EARTH DAY AT GAIA TEMPLE

Review by Raydiance Joy Grace

Photographs by Ben Geo 

Puna Palisades ; Panel on Food Sovereignty, Food Forest, Food as Medicine, Seed and Plant Party, Music & Potluck; Tuesday April 22

Video: Dayla Soul  

Bringing it all back home, Earth Day is every day in your backyard with your neighbors all cooperating by sharing seeds, planting them together, and sharing food and music afterwards. An intimate gathering of friends in a beautiful aircrete dome, acoustically divine, everyone playing in surrounding gardens with inter-generational, interspecies participants having a land stewardship day together. The best way to honor our Earth mother and each other is with reverence and joy in sharing our bountiful plant gifts so abundant in Hawaii. 

All in all, it was a very sweet, joyful, and friendly experience connecting with my neighborhood Ohana.

Bruce observed how nature works,  “We are all gardeners dancing together with everything that is already here; Sharing with our neighbors what we have and they have. A food forest, simply put, is the intelligent placement of plants.” In our interview, Bruce further stated,  “Nature is an intricate complex living organism that goes back to the Gaia theory. All of its parts are living, sentient, interrelated, interconnected beings on their own. We being the most empowered species within that system, our job is to create beneficial relationships between all of those parts of this intricate, elegant system. For example, no one tree exists alone because it has all these interconnections with the soil, bacteria, mushrooms, and communications with other trees and plants. Our job is just to be more sensitive by observing what’s already happening and understanding that nature has had 4.8 billion years of making this a living planet. The things we need to survive, oxygen, water, food, medicine, beauty, and building materials, we can derive those in a way that works with nature to get our needs met in a way that creates a mutually supportive ecosystem service. We can create more oxygen, more soil, more habitat that creates more biomass that sequesters more carbon that filters out more toxins, etc. What I am saying is that using the tools of permaculture, working with nature and biological systems, we are using our mental powers to be the master designers of existence. Permaculture is based on a pretty simple set of principles derived from the way natural systems work, and it also applies to social systems in how we organize our community.  Just as no one tree exists alone, we evolved to live in a community and to work together to get our needs met!”

Bruce Horowitz’s next permaculture course will be in winter  on the Hamakua Coast of Hawaii

Contact: [email protected]

Hajar stated, “My name in Arabic means sculptor of stone, and I am a builder who created the ‘aircrete domes’, who is moved by the mystical dimensions of life. After the accidental loss of my brother, I went through the dark night of the soul. I recovered using hypnotherapy, which led to studying shamanism. The awakening of my inner life led me to find Kahlil Gibran as my spirit father guide. I kept a daily meditation with him, which led to writing a message from my spirit father and mother, called the voice of love. It turned into the ‘Return of the Prophet’. Before all this happened, I had witnessed a miracle working with my shaman teacher. I asked myself what would I do if I could perform a miracle, and I said I would write the ‘Return of the Prophet’. Voila, without writing an email or making a single phone call, a man walked up to me on the beach in Thailand and said I heard you wrote a book! One year later, it was in 40 countries and 12 different languages. Wow, that was miraculous! I asked myself what I would do now if I could perform a miracle just like the last time. I would solve the need for affordable housing for my community, my tribe. I’ve always loved living in community, and housing is the basis of community.”

“It was pure magic! I made up the word ‘aircrete’ because that is the material I was going to use, and called my vision ‘Domegaia’. Just like that, people all over the world heard of ‘aircrete’ and ‘Domegaia’ and were building ‘aircrete domes’. I organized trainings on how to build ‘aircrete domes’, which created a global community. I have learned that when I align myself with service to something bigger than myself, my life works like magic. If all I am thinking about is myself, and I go out to get a job to pay my bills,  that can be a mundane existence. If I do some soul searching, find something meaningful, purposeful, and I can dedicate myself, somehow, there are forces that align with you. People will also support you if you are doing something that they care about, too.”

Bruce also directed the UNH Sea Grant Extension Service and started several coastal parks in Hawaii and Micronesia. Designed and directed the UH Office of Sustainability, and wrote and helped pass the nation’s first ozone protection legislation.

 “Bruce recalled that the first idea of Earth Day emerged in 1969  with Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin senator who was concerned with the oil spill in Santa Barbara, the use of DDT, and other toxic environmental issues. Gaylord recruited a graduate student and organizer at Harvard, Denis Hayes, plus activists like Bruce Miller decided to do a “teach-in” to make students aware of the environmental issues. Bruce was working on his PHD at UNH, and he coordinated the classrooms in New Hampshire. Denis picked a group of 22 students from different universities, including Harvard, to talk about the environment in their classrooms. These students built teacher support for this idea in as many classrooms in public and private schools as possible.  When the idea first started in September, by April 22, the date picked to have “Earth Day; it blossomed from 23 teachers to 20 million people interested in participating.” 

As a concerned person who wants to support a sustainable environment, I asked Bruce Miller to tell us, as an “environmental activist,” what each person can do to manifest “Earth Day” in their life every day.

Bruce’s reply was, “That’s an excellent question, and there are many things each of us can do.  However, the bottom line is that whatever the issue is, we are not going to get traction unless we have a government that works!  We can pick up the litter off the beach, and we can do a lot of recycling, but we are not going to stop the waste or destruction if we don’t have laws. We need a law to ban plastic. We can stop using plastic, but until there is a law, it’s going to keep being used. That’s what happened on the first “Earth Day”. We passed the Clean Air Act,  the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. These acts were necessary to make the kind of changes we wanted to have happen. One thing everyone needs to do is to vote in every local, state, and national election, and vote democratic. How to get more people to vote, especially the young people who are distracted by their cell phones? We need to find a way to positively support a young leader like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who encourages young people to be more politically active. That is the top thing we have to do in addition to protesting. Also, be more self-sufficient by having a garden and raising chickens for eggs, we promote independence from the system. By boycotting stores that don’t support DEI, we are using our economic leverage to make a statement, and by selling our stocks to companies that don’t support the environment. Let’s stay focused by fighting back!”

