WAILUA — Orange and yellow hues peaked through the distant horizon over the Pacific Ocean at daybreak on Saturday as a small group of people gathered to welcome a new day at Hikinaakala Heiau, just like how it was done
WAILUA — Orange and yellow hues peaked through the distant horizon over the Pacific Ocean at daybreak on Saturday as a small group of people gathered to welcome a new day at Hikinaakala Heiau, just like how it was done many years ago.
“You’re at peace and the peace has come to you,” Hawaiian cultural practitioner Puna Kalama-Dawson said in a mahalo hookupu to the group on the shoreline as a succession of waves crashed gently onto the sand behind her. “Aloha each other and aloha one another one more time as our witness.”
Within the group, San Francisco newlyweds Banafsheh Akhlaghi and James Almerico took turns embracing their friends and family members who gathered on the beach for a blessing ceremony performed by Kalama-Dawson in which their wedding rings were soaked in a bowl filled with water from Mount Waialeale and Haena.
It was the perfect way to begin their lives together as a couple, and this was how this year’s festivities for the International Day of Peace began that day.
“We are the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of all that comes after us,” Kalama-Dawson said after the ceremony. “To be able to stand with a very young child and an elder … with the understanding of peace, joy and harmony is a story in itself. Imagine if everyone greeted one another with a smile.”
The annual day of commemoration, now in its 31st year, featured a total of seven events, including individual peace services and activities at the Hanapepe Soto Zen Temple, All Saints Church in Kapaa, Kapaa United Church of Christ, Lihue Happiness Planting Center, MacArthur Park Pavilion and Waipa Foundation.
Kauai Aloha Foundation Founder and President Barbara Curl, who attended the ceremony at Hikinaakala Heiau, said a time for peace and reflection is needed at a time when communities across the island are faced with difficult issues.
“This island’s destiny to live and legacy to leave is peace, love and community,” Curl said. “We’re understanding and becoming aware that it’s not just here but it’s for everyone.”
That type of division is something that Akhlaghi, a human rights attorney and first generation American from Iran, and her husband, an Italian-American, understand well.
“We couldn’t be from two further points — we really are from two different points on the Earth — and there’s a lot happening politically between our nations — my birth nation and my new home nation — but there isn’t any separation in who we are as people,” Akhlaghi said. “When my parents first met his family, what they said was how decent they are. There’s that decency in people, and as long as you have that, there isn’t any separation. How could there be?”
The couple, who first met nearly 12 years ago but began their relationship in 2011, said the timing of their ceremony with the International Day of Peace was a complete coincidence but explained that the island itself holds a special place in their hearts.
Just over a year ago, Akhlaghi said it was at Anahola Beach, where she realized that “he was the one.”
“This island is a sacred space for us,” Akhlaghi said. “This union is not just the union of he and I — it’s the union of all of our family and friends and the union of this blessed land. We’re all one.”
Marty Adams, a family member from Florence, Ore., who was visiting Hawaii for the first time with his wife, said the experience he had that day was a great one.
“It was almost overwhelming how beautiful it is — not just the ceremony but the union of all the people here today, some of whom we didn’t even know until today,” Adams said.
