WOOD CRAFTING: Installment #8 "Kaimalama Noa"

WOOD CRAFTING

Written by Mokihana Calizar
Copyright, 2009

Please enjoy the tale for your own pleasure,
but do not reprint it or copy it for any other purpose without permission from the author.

(see the sidebar for my contact info)

Grace is not a static ideal to be attained, but an active event of enormous transformation and significance. I like to think of grace as the experience of previously unrealized forms of elegance that arise in response to crisis. In that arising, all those involved are transformed. In moments of grace, new forms are churned into being out of chaos.

-from the essay "Gateways to Grace" by K. Lauren de Boer,
used with permission from the author

Kaimalama Noa

Twin off-springs are graced with nearly equal talents, memories and physical form. As in all Creation though, no two Any are precisely replicated. It simply was neither possible nor desirable. Creation is all about the Many variations and combinations of light and dark, smooth and rough, known and unknown, small and grand and on and on. The delight of Creation lives in the art of becoming. Wood Crafters are one of a billion forms of becoming, and in my life as a song teller, the memory of my parents’ first adventure as sleuths in a Cosmos when winds went missing exemplifies Variation.

Kaimalama Noa is my uncle, twin brother to my father and father to twins Dontanea and Ane`e. I know this story is birthing characters like bubbles blown from a human child’s wand. Fret not dear readers and listeners by the time my story is done the names will be as comfortable as fleece. Kaimalama like my father Freeilll was graced as Grey in their covey of the Islands. Grey are the beings that invite a blending factor in a covey’s history, seasoned with the possibilities of something yet to be like mixing total darkness with complete light. These two brothers were warmed not in tree top as was my mother and her sister. Coveys of Wood Crafters on islands such as the Seven Sisters are often cave dwelling beings with nests made from small ocean buffed stones, pohaku, bits of limu dried on the sandy shores of the ocean and emptied shells that no longer housed living folk. Like all twins the memories of All that has been and the visions of things to come were poured into Freeilll and Kaimalama Noa. Every nuance of care was given equally and the destiny unique for each brother found a place within the coils of the growing babes. Parenting is the most important life of a Wood Crafter, preserving and ensuring the health of two new to the covey, the ultimate reward of life. A hundred cycles is a very long time to live by your Great Planet standards, and yet for a Wood Crafter, it is at that time many Wood Crafters begin there destiny – mating and warming a brood of two.

Though all the care in the Cosmos was taken and intention blessed with clarity, a very tiny over-sight took place in the building of their nest. A bit of drift wood no bigger than a blink was woven into the bowl of the nest just beneath Kaimalama Noa’s violet shell. Over the ninety moon risings and sunsets, a very tiny barnacle unseen in the process of nest building, grew from the surface of the tiny bit of driftwood as well. The unsuspecting Wood Crafters had collected a living creature and brought it into the mix of warming. The short version of a story that will reveal itself further as the song is told, is this: Kaimalama Noa and that barnacle become intimately coiled and during the soft shell stages of growing into a Wood Crafter my uncle had also absorbed the memory of a being whose destiny was to cling to survive.

The brothers grew strong and graceful as young Grey. Their places in the covey were never entitlements they were poured with equal stores of humility as well as pride. Soon after the full moon of his eightieth cycle when Kaimalama Noa’s son Dontanea was beginning to spin nets and fly with his father on short journeys, Kaimalama Noa began hiding part of his catch. In a cave known only to him, Freeilll Noa’s twin began a cache of the most prized fish: The striped red, a pair of candle nose, a long tailed pirate fish. He was careful to take one or two fish at first. And yet, the horde of precious fish grew and the cave filled to capacity. “Hording” or taking more than was needed for one day’s eating was unheard of in the covey of Noa. There was no need, there was always plenty because no more than was necessary was the Creators’ agreement.

One agreement un-kept can be forgiven. One agreement un-kept for cycles on end changes things. Kaimalama Noa’s cave of hording had begun to change things. His secret began to change his temperament first. His mate Leyla noticed how his laughter no longer filled the shoreline. She questioned him when a small debate about tides and kapu turned him red-faced and angry when ordinarily, a debate was usually an invitation to a very good time. “What was that about? Since when does a question about tides send you into such a fury?” Leyla Noa could charm the scales off a cod fish, and had a way of softening Kaimalama like no one else. The fact that his mate felt the need to cajole him from his disposition alarmed him. Somaia of the South had questioned the change in direction for the up-coming netting. Kaimalama was forced to make changes to the netting. The secret cave had grown to nearly triple the size of his original cache, and to expand the cave meant tampering with the shape and fittings of the reef. “It’s really nothing. Somaia is getting old and losing his feel for the way tides move with the season. I should have answered him with more grace. That is something I can do.” The explanation seemed to satisfy Leyla and relieved Kaimalama. That was just the beginning though, one secret, a small lie, a cover-up.

By the time Dontanea perched himself with his small-eyed net that full moon cycle just passed, the changes to the reef had become noticeable perhaps not to the eye, but most certainly to the claw. A fisherman’s footing is sure based on the familiar lay of reef under his talon. Like a blind one maneuvering in darkness all the time, a fisherman with net will trust his throw to his footing. Unbeknown to all but the twin who had internalized the destiny of a barnacle, the reef’s changes were throwing more than this son into an ocean of change. “Makani!” The polyps of the reef shouted from the outcroppings throughout the wall of the Seven Sisters. "Kaimalama Noa has taken thousands of our kind into a cave beyond our calling. They cannot hear us, and they cannot call to us. Fish families are missing their kin as well, and it is not to the feeding that loss has come. They have received no prayers in exchange for lives. Their kin are simply missing, just as ours are.” The winds Makani are inseparable companions to the ancient polyps of the Cosmos reefs. They were among the first birthed and named and on that night of the full moon Dontanea’s slip was a claw placed onto what ought to have been a familiar hold. The rogue wind was in reality, a gasp, an inhalation when the winds turned to seek the polyps taken without permission.