A good day for going with the flow

22 01 2010

A good day, yesterday. Finished another painting. Caught up with Naomi at the park. Introduced baby and tried our luck at restaurant. Ate pasta with my friend Jan. Bought some starter veggie plants. Even put them into the ground. Every day, almost, my health improves. For now I’m simply going with the flow.

The Rope Swing

The Rope Swing. Painted at Kalaeokaoio Beach Park, Kaaawa. It’s historical. The swing is gone.

My friend Naomi. A painter and a sculptor. I hadn’t seen her since before Thanksgiving. February’s around the corner. Punahou Carnival time! and we compare art notes. She’ll have six of her whimsical ceramic sculptures at the carnival Art Gallery, and I’ll have two oils. As a featured artist, she gets to start with more than two pieces in the show. I think she’s a featured artist because her work always sells! Way to go!

Lunch with Jan. I had a lunch date. Until I’m driving again, DH is my chauffeur. I said, just bring baby along, I really want to see Jan. If it becomes unmanageable, then go on ahead, I’d take the bus home. You see, we were not sure how it would work out. The restaurant. At 8 months the baby is starting to express herself and crawl about. As the adults traded our latest stories over pasta, baby sat and ate so very nicely, checking out the other diners. She really is Miss Marvelous, already preferring shopping and going out with the girls!

The garden. To the 5 gallons of vermicast (worm poop) that I harvested and stirred into a section of the garden, I added okra, eggplant, celery, sage, lettuce, and mint. We still have beets, kale, basil, rosemary, garlic chives, salad greens, sweet potatoes, turmeric, and last season’s eggplant. I love it. To your health ~ Rebekah

Copyright 2010 Rebekah Luke

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Let it snow!

2 12 2009

Where does a Hawaiian island girl go on vacation? To places where it is cold and snowy. To places where I can wear clothes! In a few days I’ll be on my way to central Europe to visit the Christmas markets where I know it will be very cold.  I am wishing for snow.

Somewhere along the river cruise route from Germany to Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary there might be some of that falling white fluffy stuff. Maybe in Salzburg, Vienna, Bratislava, or Budapest? I’ve got my snow boots packed! In the meantime, our WordPress host is accommodating by snowing on Rebekah’s Studio. Cool, huh? (pun intended)

Here’s a picture of a picture of my very first snowman the year I declared, as an adult, that I wanted a winter vacation. It was the first time I deliberately traveled to a cold place. My visit to Anchorage, Alaska, coincided with the Fur Rendezvous festival in Anchorage.

Heather and Sean showed me how to build a snowman in Alaska

A couple of seasons before that, it snowed in the mountains on the San Francisco peninsula in California during the coldest winter since such-and-such year. I was working for Sunset magazine at the time. That winter I remember the first snowball thrown at me at Yosemite National Park where the waterfalls were frozen and the scenery was gorgeous-crisp and quiet.

Throughout our 25 years of marriage, DH and I often visited his parents, brother’s and sister’s families in Pennsylvania during the winter holiday, so often that my friends would ask if I ever went anywhere else besides Pennsylvania.

The last December we went to the East Coast, before this one, was to see his parents at their funerals within two weeks of each other. We huddled under the falling snow and placed orchid lei on the ground in the church’s memorial garden where we buried their ashes.

One weekend we took the train from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. We stayed at the Pen Arts building that is the headquarters for the National League of American Pen Women, the members’ clubhouse. The staff went home for the weekend, and the mansion was ours. To trek around in the snow the next morning, though, we first had to get out of the front door. Thank goodness DH remembered how to shovel the steps and to say, “Yes, thank you!” when a man came by to ask if he should salt the sidewalk.

If you have to live in wintry weather all the time, I’m sure it could be more tiresome than romantic. But if you are born and reared in Hawaii as I was, it’s a novelty.

When I was in Osaka, Japan, one February for the opening of the Oceania exhibit at Minpaku (the National Museum of Ethnology) at Senri Park, Professor Shimizu regretted to tell me, when I asked, that it probably would not snow. A few minutes into lunch, he was really surprised to see the white flakes falling outside the dining room window. But I wasn’t.

Here is the link to Minpaku. The photo you see is an exact replica of Hale Kuai Cooperative store with authentic Native Hawaiian made products in Hauula, Oahu, that I co-founded with Ka Lahui Hawaii. How it got there as the Hawaiian part of the permanent Oceania exhibit at the museum is an amazing story, a real memoir that I’ll share with you someday.

I say it’s fitting that WordPress bless this blog with snow. Please enjoy it warmly in front of your computer! I’m planning to send holiday posts while abroad.

