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Laurence PlattBeing in the ocean is and always has been like a baptism for me. Baptism as a full body immersion in water is a total experience. This is the sense in which being in the ocean is like a baptism: it's a total experience. Yet unlike what often goeswith (as Alan Watts may have said) a religious experience like baptism, being in the ocean is devoid of significance. It's much, much more immediate than that.
In this regard I don't have any notches on my belt. Whatever I do is whatever I do. I don't assign importance to what I do. But if I did carve notches on my belt to denote things I'm happy for having experienced and proud of having accomplished, it's appropriate one of them would be for sourcing and participating in a near decade long conversation which resulted exactly as intended in Werner's work coming back to Hawai'i.
There's nothing special about Hawai'i in this regard. My life is given by the possibility "Werner's work is available". Everywhere. For everyone. With no one and nothing left out. Hawai'i fits into this context. It's not the other way around. That said, when you bring together two of the most magnanimous, sublime, angelic contexts in the universe - transformation, and the epitome of life by and in the ocean - the spontaneous inspired excitement which occurs like ocean spray thumping up through a blowhole in the rock at the edge of Kawela Bay is palpable, riveting, irresistible. There's no reason for doing any of this here. There's no reason to stand for the possibility of transformation in Hawai'i or anywhere else for that matter. It doesn't occur this way for me. I don't require a reason. Rather, it's a calling. And I notice what's so is without hesitation, I'm answering.