Miloli'i

I remember waiting for my father's fishing boat to come back in at the beach at Miloli'i (in South Kona). My younger brother and I would play by the boat ramp in the lava rock tide pools. Pahoehoe lava that was once flowing liquid stone, hardened into voluptuous folds at the water's edge, forming shallow basins lined with seaweed and coral, populated by tiny fish, crabs, sea cucumbers. The water, absolutely clear, washed in and out, carrying tiny flecks of seaweed, evanescent bubbles and swirls like fairy-tale hair. The ledge of tide pools dropped off into a small bay where a few boats were anchored on the pale sapphire.
In Miloli'i one felt yet the rhythm of an earlier world, that world that existed before, when we did not know there was anything else to do but simply live in it. Edge of land, edge of water. Sunlight and coconut trees. Mid-day silence.
Another way of saying it, Miloli'i has not lost its Being. It resists being real estate. It is a Being in which the lives of humans have been held for a thousand years, in the pulse of the sea on the shore, the ebb and flow of time and lives. Bones among the coral. Coral in the bones. Lava worn by sea and feet. Children laughing in the small waves on the other side of the bay.