Kapua Janai flips through the pages of her book, “Whispers on the Mountain,” and stops when she finds the poem she is looking for. Its title is “Being.” And as she reads it, the words flow, evenly and smoothly. Here
Kapua Janai flips through the pages of her book, “Whispers on the Mountain,” and stops when she finds the poem she is looking for. Its title is “Being.” And as she reads it, the words flow, evenly and smoothly. Here are some of the lines:
We live in a society that bombards us with the drive to “do,”
to cram a million bits of activity into every day,
to use every second for something veritably “productive”
and if possible, to do two or three things at once.
But where did this come from?
Whose idea was this?
Doesn’t anyone consider that this may be unwise?
Haven’t they seen that all this excessive doing
produces stress, anxiety, tension, exhaustion,
illness, anger, and even feelings of guilt?
Surely as human beings we are capable of better lives than that!
…
Our world is in need of healing.
Will we slow down in time to hear the answers?
Will we remember how to Be
and again become a part of this world?
Janai has found a place that puts her in touch with nature’s beauty. It stirs her heart. That place is Kokee State Park.
Her recently published book is her prose, poetry and photography since settling on Kauai 16 years ago. In it, she shares her soul and spirit about the place where she found a connection to nature.
Some of the titles are “Moon on the Mountain,” “Sitting with Fire,” “In the Company of Trees,” and “Be Still.”
“I consider myself a nature mystic,” she said. “For me, to go up there and really be in tune with that is a mystical, spiritual experience.”
Janai loves to spend as much time as she can on trails and in forests, with Kokee being her favorite. Her greatest delight in this world is nothing more than finding ways to weave nature into her life. She has taught school, worked on ships, performed music at resorts, been a professional massage therapist and studied in the areas of spirituality and shamanism.
Because people work so much, work so hard, and are fixated on financial success, they are letting themselves being robbed of their greatest joy, she says. Consider these words she wrote in “Being”:
We need to learn again from our brothers and sisters,
the plants and animals,
how to live in this world.
We need to remember that time flows in cycles and seasons,
and that relaxation and renewal can balance action,
that laughter and play can balance concentration and work.
And then we may rediscover that true inspiration and creativity
can come to us only when we are still enough to listen,
not preoccupied with an endless rush of doing-ness.
We are in need of renewal.
•••
What led you to write your book about Kokee?
The book started when I first moved to Kauai 16 years ago and I started going out in nature and absolutely falling in love with it. After a while, every time I would be out there somewhere I would feel like nature was saying, “Here, write this down.” I just started getting ideas for these poems. I would just write them down, put them in a notebook. After about five years of writing these poems, I started thinking, “I really should put this in a book, because there’s a lot of people that are so busy in their lives that don’t get out there into nature.”
In my opinion, nature is one of the most healing things that we can do for ourselves. Human beings are designed to live on a planet filled with nature. I think we have built-in responses that lower our stress and put us in connection with the bigger picture of life when we go out into nature. So mostly in Kokee I started going out on trails, going into the forests, camping up there in the woods and writing down poems that came to me. Some of them were almost like, nature giving dictation, saying, “Here, write about this.” And then at one point of a friend of mine suggested, “Well, this is nice, but if you’re going to have a book, you really should have pictures to go with the poems.” So then I started going out and taking all the photographs.
I divided it into sections and there’s an introduction into each section that talks about the magical places up in Kokee. It talks about the elements and our relation to nature and thinking about our connection to nature and why it’s important for us to connect to nature. A little bit about the cycles and the way the seasons move.
I had been writing poems probably for five years or so when I decided to put it together into a book.
Do you get to Kokee often?
I now have a cabin up there, so I spend a lot of my days off there. Certain trails I have walked on 50 times and it’s always different and there’s always something. Nature is constantly changing, but there’s such an element peace. I go at least twice a year to camp in Sugi Grove and that’s just totally magical when I go there.
I would like to remind a lot of people of what we have, right here on Kauai. You don’t have to fly 3,000 miles to go somewhere nice on vacation, to go somewhere to relax. We have such a magical place here. If you have a day off or a weekend off, or something, to get up there for the experiences and get rid of some of the stress, just from your day-to-day rushing around lifestyle.
