Makaleha Fire

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

-Henry David Thoreau

I started this blog after a propeller ripped through my pelvis, gluteals, and vertebral column.  My most vivid memory of the experience is waking up on the morning after the accident and watching the sun rise over Haleakala (aptly translated as House of the Sun) through my window at Maui Memorial Hopsital.  Sokchea was sleeping on a chair beneath the window and as the sun peaked over the mountain the room exploded with a golden light. 

That morning light changed my life.  While it might have been the endorphin infused high of completing my first marathon night of searing, indescribable pain or the simple fact that I was being intravenously pumped with more mind altering chemicals then ever before, but I think there was something else going on.  It was like the nervous laughter of relief that we let out after a near accident.  But multiplied by 1000.  My entire being was screaming out: "I'm alive."  That was the luckiest day of my life.  Not simply because I narrowly avoided death, but because it taught me how to live.  

That feeling is still there hanging around in the shadows of my mind.  But the only time it's palpable is when it's illuminated by the golden fire of the first or last light of the day.  If only for an instant, it shows me what I'm looking for. 

However, I spend the rest of the day as the embodiment of the beast that I railed against two weeks ago.  This week was consumed with insurance audits, reconciling a year's worth of canoe related expenses, paying the IRS, and preparing W2s for distribution.

Yet, as much as I'm overcome with the malaise of daily life, the sun inevitably sets.