Maui, Ghosts, Climate & Careers

Photo: Farhana Huq

After founding and running a nonprofit for 12 years, I found myself wanting to do anything but nonprofits. In fact, the farther I could get away from nonprofit work, the better. I had a list of highly viable potential career choices I would explore instead: storytelling surfer, shoe designer, organic farmer to name a few. I had just launched brown girl surf and farming seemed like an additional good idea at the time. Tilling the land and harvesting food was a far cry from sitting behind a computer writing grants or schmoozing donors. I thought I should start small. Perhaps just with a garden. Yes! That’s what I’d do!  When I thought of where or how to begin, I immediately thought of my friend Jenny.
 
Jenny is one of those generous souls with the flexibility of a gymnast but with a moral compass of an arrow. I met Jenny while we were studying classical Indian dance together in San Francisco in our 20s. Aside from sharing a love of dance arts, we also ended up sharing a common tendonitis injury (due to the eight pounds of bells we wore on our ankles stomping various rhythmic patterns of the dance with the bottom of our feet). Who knew when I introduced Jenny to Uli, my towering, burly, kinesiologist body worker with Ukrainian roots, that she would not only heal her tendonitis, but she’d also fall passionately in love with him.  They’d birth two babies and transport their life to Maui living on a land trust off the famous Hana coast. I told Jenny about my idea of coming over to visit and help design a garden and she was totally down for it. As I’m a person that learns best by doing, I considered this training as I navigated through my first major professional transition.  
 
Within weeks I had arrived at Jenny’s to acres of lush green land tucked away off a winding and increasingly elevated coastal highway. There was a modest single room structured house with jalopies out front. Yellow and greenish fruit were scattered all along the ground as if it had rained lilikoi and Surinam cherries the night before. There were apple bananas, chili peppers, rosemary, coconut, papaya, and jackfruit trees as well. The sun was blindingly bright and the backdrop of trees ranged in color from palm green to cedar pine. The black volcanic soil was so fertile that if you spit a seed in the ground, the earth would send back up a plant in a few days. The land had a power I had not felt ever before.
 
I was to camp out back in a tent Uli had pitched for me atop a wooden framed platform in front of hundreds of acres of wild forest. You could see remnants of a former civilization of sorts through the opening of the forest, as if once upon a time there had been roads paved through the grasses. Uli told me that if you traveled further into it, you would reach Maui’s deepest fishing seaport. I never went that deep into the forest, but kept to my tent platform and the open areas of grass and fruit trees behind the house.
 
During the day, we’d try to break up a small patch of earth with hoes. We tired quickly from the sun making progress at a snail’s pace. I don’t think we realized how difficult it would be to get a garden going with Jenny’s other competing priorities of tending to a family and earning income, not to mention having unreliable transportation and being so far up from town. At night, after helping Jenny prepare dinner and clean the kitchen, I’d walk down to the platform to my tent. I noticed the winds seemed to get more aggressive at night, rattling the platform and bristling the leaves of the trees. Sometimes it would rain. On one particular night, the winds got really wild and the platform shook. Only this time, it felt different. It started to periodically vibrate, as if a surge of electrical current was running through it. This was not a sensation I can say I had experienced ever before. I brushed it off as just part of the already odd weather patterns. I felt afraid to fall asleep. What is this energy? Where is it coming from?  Is there something here? I kept myself awake as long as I could before I eventually fell asleep.
 
The next morning, in my sleep hangover, I walked up the grassy hill to Jenny’s one-roomed house. In our morning conversation I told Jenny and Uli about my night and that it felt like there was something supernatural going on down there. They both looked at one another in a knowing way. Uli said I was not the first guest to have noted disturbances in the night down on that platform. He suggested wrapping an offering in a tealeaf to whatever energies were at unrest and to state my intention for being there, which was to help my friend make a garden. I ended up doing this hoping a ceremony of intention setting would settle the space a bit.   
 
The following night, the winds returned as usual and I lay on my sleeping bag wide-eyed and weary of the night, keeping myself awake for as long as possible. This time, when I peered out of my tent into the darkness of the night, I saw a strange floating light up by the house. My heart started beating harder and I could feel myself start to break into a mild sweat. My immediate thought was someone was on the property with a flashlight. Then I thought, I’m in the middle of nowhere, so maybe they are just gigantic fireflies like the ones that used to come out on summer nights in Jersey when I was young. My third and most logical explanation was that they were just an outside light fixture. To test my theory, I closed one eye and, looking over at the light, used my thumb to block the light. If the light doesn’t move beyond my thumb, then it’s likely a static house light. If it moves from behind my thumb, then it is definitely something else. As I covered the light with my thumb, it didn’t seem to move.  Phew! But when I opened both eyes and moved my thumb away, a second floating light appeared. My heart raced further. And then, just like that, they disappeared.   
 
The next morning, I walked up the grassy hill to the main house eager to share with Uli and Jenny my sightings. Jenny seemed to know exactly what I was talking about. “Yes!” she exclaimed! “And it looks like someone is walking around with a flashlight and then it just disappears,” she said. She went on to explain she had seen the lights as well on a different occasion, and freaked out thinking someone had come on the property. When she attempted to go out the sliding glass door of her house to investigate further, the lights would just disappear. Upon hearing this, I decided I’d sleep on the couch in the main house for the rest of the time beneath the loft where the family slept.    
 
In the days following the orb sighting, I learned a bit more about the story of the land behind where I had slept. According to neighborhood lore, the forest area was site of a farming village, the people of which were massacred by Kamehameha I as he attempted to unify Hawai’i. Clearly, energies were not at rest. Land was not at rest. Heck, I was not at rest! The land felt unsettled. And, it didn’t feel right for me to stay until the land received whatever it needed to be settled. So I cut my trip short, and headed over to the Big Island to stay with my friends Bryn and Danny, who lived a less off the beaten path lifestyle and whose land bore an array of flowers, fruits and trees, and seemed to welcome my stay with open arms.  
 
Jenny did eventually get the garden up and running after several years and amidst a few more orb sightings, which did eventually subside. She took her time to develop a reciprocal relationship with the land, listening to it and receiving visions over time on how the garden should take shape. She grew this interest into a career centered on gardening, permaculture and education with a dream still in tow to live reciprocally with the land. I never did manage to become a farmer. But I did become a storytelling surfer ;) and did manage to journey to far off places centering my work and life around the ocean.

Now, 12 years later, I find myself in a career evolution, feeling a calling again to the earth. This pull recently led me to attend San Francisco Climate Week, a week long event featuring everything from practical, hands on gardening and ecology education gatherings to panel discussions on the silver bullet solutions of carbon capture. The plethora of ideas and efforts around climate were wildly inspiring. Though the rush to find solutions to mitigate climate change and move us towards a zero emissions future has spurred a slew of innovations, technology and designs across various sectors, I can’t help but remember what Maui showed me so many years ago – that the land holds messages, life and powers that need to be felt to be understood. Perhaps it’s this lack of feeling that has gotten us to where we are in our relationship and reverence for the earth. Learning to take our time with the earth, nurture the earth and feel the earth is an equal, if not more important part of the solution to this crisis. To me, this is the most urgent relationship we need to move towards in order to create and preserve the planet we wish to see for ourselves and for future generations to come.

Inspired by travels to Maui, Hawai'i in 2012.

Farhana is an award-winning Social Entrepreneur, Executive Coach, Explorer, Terra.do Fellow and Founder of brown girl surf