Did you know about Kokee when you moved here?
Yes I did. Before I moved here, I had been involved with an organization called Aloha International and I would come here for workshops. So I would always come with a few extra days and go out and explore. It was actually, if you drive up to Kokee where you’re looking down from Pu’u o Kila into the Kalalau Valley, standing there in that place is what convinced me I had to live here. I had never really paid attention to past life things or things like that, but standing there at this point, something inside me just kept saying, “I’m home, I’m home.” I’m like, “What do you mean I’m home?” After that, I had a few different experiences of feeling so connected to a particular spot like I had been there before. I just knew I had this internal connection to Kauai.
Where did you spend time before coming here?
I was living in the Caribbean for 11 years and before that I was in Florida in various parts. Before that, I was in Chicago, but I don’t do cold weather.
Where would you recommend people go first if they head to Kokee?
The first thing I would look at, what’s your physical condition and experience in hiking? Are you somebody who never goes outside and doesn’t know how to walk on uneven ground or are you somebody who is out there all the time? So the first thing I would recommend to everybody, get up early in the morning, drive up there and be up at that lookout at the very top early in the day before the clouds build up so you get the full view and the full experience. You can get a million pictures of it and just not capture it, it is so spectacular.
What’s a good time to be there?
Between 9 and 10 is a good time to be up there by because too much after that, you start getting a development of clouds that come from the valley, depending on the temperature difference between up the mountain and down on the beach. You can stand there and it will be perfectly clear, and you can watch all the sudden, poof, there’s this cloud sitting there. It will fill up the valley and then you don’t get any view. It comes and goes. Some people will say, “I caught a glimpses,” but you really want to see the whole thing.
Do you have a favorite trail?
My favorite trail is the one that starts right there. It’s the Phea Trail, about three-quarters of a mile you’re going around the Kalalau Valley, so you’re looking down the rim from different angles and then it veers off and it comes to a crossroads. You’ve got three choices of where to go. Say it’s a nice long summer day and you’re early in the day and you want to do the full thing, you turn left and go to the Alakai Swamp Trail. But you better be a reasonable hiker to do that. The second choice is to go straight ahead on the Pihea Trail. That takes you to Sugi Grove and Kawaikoi Stream, that’s where the camping area is. And if you turn right, which is going back down the other part of the Alakai Swamp Trail, you go to an overlook, that’s the Waimea Canyon side.
Who should buy your book?
Number one, if there’s somebody who lives here, chances are they were taken up into Kokee in fifth grade with David Boynton to experience a little of Kokee and so this is like a memory thing. “I remember that. I haven’t been up there in years.” This has got the pictures and the poems that bring it all back.
Another thing would be, if you have family and friends on the Mainland who have never been here or who think that Kauai is just some beaches and doesn’t realize we have this whole other environment up there, this is good for that.
Or if you want to start getting more in touch with nature. You spend all your life in the office. This kind of talks about getting out there and what it’s like to be with the trees and be with a natural environment and why it’s good for you to do that.
After all these years, it still magical when you’re in Kokee?
When I go out and stay there long enough, it’s like putting yourself into the oneness, into the divine. In my opinion, the creator made everything up there as much as making us. And when you go up there you can kind of melt into this, feeling connected, like a grove of trees is all connected. It’s like they let you in, come and be part of our family and feel this peace. I belong to this beautiful, magical and wonderful world. There’s an energy there that revives you and renews you. So, it’s a spiritual experience for me.
Do you think, in this world today, people can learn to slow down, relax and enjoy nature, even at Kokee?
I see people all the time, stop, run up, snap a picture of the lookout and go back to their car. You really need to go walk a little bit, not chatting to your friends, not being on your device of some kind. Just being with what’s there, listening to the birds sand trees.
So it’s worth the 90-minute drive from Lihue to get there?
Absolutely. It’s absolutely worth it. It could change your life if you let it.
•••
“Whispers on the Mountain” is available locally at the Kokee museum and at http://outskirtspress.com/whispersonthemountain
