I am an only child. I was 9 years of age when my parents decided to immigrate to the States. I remember the Dutch American liner and the nine day Atlantic crossing like it was yesterday. I was happy in an English Catholic school, a weekday morning altar boy in the big church downtown Bristol ages 7 & 8, involved in sports. Relocating to Indianapolis, Indiana, where my cousins (and sponsors) lived was not easy. I got beat up a lot. I was young in all my classes. 12 starting high school. 16 starting college. In high school I survived by getting involved in the audio-visual program, responsible for showing films in classrooms, recording concerts with the big Ampex reel to reel. I was in the classical league, translating Pete Seeger folk songs into Latin and performing them on the road in universities. The historical society, which took us all over Indiana. I was on the debate team. One particular topic left a deep impression on me: world population. I decided not to have kids.

In college, a small Benedictine school south of Portland, Oregon about 40 miles, I was a big fish in a little pond. Year by year, I edited the lit mag, the yearbook, the newspaper. I ran the art gallery, which had a reputation for showing established Northwest artists, such as Lee Kelly, the sculptor. I was given free rein to be as creative as I liked. It was a sanctuary for me. I got interested in aesthetics, starting with a freshman paper titled The Origin of Aesthetics in Greek Antiquity. I was preoccupied with “beauty.” I believed beauty held core answers for the human dilemma. I continued writing papers on beauty until finally, I wrote a very open piece which described how my thinking had shifted out of the Western mold to basic, primary questions, regarding color and form. One focus touched on beauty as expressed and valued in Pacific islands. Big women might represent wealth and fecundity, something that could be traced to neolithic statuary in Europe itself. In other words, my definition of beauty broadened enough to acknowledge every interpretation.

This tendency to seek out the core truths has served me well. My work in theatre was never narrowed to what I could hold in my hands (being a stagehand), or the pain in my knees from all the heavy scenery, or the grueling hours as the season wore on. The context was always much bigger, the greater goal of theatre, not necessarily appreciated by the actors themselves. The service to the community. The tradition of theatrical practice handed down over the centuries (alluded to above in the changing of makeup and sound)...the need for theatre. However, this was also a struggle for me, balancing the life of the working man with the timeless activity we call theatre.

Even in hula, the components are all there. The story telling. The illusion. The presentation. Tradition. Audience…not always easy for me because hula audiences, especially at a market or some other public venue, can be very distracted. My theatre experience was very rooted in punctuality and rules which sustained the illusion. I am just saying there is a faint connection for me between theatre and hula.

Regarding the land, my last two years of college were spent 12 miles off campus on acreage in the woods, on a creek. For a while, a group of us, through the college, formed a cooperative land maintenance group, taking turns going from place to place pruning, clearing, taking on other projects. My interest in land probably begins in those childhood summers in Ireland, left to wander the farms by myself, or follow my grandfathers as they went about their day, getting water for the house from the spring, weeding the cabbage patch, trapping rabbits, helping my uncle milk the cows, ride the cart to the creamery each morning, make the hay… Even in our postage stamp garden in Bristol, there was a garden, where I evoked the Arthurian knights with swords made from dried milkweed stalks, that sort of thing. So there was a romantic origin story that came with my involvement on the land. In practical, agrarian terms, the most significant thing that happened to me was working with my wife, Charlotte, who had a serious green thumb and a passion for growing everything, from shrubs to vegetables. We did it in the London clay a few streets away from the River Thames, and we did it extensively in Ashland, Oregon at the 2000 ft level on granite soil. Here in Hawaii, Charlotte went all out, and I cleared, turned the soil, planted and harvested accordingly. She died after several years of neglecting the garden, and I was confronted by what seemed like an unruly mess. Eventually I began to see how the trees we planted all those years ago had become canopies, providing shade. I started relaxing. Less fighting the unruly growth and more “as needed.” What I have come to appreciate is the importance of maintaining a green buffer, a place for trees and shrubs. A sanctuary. At the same time, I am introducing more and more plants and vegetation that have always been here, the ulu, kukui, ti, kupukupu fern, for example. And it is no coincidence that the pa hula or hula platform I built seems to blend in with the land, as if it has always been here.