Aloha Hawaii

My Manifestation:  What I asked for was to be around happy, healthy, high IQ people.  Interesting, creative people who are doing interesting things.  A month later I ended up in Hawaii.

Here's a 16 second video Diana shot of distant leaping whales out in the ocean  According to Diana because we witnessed this it meant we were on the right paths in our lives.  Cool.  She shot it from her phone and it hesitates for a bit before the leap.

It all started when I read several articles and saw the photos of the lava flows in Hawaii.   I e-mailed Adele, a woman I had met five years ago on Maui.  She'd told me then that she lived about 12 miles from the lava flow, in Pahoa on the Big Island.  She had given me her card and invited me to visit her.  I was impressed with her spirit and friendliness.  She told me she was off the grid (no electricity or internet) which bothered me before, but now I was craving someplace green and beautiful.  I was craving healthy, happy people,  Long story, short.  I decided to go visit Adele and learn about how she eats and lives.  She has no fat on her body.  What is her secret?

Above, the Big Island as we came in for a landing.  Below is Adele sitting on a lava "chair" and doing a yoga pose for me.  Adele is a violinist, yoga teacher, masseuse, and enthusiastic foodist.  By that I mean she loves to experiment with the amazing foods she grows on her jungle property.  It is one mile from the ocean and she took me to see the path to the lava formations that formed a mermaid pond for us to soak in.

The beautiful drive to Adele's road.

Below is my tent, under big tarps that protect me from the rain and sun.  At night I can hear the waves crashing on the lava beaches, the high pitched sound of the tiny local frogs - they sound like birds.  Once, the snorting of the wild pigs that forage around the area. The sound of giant palm leaves and coconuts crashing to the ground.  Tiny little red fire ants coming to visit - ouch!

Inside, my cot.  There was a lot of room inside and Adele bought a large tub to keep my clothes dry and a three drawer plastic night stand to hold my light and keep my paper stuff dry.  The humidity was intense.  I was always a little wet from sweat or rain.  It took me a week to get acclimated, sort of.

Below, Adele's house which she bought as a ruin and rebuilt.  It was originally built with mahogany planks, which give it a rich interior.

A view of the inside of Adele's house, looking at the kitchen.  The center room is the perfect room to do yoga classes and play music.  All the wood is mahogany.  Bob painted the floor brown but the rest of the wood is its natural color.

The house is open-air.  Many of the windows are screens.  Below, is the living room, opposite the kitchen.

Adele is completely off the grid.  She has a solar system that provides electricity, gas for cooking, water comes from the rain in a catchment system that filters her drinking water.  There is no heating or insulation because it's not needed. Below, a compost toilet in a small outdoor room where two walls are screens, keeping it smelling sweet at all times. 

The kitchen and the shower, below, provide the only hot water, coming from a hot water heater attached to the water tank.  When I arrived, they had been having a drought, not having rained for weeks.  Of course, that changed right away.  The shower was good, but there's no privacy except for the jungle.

Adele is the most creative food person I've ever met.  Many of her dishes are based on the coconuts that grow in profusion on her property.

Below, the makings of a smoothie.  A coconut, fresh from the tree, a star apple (brown), a rollinia, little bananas, a small hunk of ginger and the orange root is turmeric, which Adele grates into her sourkraut, smoothies, and vegetable stir-fries.  I love the taste.

The finished smoothie - yum.

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Adele grows her own everything. Below, a cacao pod, which is filled with 20 to 40 seeds.  When the pod turns a deep red it is ready to harvest.

These are the seeds, which she then allows to ferment, then she rinses them off and dries them under the pilot light on her stove.  After that, the skin can be peeled off and what you have left are the cocoa nibs, very tasty and healthy, ready to use in cooking.

A kidney bean chocolate cake - yum.  Very rich and made without flour.  No sugar, instead she put 10 drops of stevia into it.

Raw coconut and chocolate cookies that have been dried under her pilot light.  Double yum.

Adele and Bob in the background, and another weird fruit whose name I can't remember.  