Copyright 2009 Rebekah Luke

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View of the Koolau Range and the sea

23 11 2009

Another view of the gorgeous mountains of the Koolau Range on Oahu is off my easel and waiting for its protective varnish coat and frame. I’m so thrilled that it’s finished, I want to show it to you.

On Sunday we found some time to relax. Here’s a familiar scene of repose at the beach: DH and Alice Brown by the sea.

Sunday at the Beach

Copyright 2009 Rebekah Luke

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Keeping up on sovereignty issues

23 10 2009

Three live panel discussions on the status of Hawaiian sovereignty will be held tomorrow, Saturday, Oct.  24, at the UH Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, 2645 Dole Street, in Honolulu, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. They’re free to the public. For those interested, this will be a good opportunity to catch up and become more informed. As filmmaker Anne Keala Kelly noted (see my 10/9/09 post “Wrongful occupation of Hawaii”), the Hawaiian activists are on the map, but they are all over the map.  I’m planning to attend some of the talks so I can make some informed decisions for myself. The Hawaiian Studies center is a safe environment, and all are welcome. Some details about the speakers and the topics are on the Calendar of Events page of the following website:

kalahuihawaii.wordpress.com

A hui hou! Malama pono!


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Why write? why paint? why heal?

15 10 2009

Rebekah’s Studio features old-fashioned letters, paintings and healing. Why write? Why paint? Why heal?

In the current 42-day world gratitude experiment shepherded by Stacey Robyn, the meditation for Day 27 is “Writes of Passage.” The suggestion is to ponder, “Who am I grateful for?” and write a letter to thank this person without the pressure that it needs to be delivered (because it doesn’t).

Stacey Robyn notes that psychology professor Peterson of the University of Michigan gives students a homework assignment now and then of writing such a gratitude letter, a belated thank you note, if you will. The letter writing “provides long-lasting mood boosts to the writers.” The professor says his students feel happier one hundred percent of the time.

Lately I have been trying to locate a certain Alan who was a fan of my oil paintings when I first started exhibiting my work. He would see the announcements in the paper and show up at the openings. Passing by one day he saw me painting on location at Kaaawa Stream and pulled up along the side of the highway. He cheerfully called out the window, “Let me know when you’re finished with that one, I’d like to see it.”

The painting he admired

The painting he admired

As it turns out, this was quite some years ago, and after a long pause in painting I pulled out the canvas just this spring and completed it. I remembered Alan and set out to contact him. It’s a wonder to me how I remembered his name—his first name, and then after a couple of days, his last name. No luck in the printed phone directory, and initially nothing familiar in various searches on the internet.

My research brought me to a blurb and photo from Hawaii Fishing News, reporting and depicting a fisherman with the same last name and looks who had caught a 100-plus-pound ulua fish in the summer of 1999 and who thanked Alan for his help. Being tenacious in my research, I contacted HFN who kindly gave me the fisherman’s phone number. I left call back messages twice, but no one rang back.

Still wanting to reach Alan, I took to searching the internet again. Last night I came across an esoteric article by T. Castanha, “Aia Na Ha’ina I Loko o Kakou (The Answers Lie Within Us),” concerning the “Boricua Migration to Hawai‘i and Meaning of Caribbean Indigenous Resistance, Survival and Presence on  the Island of Boriken (Puerto Rico).”

The article is interesting to me for its insight on the situation of the indigenous peoples of Boriken and the Hawaiian Islands both. The paper was presented in Hilo at the 1999 World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education.

More intriguing to me was that the author dedicated his presentation to his friend, brother and roommate, who recently passed on, the article stated, his friend who had the same name of the Alan I was looking for.

There, then, was the answer for me.

And here, now, is my gratitude letter to a faithful fan: Mahalo, Alan, for encouraging my art. Perhaps our paths will cross again.

Copyright 2009 Rebekah Luke

In a Reiki healing session, we thank our Reiki masters in spirit from the heart. Like writing a gratitude letter, Reiki can help one feel happier. For more information, click on Reiki Healing by Oelen in the menu bar.


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Wrongful occupation of Hawaii

9 10 2009

Anne Keala Kelly has made a very disturbing documentary film entitled “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i” that all Hawaiians and Hawaiians at heart should see. It is so disturbing that at the end of last night’s screening, when the house lights came up and Keala asked the audience for questions, there was dead silence in the Paliku Theatre of Windward Community College.

“Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i” is so disturbing that it won the Best Documentary 2008 Award of the Hawaii International Film Festival. That was last October. Now, ten more minutes have been added, and the DVD is now available for $20 to help the filmmaker recoup her expenses.

