Dear Friends,

There’s a small altar in my kitchen. An ever changing collection of shells, cards, stones, flowers, crafted arts, and candles. For more than a year, in the mix of it all, is a handwritten note folded just so and placed in a ceramic dish. I can’t recall the exact words now, as many days filled with wonder and sorrow have passed by. But, I remember why it was written. 

A petition to my old ones, to the gods of this land, to mystery. 

Maui, like much of Hawaiʻi, has become a playground for the leisurely inclined, third home, winter home destination, a distraction from regular life where anything is possible, everything is available, and anything goes. 

Outsiders continue to move here only to invent some tourist based business acting as the pimp and prostituting out the beauty of the land. 

And we imagine all these acts are justifiable simply because we feel good, because the river told us we were needed, because the tendency to let ourselves off the hook of consequences is disguised in the “live your best life” lingo. 

Into this scenario walks a wind storm in August ripping fires throughout Maui. A wreckage still smoldering now.

Before grief could really settle in to hold the community, the opinions, the shaming and the conspiracies took over. Old wounds, unhealed wounds, questions of belonging, questions of purpose all rising to the surface. Who has been lost? What has been lost? Here. 

Reckoning Maui is the handwritten petition from the kitchen altar coming into form, in real time, to the old ones, land, and mystery of this place and the people who call it home. A worthwhile dream, a life line in a whirl of confusion.

There is no audience at a Reckoning event. Not that we are all the same and I don’t mean to give the impression there is no direction. Simply, with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson at the front of the room, the conversation holds a willingness to take on the hard and tangled questions of these days.

Over the last handful of years, once solid friendships have all but disintegrated with my inclination to linger over the effect of visitors to the island. So it is no small thing that I have asked Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johson to come here. There is weight involved. There are the Haiku Sessions that Stephen and Bodhi Be produced some years back lending something of a past for us to lean on. 

It is the quiet stories and glazed look of folks either frozen in shock or fixated on everything will be better in the future. It is a confession of a friend who realized all the tools they thought made them a good person, turns out are mostly useless in a real crisis. These are what has me stirred and willing to invite Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Jonhson here, now. 

Reckoning Maui is a Love Letter from me to you, my neighbors, my community, the Maui ʻohana.  An invitation to be gathered in by a longing to belong, to practice etiquette where it is lost, to wonder about the consequences of these times. I’m not suggesting this is a solution, rather a way that we might be broken hearted, together. 

Mahalo a Nui Loa
A Grand Thanks
~Khadija Meghan Rashell Striegel
Host of Reckoning Maui