Inside the fruit, very weird looking but sweet tasting and nice.  All the fruits I saw had large black seeds in them.  

 

If you want to learn the best way to open a coconut, here's Bob with a machete:

 http://youtu.be/MhRPr0YDf3g

Below is a singing group Adele took me to sing with in Hilo.  She has a beautiful voice and is fun to sing with.  She helped me with a song I wrote, singing it in a way I hadn't thought of.

Adele and a friend making music.  Her violin gives me goosebumps, it's so beautiful.

Above: Diana who took me swimming in the Mermaid pools and who shot the whale leaping video.  Diana reminds me of myself in that she's making her living selling jewelry at various craft fairs on the island.  When I quit being a computer programmer I started selling my jewelry, using beads,  Diana specializes in feathers, which I never got to photograph.

Below is the hala tree in front of my tent.  Hawaiian's use the leaves to weave baskets and mats.  I called it the penis tree.  

It's just a root growing down, but when I sat outside it was standing there in front of me looking very phallic.

Below, the warm pond.  A wonderful place for the locals to swim.  The ocean is too dangerous.  The waves crash against the sharp lava rocks and are scary.  There is one local black sand beach used as a nudist beach, but I never got there.

Below, Pahoa, the closest town, reminds me of an old western town with wooden overhangs that cover the walkways.

Below,  At the local mermaid pond.  I thought this large lava formation looked like a giant roosting chicken.  Much of this lava was formed by being tossed, as opposed to flowing, out of the volcano.

Adele, who spends lots of time in the sun, doesn't have a wrinkle or ounce of fat that I can see.  Not bad for 56 years old. 

Below, I'm sitting in the mermaid pond while the waves crash in.  Mermaid ponds are pools that collect water just beyond the crashing waves.

We went to the Saturday market in Hilo.  Unbelievable variety of the strangest foods I've ever seen.

Some flowers from Adele's place, below.

Below, coconut sprouts from a Samoan coconut tree.  These are considered the best coconuts, producing over a quart of water and lots of coconut meat each.  Adele uses coconut oil in all her cooking, makes her own coconut milk and coconut cream which she uses in sauces and deserts.

Wild pigs had broken into her garden, digging up and eating all of the sweet potatoes.  I could see evidence of their rooting all over the property and near my tent.  They really love root vegetables.  Luckily, I didn't see them.  They can be dangerous.  But every day I'd see their digging marks.

I think these are called eggfruits.  All the new fruits I tried were sweet, with large black seeds.

Adele, giving a ukulele lesson.  I met the most interesting people.  Sage, sitting on the floor is married to a German ship captain.  They have two girls, 2 and 4 years old and they spend their lives traveling around the world on their super yacht, over 120 feet long.  

Below, I shot Adele and Bob playing together.  I keep playing it over and over.  I like it.

Below, lava from the last flow that everyone was afraid would burn and smother the entire town.  I took this shot from the Transfer Station.  It amazed me how orderly the lava went by, slowly oozing downhill.  One guy bulldozed a large berm behind his house to, hopefully, divert the lava.  The flow stopped just at the  bottom of the berm,  They closed down the only food market (besides the incredibly expensive health store) because the flow was only a few hundred feet from it when it finally stopped.  It's as if a whole bunch of people prayed for the lava to stop, and it did.  Adele left for two months to make money in California creating Christmas decorations for businesses.  She half expected that her house and property would be burnt down when she returned.  But it had stopped.

The lava field next to the transfer station, crossing a road.

Below, a shrine near a mermaid pool.  

The Bakery in Pahoa, below.  The perfect hangout with Internet and good food.  It's easy to meet someone new and make friends here.  I hitchhiked into town one day in the rain.  People are nice and I got two rides right away.

I lasted three weeks, then I literally began itching to get home.  I returned itching from head to toe.  The mosquitos and fire ants left their trail of bites and welts up my legs and down my neck, arms, and back.  I lasted three weeks because I kept meeting lots of friendly, happy, interesting people with interesting lives.  Three weeks was long enough for me to make up my mind on a lot of things.  I returned knowing what it is I want to manifest next.   Big changes.