Rooting for Your Dreams

One evening during my recent trip to Honolulu, I was sitting in an upscale sushi bar on Kalakaua Avenue – the “strip” – on Waikiki Beach. To my right was an empty seat, and on the other side of that chair sat an obviously wealthy Japanese woman and several of her friends. Five or six empty chairs were available down the sushi bar on my left-hand side.

As I sat enjoying a lovely miso-glazed butterfish and a Dancing Geisha (crushed blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries with tonic water and vodka), I noticed the restaurant had copies of their “house” music CDs available for purchase. I picked one up and was surprised to find that Bob Marley was the house music in a Japanese restaurant in Hawaii. And sure enough, “No Woman, No Cry” was wailing over the speakers.

At that moment, a woman slipped into the seat between me and the Japanese lady. She was barely five feet tall, and she wore board shorts, flip flops, and a Billabong surf shirt. Her hair was wet, and her clothes were damp. As she sat down, she shivered and said, “I just came in off the beach. It’s my birthday, and I’m treating myself to some sushi tonight.”

“Happy Birthday!” I said. We introduced ourselves, and then Millie began to study the menu. When she began shivering again, the Japanese lady looked at her and then took off the Chanel jacket she was wearing and put it around Millie’s shoulders.

As Millie thanked her, the Japanese woman said, “We take care of people here. It’s the Waikiki Way.”

Millie looked at me and said, “I knew it was going to be like that here. I just moved here from Washington D.C. last month, and I’ve already met the most wonderful people.”

Intrigued, I asked her why she’d moved to Honolulu. “I wanted to,” she said simply.

It can’t be that easy, I thought. It just can’t. As if she had read my mind, Millie looked at me and said, “In life, you have to decide what you want. I wanted to live somewhere with nice weather and with a beach. So I moved here.”

I’d heard those words before. In a television interview, Elizabeth Gilbert, the woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, a book that became an international bestseller, said this about her success: “Every morning, you wake up and ask yourself, ‘What do I really, really, really want?’” And once you’ve answered that question, she said, you move in that direction.

I told Millie I admired her bravery and wished her well. As I left the restaurant, I heard Bob Marley singing, “Don’t worry about a thing/cause every little thing’s gonna be alright.”

I was still thinking about Millie the next morning as I put on my workout clothes, grabbed my iPod, and headed out for a long walk. I marveled at the courage it must take to pull up roots and move such a huge distance.

And then I saw it, the massive Banyan tree growing in Kapiolani Park. Banyan tree branches develop rope-like “vines” that hang from them and grow downward. These “vines” are actually aerial roots that take hold in the ground and grow into thick, woody trunks. With age, these new trunks become indistinguishable from the main trunk, and that’s how the Banyan grows. In fact, one particular large old Banyan on the island of Maui covers almost 2/3 of an acre.

Interestingly, in Hindu mythology, the Banyan is call the “wish-fulfilling tree" because of it's ever-expanding state.

I wonder if moving – or even going for what you really want in life – is really the painful all-or-nothing process we like to make it, the gut-wrenching decision to give up something meaningful for something desired. If we could use the Banyan tree as a metaphor and see change as more of a process of putting down new roots, of growing stronger by expanding, then maybe we can have the courage to pursue our heart’s biggest desires with the assurance that, indeed, every little thing will be all right.

Finding a Higher Power

Last January, I took a trip to Hawaii with my mother. Petras, our exchange student, plays for the University of Hawaii on a basketball scholarship, so Mom and I spent a week on Waikiki drinking pina coladas during the day and watching Petras play in the evenings.

The first morning after we’d arrived, we set out from our hotel on Kalakaua Avenue walking east toward Diamond Head. It was close to 7:30 in the morning, and as we power-walked through Kapiolani Park, my mother pointed out a group of twenty or thirty people congregated under the spread of a few large royal Poinciana trees. Some were sitting on their bicycles, some sat in stadium chairs they’d brought, and some stood. “I wonder what they’re doing?” my mother said.

“That’s got to be an AA meeting,” I answered immediately. And I was right. When we got within hearing distance, I could just make out the words of the man who was speaking. “Did you hear what he said?” I asked her. “’Higher power.’ It’s definitely some sort of ‘Friends of Bill’ meeting.”

I wish I didn’t know what it was, I thought.

In all my wildest imaginings, I’d never once thought I would have such intimate knowledge of what the Friends of Bill talked about when they got together or that I would even be able to recite the Twelve Steps. Somehow, it just wasn’t fair that a preacher’s daughter who had always followed the rules and tried to do what was right would be the family expert on Twelve-Step meeting. To my way of thinking, I should have been wondering what all those people were doing in the park at 7:30 in the morning, because that would mean I’d never been married to an addict. But here I was, both weary and wary of recovery programs, feeling a great deal of animosity over the fact that after spending $35,000 at one of the better treatment facilities in the country, my husband had come home blaming me for his problems. And on top of all that, I was so damn tired of the term “Higher Power.” What’s so hard about using the word “God?”

I got my answer from my little nephew, Joe. In July, I was at the beach with my sister and her children. We spent some lovely afternoons sitting on the beach, and one evening we drove to our favorite beach dive, the World-Famous Oasis, for their annual Christmas in July celebration.

The Oasis is managed by a good-natured little man named Hoover who, incidentally, drives a Hummer. When I say “little man,” I mean it in the sense of the television program “Little People Big World.” Hoover is about three feet tall, and the evidence of his good-naturedness is the fact he dresses up as a leprechaun for St. Patrick’s Day and as Santa’s Elf for Christmas in July.

To begin the yearly festivities, Santa and his Elf are transported by helicopter to a parking lot across the street from the Oasis, where hundreds of Santa’s constituents wait with their lists in hand. Santa and Hoover jump out of the helicopter clad in their respective red velvet Santa pants and green elf pants, Hawaiian shirts, and sunglasses. And they each have a gorgeous blonde on their arm.

My sister’s kids watched the proceedings with utter joy, and then we corralled them to a table, where my sister informed them that Santa would visit our table if and when they ate all their dinner and behaved while they ate.

Bless his heart, little Joe has an awfully hard time sitting still at the dinner table, and he has an even harder time eating all his food. He began horsing around and knocked over his Sprite. “Joe,” his mother warned, “You’d better be careful. You don’t know who’s watching.”

The kid looked up to the sky and promptly said, “God, please don’t tell Santa!”

And that’s when I completely understood Step Two: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I’d always thought the term “Higher Power” was used by the program as a way for those who struggled with the idea of God to reconcile themselves to, well, God. But the word “God” is used throughout the other eleven Steps. What the program is alluding to, I think, is the fact that since we can't see God, sometimes a "higher power" exists in the form of a visible motivation to change our ways.

For Joe, it’s Santa.