Fourth Tribute … Ho’okena Beach (04/22/14)
RETURNING TODD to a PLACE of PEACE
… Bringing my brother back to the Big Island
“Tribute 04 … Ho’okena Beach”
The next-to-last Tribute took place at a beach where Todd apparently lived off & on in 2003 & 2004. These days, Ho’okena Beach is part public beach, part tourist campground, and yet back in the early 2000’s it was the location of a small “tent city” of home-free people. There are also caves set into the cliffs overlooking the beach where other folks were rumored to have lived at that time. I never came here with Todd, and yet the very first hitchhiker we picked up on our April 2014 “Tribute-Tour” had actually known him and had spent time with him and some mutual friends on this very beach, so it seemed fitting that part of his ashes be placed here as well.
When we arrived, the beach was comfortably filled with tourists and beach-goers. It wasn’t as though it were jam-packed with people, and yet there were enough folks around that there seemed to be no suitable spot where our memorial could take place. Undaunted, we clambered over the first few boulders that form the beach’s southern border and almost immediately discovered the perfect “altar” for our ceremony — a small rock promontory sheltering a miniature beach with a large smooth stone in its center.
I found it especially fitting that our tribute could feel so private and so Peace-full even while children played in the surf just a few yards away … I think Todd would have liked that.
Also intriguing was the “surprise guest” who showed up near the end of the tribute — a baby crab. While more modern archetypal language would judge the appearance of a black crab to be “ominous” or “foreboding”, or even to represent sadness or mourning, more traditional meanings tell a quite different — and a much more fitting — tale. For black is not primarily the color of “evil”, but is rather the shade of the new Beginning that resides within all endings; the reBirth that rests within all deaths … And even though crabs are indeed the scavengers of the seas — and in that sense revel in death & the dying, they are also the “janitors of the deep”; representing the ability within each & every one of us to accept & embrace (and thereby transform & “clean up”) all things in life that are unwanted, unorthodox or unpleasant. They symbolize our innate ability to “go with the flow” — to deftly move sideways through all tragedy or crisis — to choose to see the positive pregnant in every negative, and appreciate the Joy waiting within every moment of sadness.
Yes, Todd did indeed take a most circuitous route back to the One — a route that, at least in its later years, was often filled with sadness & discord. And yet he has returned to the gentle arms of The Divine regardless, and a hearty “Welcome Home” is in order nonetheless.
So … Welcome HOME, Todd!
Peace … S
“For death is but a passing phase of Life; a change of dress, a disrobing;
A birth into the unborn again; a commencing where we ended;
A starting where we stopped to rest; a crossroad of Eternity;
A giving up of something … to possess all things.”
~ Edwin Leibfreed
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