Together We Rise

I was watching a video the other day from the 2019 Together We Rise March where 20,000 people took to the streets of O’ahu calling for the protection of Mauna Kea. As I watched us gathering by the thousands, walking alongside one another, chanting, and singing - I found myself longing for this feeling. A feeling I haven’t felt and we haven’t felt as a collective in two years. The feeling of gathering together without the worry of passing an illness along to someone else. The feeling of greeting one another without masks. The feeling of sharing space without the fear of getting sick or someone else sick. The feeling of not needing to test.

In my family home, we’ve had to remain cautious and vigilant because my mother has been going through a deep healing journey with her health and because of kuleana around taking care of our grandparents. I’m sure our story is very similar to many of yours. The mindfulness, awareness, and transparency that our communication requires in our family dynamic is important. After going through my own experience with Covid, what it took and is currently taking to heal from it, I understand and have compassion for my own feelings of fear that I carried around for all of these months, being a person who has had asthma for my whole life and has had ups and downs with my immune system for years.

In the past few weeks, I have needed to call on the same courage and strength that I felt in this moment dancing in this photo from the March and ground myself in all of the pule we ever did in ceremony on the Mauna and on the ala. It was a ritual to release the fear and center in trust - trust in my lungs, trust in my long and continual journey of healing my physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies, and trust in my guides.

That work of release was so supported by the community who gathered in prayer, in the sharing of remedies, preparing of care packages, and the sending of loving messages. It brings tears to my eyes thinking of all of the people who reached out with so much aloha.

Today, I lift my gratitude and hold the echos of thousands of voices chanting together close and tender - as medicine.

Together We Rise

📸: @greg.noir