Welcome, friend, I’m so glad you’re here! Today, a peek into an exciting restoration project on Maui, where I volunteer whenever I get a chance. We’re helping to regrow the native dryland forest near the top of our volcano, Haleakalā.
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The Saturday morning was sparkling clear, the temperature up at 3,000 feet cool and refreshing. I had driven up to Kula on Maui, an hour away, to join other volunteers at a greenhouse to plant some seeds. It’s the greenhouse of the Auwahi Forest Restoration Project, where people are helping to bring back the dryland forest near the peak of Haleakalā, a place so diverse it holds more species than the wet tropical rain forest. At the greenhouse we plant and nourish the keiki plants, the babies, so they can grow up to be placed in the forest ground.
Oli
When all the volunteers have gathered round, a young woman offers the oli, the chant to open the morning. She asks us all to turn and face upward in the direction of the forest. Her voice rises clear and strong, the chant calling out to ancestors to be with us in our work of the day. With each new phrase of the chant, her voice rises a step in pitch, and with each new tone her intensity grows, each phrase more determined, more powerful. The hairs on my arms and neck are rising.
Soon her voice is a full-throated cry filling the little valley where we stand, echoing in the early morning stillness. She is calling out to all the forces available to help us undo the harm done to this land and to open a way for new life.
The chant ends and she begins another, joined now by a few other voices, all singing the ancient prayers in unison. She leads on and on, sure and strong, her voice gathering together all our prayers and conveying them outward in one healing stream of life.
When the voices finally stop, there is utter silence. No one moves for a very long time. The singer is dabbing her eyes and sniffling, and so are we.
Hui Up to Care for the Land
Finally she is able to speak. “This forest is such an inspiration,” she says through her tears. “I get so sad about the harm that has been done to the land. But then I think about Auwahi and how the forest is coming back. And how people keep coming here to plant. This is what we have to do! We have to hui up, people!” Hui means community. “We have to care for the land,” she says. “We have to keep showing up. This is the only way to save the ʻāina. This is the only way to protect our land.”
She dabs her face some more. The group remains silent. Finally an older woman, another chanter, turns to us with a big smile and a blessing. “Itʻs going to be a good day,” she says.
And I think about how this is what we have to do everywhere—in every state, in every community. Hui up and care for the land. Because our lives depend on it. We depend physically on the land for survival, and we depend on it also to keep us “grounded,” to keep us in touch with what is real.
For the Earth shows us every day what we need to do to live well. It offers us endless possibilities every day for renewed life, and it shows us every day the harm we do with human greed. The land reveals exactly how to live in balance—what brings life and what brings death. It is a sure guide, the most real thing we know. And coming together in community to care for the land is a powerful antidote to lies and cruelty and greed—all of which are poisons that deplete life instead of renewing it.
This is what it means to say land is sacred: it is our source of life. And to live in connection with the sacred is to live in ways that support and encourage that ever-springing life. To care for the land is to plant our feet in what is real and lasting and life renewing.
The work of the day hasn’t even begun yet, and already our hearts are full.
ʻAʻaliʻi
Our first job of the morning is to plant the tiny black seeds of ʻaʻaliʻi (Dodonaea viscosa), a beautiful shrub that forms the foundation of the Hawaiian dryland forest. I helped with this job last time I came up here, about six weeks ago.
Planting ʻaʻliʻi takes some concentration. The black specks of seeds are the exact color of the soil, and because they’ve been soaked to help germination, they are damp and sticky. So handling them is tricky, and counting out three or four only to drop into each planting tube, or dibble, is even trickier. Look up from your row of dibbles, and you might never find your place in the flat again.
At our September workday I discovered a young woman at the other end of the table using a tool I don’t have: fancy long fingernails! She parceled out the seeds with no problem. She just filled a plastic teaspoon with seeds and used a long pink-and-black-striped fingernail to scrape a few seeds from the spoon into each waiting dibble.
I learned that her name is Hokua, short for Hokuaoka’ale, which means “the crest of the deep ocean wave.” She tells me that the first part of her name, Hokua, means “the nape of the neck,” so her full name is describing that part of the ocean wave. What a powerful name to carry throughout your life! She works in conservation and never misses a chance to talk to people about how important it is to care for the land. She was also Miss Hawaiʻi Teen USA last year, and she’s been using all her official appearances, she says with a grin, “to push conservation onto everybody.”
And as we experienced today, she is a powerful singer of oli. She is the one who led us in the morning prayers. Today her love for the land is filling us all.
