When people ask me what I’m doing in Hawaii, or how I spend my days, it’s funny how hard it is to answer such a simple question. For example, I sat down to write this post, and then decided I wanted some honey lemon tea, but had to go pick a lemon off the tree. While I was picking a lemon I realized the chickens were out of water, so I gave them water, and right about that time Monica got home with Bodhi Kai, so we made a game out of hunting for lilikoi, because Bodhi Kai is still pretty excited about Easter Egg hunts, and it’s lilikoi season and they are everywhere. It kind of feels like the story, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, except it’s more like, If You Give a Corie a Writing Task. You never know what kind of adventure will pop up, but it will inevitably involve a tasty treat and a beverage of sorts, and hopefully some writing.
In all seriousness, without the structure of a job, it is hard to know what to do, and when to do it. Not to say that I am ever bored, but when you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want in a tropical paradise, what do you do? You sightsee, certainly, you surf and snorkel in the beautiful water, go on epic hikes and poke around the nooks and crannies. But I’ve gotten the most joy out of working on the farm and hanging with the kids. Mahina is growing faster than she knows how to handle (I guess in the parenting world there is something called milestone digressions and now that she is walking she apparently hates sleeping), and Bodhi Kai is too smart for his own good.
There is something incredibly rewarding about wanting a papaya, and going out with the scythe and cutting one down, or keeping an eye on a rack of bananas until the first one turns yellow, and then hacking the trunk up with a machete and harvesting the bunch. There is something damn near serenity in weeding the pineapple patch while the mosquitoes buzz in my ears and bite my face. Just kidding – mosquitoes are my arch nemesis and I would eliminate them from existence in a second, given the opportunity, but you get the idea.
Occasionally, I still get the panicky feeling like I’m wasting my life or what comes next or what about my 401K, and then I stop and take a deep breath and come back to the here and now, and how incredibly beautiful it is and how damn lucky I am to be right here right now. It puts life into perspective. I had a chat with my wise old uncle the other day, and tried to describe the feeling I’ve been having, of not knowing what I’m doing but knowing that I’m doing something. He distilled it into the simple notion of: Oh, it sounds like you are getting comfortable just being alive. What a fucking concept.
I truly wish everyone had an opportunity like this in their lives – the time and space to sit with uncomfortable feelings, ideas and memories, and instead of going for the dopamine hit of buying something on Amazon, taking half a Xanax, or scrolling Instagram (all things I have done, so no judgment), acknowledging whatever it is, and then letting it pass. It is a tremendous feeling to have this built in coping skill, which I am still developing (and will be for the rest of my life). Sure, it took me moving to a tropical farm and a lot of seclusion to even get here, but it feels like a burgeoning superpower. That, and Amazon takes forever to deliver here, so it isn’t nearly as gratifying.
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