very creative term for me. I feel there is something big about to happen in the book, and I am unwilling simply to put it all on hold for my classes. I need to be writing. I need to be writing every day. One thought I had in my half-sleep this morning was that Drum is a book that needs be out in the world. The story cannot live alone anymore.

I believe this is an idea arising from Kim Stafford's book, 100 Tricks Any Boy Can Do in which he says it is not a book about his brother's suicide and not even so much about his brother: "It is a book about the tricks required to become a man." (176) The narrative balances his experience of loss against his understanding of the Hawaiian word, kuleana, which can be interpreted as the responsibility to become, making use of the abilities bestowed a person, fully human. This is my protagonist's plight as well my own.

It is all of our kuleana to realize the inevitable direction of our lives, no matter how much resistance posed by the inner doubter. A Buddhist might embrace the inner doubter as a necessary evil, a platform for active engagement. But the concept of kuleana seems to go beyond this; it is to act in spite of self-doubt, to tip a hat to Doubt, but to feed Potential what it needs to flourish and discover what there is to bring back to the community.

Okay, so I may be reaching a bit with kuleana, and I'm certainly not claiming to comprehend the word fully. But I am especially intrigued with the term also simply because it is Hawaiian. That I should be writing independently a story that is partially based on events in Hawaii, and that this very concept is what my character is most in need of: is this a coincidence? On one level I suppose so, but adding to it the context and thrust of Stafford's story and mine, it is perhaps a natural point of orientation for survivors of lost siblings.