Feeling “called home” to Maui, I arrived here in 1975 with a backpack, $100 and a guitar with extra sets of strings, imagining “Gilligan’s Island” wouldn’t have a music store. Stepping out of the plane, smelling my first taste of the tropics.
Hitchhiking to the one health food store to maybe meet someone with an extra bed, I was immediately shocked by the site of, not one, but three shopping malls in Kahului. Clearly, I’d been sold a fantasy of a paradise long paved over.
Maui welcomed me and now 48 years later, my life is filled with a long marriage of raising kids and now helping to raise grandkids, a beautiful home, blessed with good work, community service and a Maui family. I’m recalling all this as the world’s hearts and thoughts have turned this way at the news of what has befallen our precious home.
For the moment, the fantasy that the tourism promotion industry has been telling, fueled by millions of dollars, has been punctured for all the world to see. Is this Maui’s “Mauna Kea” moment?
The Rev. Bodhi Be
Haiku
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