Lei for Liberation

I became mildly obsessed with making lei po`o after taking workshops with Honolulu Parks and Recreation with master lei maker Kumu Cynthia Hopkins, and others. It’s a sensual, meditative body and mind immersive experience. Over this past month, I’ve been making several each week, experimenting, learning, and giving them away.

As a budding lei maker, I’m relating much more deeply with the `āina, paying closer attention than ever, to the plant life around me, even along the sides of the road. I’m in deeper communication with the plants, thinking of how Queen Lili`uokalani would bow to the flowers in her garden and ask permission of them before picking. For the most part, the trees seem to love the attention, and happy to let go of their blossoms, so that they can redirect their energy, as long as I do not overpick. I only take what I need, and snip strategically so as not to cause harm.  Foraging for lei material has made me appreciate every part of the plants, and stages of growth, from the sweet little closed buds, to the shapes, textures, and sizes of the leaves. As I walk through the garden, I imagine combinations of colors, fragrances, and textures. I especially love the sprays of palm flowers before they bloom, and hinahina (Spanish moss, Pele’s Hair) that grows draped on trees and fences. I never paid much attention to these humble plants before I started making lei.

Making lei is an act of devotion to `āina, a practice of malāma `āina, and aloha `āina. For me it’s a practice of decolonizing and reindigenizing. I am not indigenous to the land I currently inhabit, but taking care of my immediate surroundings reconnects me to my own ancestry. My friend Schantell, from Wai`anae, but living in Michigan, makes lei there, using anything and everything available to her, from maple leaves, to oaks, to flowering plants. I realize that we can create ephemeral beauty out of anything. We just have to open our eyes and our senses and our imaginations.
 

My friend used to have a job selling lei to tourists in Waikiki, and they frequently encountered tourists who simply could not fathom why they would spend money on something that would die. Fresh lei are created to bring us intense joy and pleasure for a short time, then return to the earth, to nourish the next generation. As a death-phobic, capitalist society, we want a big bang for our buck, and that includes posterity. Just look at all those tech bros obsessed with longevity. But instead, lei teach us to let go, to move on, to decompose, with grace and dignity, happy to nourish future life.

As I was creating lei after lei, friends started asking me if I planned to sell them. As it turns out, I inherited my mother’s “maker” genes, and I’m pretty good at handwork, and have an eye for combination. I’m learning that a beautiful lei po`o has rhythm, breath, repetition, as well as color, pattern, and even a feeling of narrative. Each lei is singing a song, telling a story. The unique combination of elements in each lei make it a living being. I'm even tempted to name it. When the lei is complete, it requires admiration, photos, adoration. I wet it, gently wrap it in a towel, put it in the fridge overnight, then wake up in the morning remembering the lei and wanting to look at it and touch it again.

Despite compliments received, I really did not want to sell any lei. I did not want to turn a passion into a pressured, perfectionist obligation. Plus it didn’t feel quite right to try to profit from the generosity and gifts of the `āina, especially since I’m a settler, and not native to the land. Every day, Hi`iaka presents us with overwhelming and abundant beauty. At my residence alone, we have huge, overflowing kalauna (crown flower) trees, pua melia (plumeria), mangos, noni, and much more.

However, I received a message as I was driving across the island one day. As a resident of Waimānalo, I cross the island and the truly magnificent Ko`olau mountains several times a week. To tell you the truth, it feels very kapu to make this crossing. I think of the days before the highways, when kānaka had to cross by foot or horseback. How forbidding the mountains and valleys are, how dangerous, and how sacred. I recognize the controversial history of interstate H-3, and the desecration of sacred sites I am driving over. As I make this crossing, I turn off the radio, I take a soft, slow breath, and do my best to center myself. I chant to the mountains, and pray, asking for guidance, and wisdom, and protection. I offer myself as a servant to the `āina. As I drove home one evening, the message came all at once, with great clarity: make lei to support Palestine. At that moment, Lei Po`o for Palestine was birthed. The purpose is to sell the lei, on a sliding scale donation basis, to raise money for the Wai Nau Aloha Water Project. Also, the Ko`olaus helped me realize I didn’t have to make the lei alone, but rather as a hui, inviting others to participate.

Our little hui met this weekend for the first time, and we created 3 lei po`o, 1 pua melia lei ā`ī, and 8 kalauna lei ā`ī! Amazing, beautiful work. The next day I made 2 more lei po`o. Make sure to check out our photo gallery. It feels pono to share the abundance of Hawai`i with the people of Palestine, 2 million of whom are still in Gaza, after 19 months of devastation, and now, out and out starvation. Hawai`i and Palestine, and for that matter, Korea, share similar histories of illegal occupation. As we yell, FREE PALESTINE, we also demand rights, reparations, demilitarization, and landback to Kanaka Māoli, and reunification of the Korean peninsula. The Wai Nau Aloha Water Project has been providing direct food and water aid on the ground in Gaza, by Palestinian relatives of a Honolulu resident.

