Hawai'i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a 'mixed plate'---a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely 'local' cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best---a whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

Hawai'i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs--islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens. It was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity... life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn't? She realized now wrong she'd been; the pali wasn't a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn't a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death....is the true measure of the Divine within us.

It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.

Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.

Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.