Twinkle is a different sort of star

Tomorrow there's an event taking place on the West side of O'ahu which marks a huge (Jupiter) and progressive fundraising milestone for the people of Hawaii and especially the residents of Pu'uhonua o Wai'anae.. Here's the email and invitation I received:

Aloha,
Weʻre  excited to invite you to celebrate a major campaign milestone for us next Friday.
On December 14, Aloha Lives Here will join Twinkle Borge, other Puʻuhonua o Waiʻanae residents to celebrate a huge moment in our fundraising efforts. At our event, Twinkle will accept a generous check of $150,000 from the REIT Foundation to help The Village buy land for their future home.
Click here to RSVP to join us at the REIT Foundationʻs check presentation to Twinkle and The Village. The event starts at 10:30AM on Friday, December 14.
The REIT Foundationʻs gift will immediately be matched by anonymous donors, doubling their gift. This means that on this day we will have raised more than $300,000!
We will have coffee and some light refreshments. Please RSVP, and join us in celebration and in thanking the REIT Foundation and our other generous donors.


Mahalo,
The Aloha Lives Here volunteer crew

Twinkle Borge is interviewed in the YouTube below.  I found the interview early this morning, seated at the tall bar stool that puts me at the keys. The wind has howled through the night and only now is settled into his elemental form somewhere else. Across the highway roofers are on a newly being built home; we hear the rhythmic tempo of the pneumatic (air) staple gun. "Glad they didn't do that yesterday," Pete was giving working man know-how commentary. "All of it (the roofing) would be over here."

Housing. Shelter. Home.They name similar situations, but bring up such different images.


We won't be able to join Twinkle and her community, but what I can do is witness and put the action here because? Because it demands my attention to ways meaningful change can happen. I listen to the tita, the Hawaiian woman who has committed to her personal and community healing.

The question of ownership was raised early in the interview. "You folks are PO'E KUEWA.You don't own this place...you folks came over... " Twinkle interrupted, "We had permission," Twinkle makes the facts clear, "I don't look at us being trespassers." The permission to be. What a touchy state to live out. What a touchy reality to live out with kindness. Do you have permission to be? In an island world, a island nation that draws people to her tiny buildable environs to retire, to enjoy the tropical conditions and the inimitable culture and buy property what happens to the people who were born there, can't afford to live there, but don't want to leave?


What has evolved on the Waianae Coast of O'ahu, and Pu'uhonua o Waianae is a present day collaboration of 'structure' -- home, house, shelter -- defined from the ground up. Literal examples of a long story with a beginning, middle and ending being told where life is happening; and the way Twinkle communicates serves the people by engaging the energy of the whole/holy sum of all parts.

I listen to her answers and hear a grounded experience of having come through the huli, the upheaval, of life before and after using. "I'm clean ten years now," Twinkle says. She wasn't when she first arrived on this place of refuge on the Western O'ahu shore. She leads by example today and has a team of eleven wahine, women, who are her alaka'i. They are the combined force, the leadership for a village of nearly three hundred.

The REIT Foundation has donated $150,000 to 'buy land for the Pu'uhonua o Waianae future home.' Anonymous donors are matching that money. Just who and what the REIT Foundation is about came as a surprise to me. I'm still researching the foundation's kuleana (purposely using the Hawaiian word here, to give me space to weave meaning)  because collaborations is a process I have so much to understand; trusting collaboration is the big resistance for me. To be honest I need to allow for windows of opportunity, and move/revolutionize some of my fixed nature. Astrologically, that means I need to call on my native Uranus energy in my 6th House of Community to blast open a window, like the winds that have done here, if that's what is needed.

Twinkle, Twinkle little star how I wonder what it will take to hitch to the energy of your efforts to bridge meaningful collaborations for pu'uhonua (places of safety) for people where they are. Leading from the ground, the makaai'nana, those with their eyes on the ground have a contemporary model of making the story fit the characters who are living it.

Once upon a time in a place not so far away was a star, a different sort of start. Dis is one story fo get your head, and grab your gut. Listen to Twinkle.

How's dat Lili'uokalani? I think she'd be proud to be there tomorrow.