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.
ALAN BRENNERTIt 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.
ALAN BRENNERTHawai’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.
ALAN BRENNERTLove, marriage, divorce, infidelity… life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn’t?
ALAN BRENNERTBut in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps.
ALAN BRENNERTIt 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.
ALAN BRENNERTBut it’s a poor church that cares only for what happens to a soul after it leaves this life.” -Damien
ALAN BRENNERTA road need not be paved in gold to find treasures at its end.
ALAN BRENNERTWhen we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design.
ALAN BRENNERTThis is also, I believe, what America is at its best—a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.
ALAN BRENNERTFear is our boon companion but never our master.
ALAN BRENNERTLearn how to smile in the cannibal pot and life will be so much easier.
ALAN BRENNERTMany different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely ‘local’ cuisine.
ALAN BRENNERTGod didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brains and the spirit to give himself wings.
ALAN BRENNERTI’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.
ALAN BRENNERTIt was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.
ALAN BRENNERTShe realized now wrong she’d been; the pali wasn’t a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn’t a grave.
ALAN BRENNERT