When I am weary,
I remember a picture of my grandmother, Mary Uilani Kaumeheiwa Sodetani.
She is sitting on the puʻunene with her feet up
Her long legs stretched out toward the ʻAuʻau Channel
Her blue bandana
Her long, brown arms clasped gently around her stomach
Her eyes looking into her beloved yard.
Once as a young child, after some nasty comments my grandfather said to her,
and after his swearing that stuck out to my young ears
as sounding very much like the way my father talked to my mother,
I asked grandma, "why do you let him talk to you like that?"
Her eyes were tearless, steady. She looked at me and the sides of her eyes crinkled
and her mouth, in the side smirk said,
"I just let it go one ear, and come out the other."
I thought as a kid it was a way of forgetting. As she stared into her yard in that picture, I always thought it was what Sandra Cisneros described in House on Mango Street, "My Name,"
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.
But thinking about it 50 years later. It is not about forgetting, or even sadness.
It is none of that.
What that means to me now is more about healing my naʻau
protecting it from any sadness, grief, violence.
Tutu and I, we come from generations of abuse,
but she did not buckle or let it crush her. She would say we are not victims.
Unlike other long married couples I see who end up in different bedrooms,
my grandparents continued to hold on to each other in their same bedroom
for the rest of her life.
She passed peacefully in the same bed with my grandfather by her side
holding her hand.
That kind of love does not have time for weariness or holding on
instead of going to empty, letting it come in one ear and go out the other.
When I get weary,
I go to that place of emptiness and quiet contemplation.
I look out at the ʻāina that feeds my soul.
I go to the shore or into the water, not to swim or surf,
but to float with my face skyward
watching the clouds drift over.
Mostly, I remember Tutu ma who would not waiver in her conviction to aloha ʻaina
to be the feeder of her family
spiritual but not religious
loving and stern
I going pinch you but I going hug you more hard
We acknowledge the violence
But let it come through and out of us without sitting in it
It is our own form of resistance
She teaches me always, over and over again,
Do not bow down to the pain,
these words cannot bend your back
these stings cannot break our spirit
E kū, e kū, e kū forever and forever
let it be so.
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