Our family bought two copies. You may go to nohohewa.com for information about future screenings or to purchase the DVD. Keala will take her guerrilla film to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque on October 12, 2009, and to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma on October 15, 2009. Admission is free.

For more information by the filmmaker, visit nohohewa.com

For more information by the filmmaker, visit nohohewa.com

Quoting the DVD cover notes of “Noho Hewa”:

Hawai‘i, thought of by most as the 50th state, is, according to international law, an independent country under an illegal and prolonged occupation by the United States. Through this occupation, Hawai‘i has become home to the largest military command on earth. It also has more endangered species’ habitats per square mile and is the location of more open field tests of genetically modified organisms than anywhere else in the world.

Beyond the illegitimacy of the U.S. presence in Hawai‘i, “Noho Hewa” looks at the methodical removal of Hawaiians from their homeland. The film considers how the erasure of Hawaiian people and history through government sponsored acts of desecration is central to an ongoing agenda to ethnically cleanse Hawai‘i of the Kanaka ‘Oiwi, the indigenous population of Hawai‘i.

If you are alive at all, “Noho Hewa” will shock you. I am Hawaiian. I consider myself an activist. My Hawaiian friends, neighbors, citizens of Ka Lahui Hawaii, and my extended family are in this film. This piece of journalism—it’s excellent—has woken me up even more to the truth about Hawaii, my beloved home. If you can, share this information with others and decide what you will do. It will take all the courage you have. Mahalo to Anne Keala Kelly for hers.

Copyright 2009 Rebekah Luke

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Sweet memories and coming home, part 2

11 09 2009

For a time I joined the morning water exercise class at Pohai Nani, a vibrant senior living community in Kaneohe, which led to my  practice of Reiki there for the residents and staff. One day, more than five years ago, Judy who coordinated activities showed me the little chapel and told of a dream to refurbish it.

I saw a cute, tiny room with an arched ceiling and pews for no more than about 8 to 12 people, if that many. The glass doors on the side slid open to overlook a small enclosed garden patio.  A hallway entrance was plain and dim. I agreed the chapel could used some refreshing.

Judy mused, wouldn’t it be nice to have the chapel decorated with a painting, something Hawaiian, to brighten the area? Maybe something in the hallway to welcome the residents, maybe even something in the chapel itself? I envisioned a fresco-like painting on a wall.

If it was to be Hawaiian, then the only person I knew who could do such a project was Ipo Nihipali, a Native Hawaiian artist known for her paintings of native birds and who had just completed a large outdoor painting at the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Later I called Ipo to ask if Pohai Nani could contact her directly, and I gave Judy the information. I moved on to another project and didn’t see Ipo until this summer at a Hawaiian civic club celebration.

“Rebekah! Rebekah Luke! I have been looking for you!” Ipo exclaimed. She grasped my hand in both of hers. They were trembling and deliciously warm. “I finished it. I finished the painting!” Ipo said she had gotten the commission after all. She said she prayed about the piece and allowed the kupuna (elders) to guide her work. “We’re having the blessing on July 22nd, and I want you to come!” I assured her I would be there.

As soon as one steps onto the breezeway leading to the main entrance at Pohai Nani, the new painting beckons. It was decided that the imagery grace the lobby rather than the chapel for all to enjoy. Entitled KO‘OLAU! the painting is exquisitely executed and depicts our mountain cliffs, the forest, native birds, plants, a waterfall and stream. The piece is enhanced with real pohaku (stones), native ohia lehua branches, a sprouting coconut, ti leaf bundles, and arrangements of tropical ginger beneath the painting, creating a three-dimensional set. It is as if you can step right into the painting.

Recalling Ipo’s words at the ceremony, the manao (thoughts, ideas) for the  painting is something like this:

Do you remember what it was like, when you were a child, to swim in the pool and play in the forest? Look, you can do that again. Come. Leave your earthly possessions here, and go to the other side. Look at the mountains and see your ancestors. They are calling and waiting to carry you home once more. “Oh! Ko‘olau, my beloved rainbow of dreams.”

KO‘OLAU! is a magnificent work, amazing, and a miracle. Ipo will tell you that herself. That’s because she is legally blind (when she can see, it is as if she is looking through a glass of water), and she has Parkinson’s or Parkinson’s-like tremors. What a gift.

Mahalo e Ipo, my tita angel! Aloha no wau ia oe. ~ Rebekah

Artists Ipo Nihipali and her father Joseph Dowson at the blessing and dedication of "KO‘OLAU!"

Native Hawaiian artists Ipo Nihipali and her father Joseph Dowson at the blessing of KO‘OLAU!

Copyright 2009 Rebekah Luke

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