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Surrounded by the Ko‘olau mountains, the Mānoa Valley is shaped like a gigantic footprint into which the dawn is now spilling, and, as the sun rises over the mountains to Daniel’s right and its spreading mellow light emphasises the massive heads and shoulders of the mountains, and the chilly cool of the dew on the vegetation prickles his skin, it’s his forty-seventh birthday, and he is alone for the first time of any of his birthdays but he doesn’t feel the need for company, for people he is familiar with, feels safe with; no, inexplicably though he is thousands of miles and memories away from ‘home’, he feels self-contained, complete, without a beginning or an end, just here, on the narrow front lānai of his apartment, two storeys up, in a sweat-stained canvas chair he bought at the Salvation Army store for $3, mug of hot coffee in his right hand, letting the sunrise slide down over the forested foothills and slopes and across the valley floor now covered with expensive homes and apartments into his eyes and head and, with its illuminating warmth, helping him finish the poem he has been writing over the past few weeks about these mountains and this valley:

… The Ko‘olau watched the first people settle in the valley

The Kanaka Maoli planted their ancestor the Kalo

in the mud of the stream and swamps

and later in the terraced lo‘i they constructed

Their ancestor fed on the valley’s black blood

They fed on the ancestor

and flourished for generations …

The akua have been generous in helping him find this poem, anchoring him to this new location, this time, and this sunrise into the future and, he hopes, more lucid readings of who he is and where he has come from.

He is where, a few years ago, he never intended to be, but he is not afraid any more; well, not now, not today, as the refreshing breeze that is following the spreading light curls around his bare chest and arms, reassuring him that he is safe with himself, by himself, in the healing presences of these mountains and akua and the Kanaka Maoli who gave language to the air he is breathing: air scented with the fecund mud of the stream that flows through the valley and behind his apartment.

The sun continues rising, its inventive lifting starting in his belly and surging up his moa into his lungs and heart and up through his astounded gullet into his questing mouth. Soon he will release it full-bodied up into the sky, free of the range’s grip.

It’s been almost two years since he shifted from Aotearoa/New Zealand to Hawai‘i and this valley.