‘Aʻaliʻi, the cradle bed of the forest
As we work I learn more about ʻaʻaliʻi. It’s a shrubby tree that grows twenty to twenty-five feet tall and is crucial to the native forest. The ‘aʻaliʻi trees shed their leaves to make a rich native leaf litter on the ground, and this leaf litter forms the perfect cradle bed to nourish all the other baby shoots. ʻAʻaliʻi can survive fire, and they are one of the first to colonize degraded earth, so they are perfect for helping to strengthen a new forest.
During a break from the planting tables I wander a few steps away to where an ʻaʻaliʻi is growing big and strong. It’s already fifteen or twenty feet tall.
Our young crew leader, named Etta, explains more about the tree. She separates the branches to find a few remaining flowers. The blossoms are filled with centers of deep red fleshy seeds. “These flowers are open?” I ask. “Yup,” she says, “that’s how they look when they’re fully open.” The red color of the developing seeds was highly prized by the traditional Hawaiians. They used it to dye their kapa fabric red.
The seeds develop into a star-shaped papery fruit that dries into a sort of paper lantern, and these paper clusters are then picked from the trees to propagate the seeds. On this tree two or three clusters of seeds remain.
I wander then over to the long greenhouse tables full of flats. Our September planting day had been such a huge success that more than a thousand dibbles full of ‘aʻaliʻi seeds were ready to sprout with new life.
Today, six weeks later, those same flats are bursting with baby plants two to three inches tall. Walk by this table, and a feeling of wonder at the miracle of new life fills you to the brim.
“I tell people I come here to volunteer,” says one woman, “but that’s a joke, because I’m the one receiving all the blessing!”
Thinning the ʻaʻaliʻi
The seeds we planted were so generous that now three or four baby shoots are growing in each dibble. So a few of us start thinning them out. We pick the most vigorous little shoot in each tube and carefully clip the others away.
After all the aloha we put into every one those seeds when we planted them six weeks ago, I have to say that making a decision about which one to save in each tube feels like Sophie’s choice. But we do it anyway, dropping the clipped shoots into a compost bucket, where they will support new life in a different form.
ʻŪlei
While we are thinning shoots, other hands are busy getting ʻūlei seeds ready to plant. ʻŪlei (Osteomeles anthyllidifolia) is a shrub with sweet-scented white flowers, often made into leis.
The seedpods of the ʻūlei are white and look like rosehips, which they are because ʻūlei is a member of the rose family. When the pods are soaked, they turn the water purple, and Hawaiians traditionally used them to make a lavender dye.
Today the seedpods have been thoroughly soaked to soften the hulls, and many hands now get busy, reaching into water dishes full of ʻūlei and squeezing the hulls to release the seeds.
One woman dunks her fingertips in the water and jokes, “It’s my preferred manicure soak!” Another holds up a hull to show the seeds inside. Five brown seeds clustered tightly in a circle.
Soon there are thousands of seeds ready to plant, maybe tens of thousands—more ʻūlei seeds than have ever been harvested before in this project. They will sprout here at the greenhouse and then, next year, they will go into the forest to grow up and release their fragrant gifts to the world.
One final blessing
After a morning of work we are beginning to wrap up when the sky over the mountain fills with clouds. The temperature suddenly drops, and a light rain begins to fall. Everyone’s face lights up. One final blessing! We keep working in the rain, glad to feel the gentle drops and the cooler air. The morning was hot for November, and a shower is refreshing.
At the end of the morning our hearts are full. We take a group photo, all saying “‘Ūlei!” then share hugs all around.
I start my long drive home, but the view is so glorious I have to stop and take a picture. Where I am standing beside the road, the sky is gray and rain is falling, but down below over the ocean the sun is bright and the sea glows with that intense sapphire blue that burrows right into your soul. It’s a blue I hope to gaze at as long as I have breath.
It’s a fitting blessing to end a morning full of blessings.
How does the Earth nourish and refresh you? Are there restoration projects taking place in your community? Do you have a garden, or is there a community garden in your area? Share your stories and blessings with us in the comments!
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For digging deeper
The Auwahi Forest Restoration Project started about thirty years ago. To hear the founder, Art Medeiros, tell the whole story, see his TEDxMaui talk, “Auwahi: Hope on a Hawaiian Volcano,” 2012. Keep up with the project on their Facebook and Instagram pages.
For a dose of the inspiration and joy that emanate from restoring dryland forest, see a short video by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (2019) about a project on the Big Island, “Restoring and Protecting the Ka’upulehu Dryland Forest.” The video opens with an oli.
Here is an earlier post I wrote about volunteering at the Auwahi greenhouse:
Caring for the Local Earth
One of the things that delights me wherever I live is getting my hands in dirt to care for the local Earth. Way back in Oakland more than 20 years ago, I helped grow dozens of types of locally native plants, like monkeyflower and bedstraw and others, and then plant them in the mud next to their creek. This was a massive restoration project run by the