Amara stated, “La’akea is a community that started 20 years ago by a group of people who met at a ‘culture camp’ who were interested in emotional intelligence and how to get along together and have good relationships. They said this if fun doing it at camp, but how can we do it all the time, and they came to Hawaii and bought some land. I have never wanted to live alone, as I was aware of the ‘epidemic of loneliness’ caused by the change from the tribal/village living dynamic to the separation into smaller and smaller family units. It is also more difficult if you want to grow your own food to do it alone. I wanted to live in a community that employed the principles of permaculture, which became our central idea to teach, and we have taught many permaculture design courses in the past. We have 11 members and trial members in a tight-knit group focused on ‘social permaculture’, so all these principles that apply to permaculture and the land, we wanted to figure out how to apply them to humans getting along together. I figured out early in my life that what makes everything fall apart, relationships, businesses, and communities, is emotional problems. People do not know how to handle their emotions or how to release their emotions safely, and not dump them on other people. I’ve made it my goal in life to learn how to do that by teaching people peer counseling and other communication skills. We study that specifically at La’akea, that’s a big part of what we do and why we have been there for 20 years. We understand what happens when someone gets triggered and how to help them. It is my heart’s calling to help people understand their emotions and work with other people’s emotions to help each other. I also recently learned that trees not only emit oxygen but also a chemical that makes us happy. I believe it is easier to have healthy relationships when you are in nature, around trees, and living on your land. It supports your health. For me, it is more difficult to feel healthy in the city with all the electro-magnetic fields and absence of nature, and still feel happy and open.” 

“He aliʻi ka ʻāina, he kauwa ke kānaka”

The land is chief, the people are itʻs servants

-ʻŌlelo noʻeau (Hawaiian proverb). 

This Hawaiian proverb is the essence of understanding the relationship between the Hawaiians and their Aina (land) as quoted by Kealahilahi Verschuur. She has always been interested in indigenous cultures, so when she first came here, the Hawaiian culture was so present and visible, she wanted to learn as much as she could, and she joined a Hula class. Thus began her journey as a Hawaiian cultural practitioner and advocate. She received a Hawaiian name, which helped her to embrace the culture from the inside out. Kealahilahi is a lifelong student and supporter of Hawaiian culture and believes her greatest contribution is by modeling love and willingness to learn the traditions, inspiring respect for Hawaiian values. 

Kealahilahi’s joy and connection to the aina and the feeling that she belongs here come from the Hawaiian practice called ‘malama the land’.  “Mālama ka’aina” is a Hawaiian phrase that means “to take care of the land”. It embodies the spirit of land stewardship in Hawaii, going beyond a simple environmental ethic to encompass deep cultural, social, and ecological connections with the land. This practice is at the core of indigenous Hawaiian culture and guides Hawaiian sovereignty politics.  Kealahilahi has a small homestead in Seaview and plants as many native plants as she can to give back to the land to restore the original indigenous flora and remove the invasive species that were brought here by Westerners.  Kealahilahi shared, “I  believe that you can’t have an Earth Day without honoring the Earth that you live on. I wanted to contribute to Marly’s Earth Day by making sure the native Hawaiian plants were represented.”

The Kalo plant is called the mother plant, being the most significant in Hawaii because of the sustenance and its spiritual connection to the land, and it is considered an ancestor of the Hawaiians.” A ‘canoe plant’, kalo, is one of the first plants brought by Polynesians to Hawaiʻi.  It is believed to have the greatest life force of all foods.

When I asked Marly what had inspired her to produce Earth Day at Gaia Temple, she responded, “I had come back to Hawaii this winter to plan and host an 8-week incubator called ‘Aloha Aina’ that was to be held at an eco-village to bring people from my global community here. Hawaii has incredible resources with teachers and projects in a living laboratory of how we can live a regenerative life in harmony with others in a community. I met 2 people who supported my project: Tomas Mendola, host of Gayatri Mantra chanting in Seaview, who helped inspire this Earth Day event. Tomas shared his vision of food sovereignty manifesting in the community by people working together, gardening in their yards, and demonstrating neighborhood support for each other. The other person who inspired me was Bruce Miller, who is an environmental activist, as I am, so we hit it off. He wanted to do something special for Earth Day, create a big movement. He inspired me because of how much he was suffering from the Trump administration defunding the different agencies that he has committed his whole life to fighting for the rights of nature. I wanted to show Bruce that there are people who still care, that there still is hope, and we can come together for a good cause. I talked to my community members, and they were on board with Hajjar Gibran, who owns the land here. He has been wanting to create food sustainability, and he offered a financial donation to cover some costs. I prepared for Earth Day by taking a hydroponic workshop that Robert Golden of Puna Rising invited me to participate in, and he gave me a scholarship. I planted over 1,000 seeds so we would have something to plant on Earth Day, then people started showing up with keiki starts, their musical instruments, and food to share.”

Marly was asked how she would recommend having Earth Day every day in our lives. She responded by saying, “Connect to the land that you are living on; connect to the earth-based traditions of the people that have been here for generations. Here in Hawaii, we are enmeshed in a culture that engages with the elements, including the sun, the water, and the earth. In the Hawaiian Language, each vowel represents a different element.  You can celebrate Earth Day by having a deeper sense of recognition and reciprocity with the natural environment and the cultural heritage of those who have been stewards of this land.