Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity… life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn’t?
ALAN BRENNERTLove, marriage, divorce, infidelity… life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn’t?
ALAN BRENNERTFear 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.
ALAN BRENNERTA road need not be paved in gold to find treasures at its end.
ALAN BRENNERTIt was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.
ALAN BRENNERTThis is also, I believe, what America is at its best—a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.
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 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 BRENNERTFear is our boon companion but never our master.
ALAN BRENNERTGod didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brains and the spirit to give himself wings.
ALAN BRENNERTPerhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.
ALAN BRENNERTJust as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up. 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.
ALAN BRENNERTHawai’i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs–islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens.
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 BRENNERTShe realized now wrong she’d been; the pali wasn’t a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn’t a grave.
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 BRENNERTWhen we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design.
ALAN BRENNERT