Hawaii doesn’t know how to stay outside. It permeates. It lovingly infiltrates. Its life finds the way inside your house and if you give it the merest opening, finds itself all the way inside of you.

The home of my friend, Lynn, is a sublime example. When she’s not flying about the globe as a flight attendant or acting in a movie, she’s at home in her “Jungle House” --a place built as an invitation to be uncertain whether you are inside or outside. At the end of two long, steep ro...

“At about 1,860 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Island archipelago is the most isolated grouping of islands on earth.” I first heard this news from Ilene, the doctor of Chinese medicine who tended to my fungus and other physical anomalies with both aplomb and grace. She heard it on an Hawaiian Air flight after having making her home on Maui for a long time. “And I live there!” she'd marveled with a dash of shock. You can imagine how it hit a rookie dweller like me.

The ...

The fungi of Maui have a thing for me. And like a house guest more enthusiastic about staying than you are about hosting, they are hard to oust from the premises. When I was on Maui in February with The Peaceful Woman, I investigated an itch only to be startled by a derriere that looked as if it had been clawed by a wild animal! Once back home, my amazing health practitioner, Amber, moved the fungus on down the road with a bottle of Zymex 2. Whew!

Then a couple of months into my residence h...

Alice fell down the Rabbit Hole and landed in Wonderland. Lucy walked to the back of the wardrobe and found herself in Narnia. And Maridel slipped past the Pineapple Portal and entered Hawaii Heaven. How many times did I walk past the orange gate on my way into Haiku Town without ever noticing it? But that’s the magic of a portal into another world: It’s so much a part of the landscape that you don’t see it … until you do.
 
Looking for a new place to walk one day, Karren Louise and I f...