If this story resonates with you, and you would like to support the people of Palestine, while acquiring a beautiful, custom-made lei (of any sort), please message @lei4palestine on Instagram, or email or text me directly. Suggested donation is $50-100+.

Free Hawai`i, Free Palestine, Free Korea! From the abundance of the island, with eternally bountiful aloha.

Colonialism Under Any Other Name

 

My yoga philosophy mentor, Dr. Shyam Ranganathan of York University in Toronto, pointed out in a recent talk, that what we tend to label “fascism,” “authoritarianism,” “oligarchy,” and other similar terms, all fall under the umbrella of colonialism.

Under the system of capitalism, it’s easy to forget how colonized we all are. Capitalism is what enables our labor, creativity, and resources to get exploited. Capitalism is so deeply imbued in us that soon, we become the exploiters ourselves. We sell others and ourselves to the highest bidder, we strive to get a piece of the colonial pie. Those who thrive under capitalism will never admit they’re colonized. Instead, they uphold themselves as exemplars of society.

In Hawai`i, colonialism permeates all life on the islands. We only became a state in 1959, and Queen Liliu`okalani illegally overthrown in 1893, which sometimes feels like yesterday. The US military controls over 200,000 acres in Hawai`i. In Waimānalo, you can hear military drills and bomb testing several nights a week up in the mountains. It shakes the house and startles the dogs. During the day, fighter jets roar through the air, disrupting conversations, and making me cover my ears and close my eyes. The dire housing shortage and the roaming houseless communities remind us constantly that this beautiful land has been sliced and diced for profit, and that only the wealthy can acquire housing stability. And just how was their wealth acquired? Hmmmm.

Colonizers are the most colonized. Over time, the colonized subject begins to buy into the system and allow themselves to be shaped by the colonizer. It could begin with, “Oh, I like that song you sing to your god, let me learn it.” Or “what a beautiful cloth your dress is made of,” or “I can express myself more through English than my mother tongue.” Soon enough, the colonized have internalized the values, beliefs, and practices of the colonizer and will do the bidding for them.

What we’re witnessing in 2025 in the so-called United States of America, is just the next stage of colonialism. We know USA was built on genocide of the Native Americans, and chattel slavery of Africans. That transitioned into Jim Crow, institutionalized racism, Indian reservations, power to corporations, devastation to our natural resources, and greater and greater concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and much more.

The oppression that People of the Global Majority have always experienced in the USA now extends to white folks and the middle class. The American myth was that class privilege could protect you. That if you worked hard enough, and taught that work ethic to your progeny, that over generations, you too could be a homeowner, with a retirement account, healthcare, paid vacations, and all the other perqs.

Trump and Musk have revealed that myth as a great lie. Under DOGE, even middle class white folks are losing their jobs, the stock market falling, and even US citizens face deportation for violations as minor as traffic tickets. Colonization not only oppresses Black and Brown folks, as it always has, but has caught up with everyone outside of the 1% billionaire class.

The good news is that now that we can name it, we can fight it. We know how to decolonize! Many of us have been working on decolonizing for decades. From a yoga perspective, decolonizing means devoting yourself to sovereignty, and also supporting others in their sovereignty. In Iyengar Yoga, we begin with the body. As we become more deeply attuned with our own physical form, we start to notice our habits that cause imbalance, and later, aches and pains: “I favor my right leg,” “My head tilts to one side, “ “I slump at my desk.” As we begin to notice and disrupt harmful physical habits, we may note our minds starting to shift. Why am I spending so much time at my desk? Is this what I value the most? Do I feel good when I’ve spent an hour scrolling on my phone? We may start changing our lifestyles, diets, and the way we spend time and interact with others.

From a yoga perspective, sovereignty, the opposite of colonization, means we will take charge of our lives, no matter what. We recognize that we always have free will. In contrast to libertarianism, it’s not my desires and preferences at the expense of yours, but rather, if I value and uphold my own sovereignty, I also must uphold yours. This does not lead to a hyperindividualized, selfish society, mimicking the hoarding billionaires, but instead, can be the first stage of decolonizing, and building beloved community.

For me, decolonizing means I have largely extracted myself from mainstream culture. I have chosen time over money. I subsist on very little money so that I have time for my artistic, spiritual, cultural, and family practices. I help care for my grandkids twice a week. I practice hula and traditional Korean dance and drumming. I engage in community resistance efforts and projects, especially regarding Palestine. I engage in aloha `āina and I mālama the land. I devote myself to the next generation of Iyengar Yoga practitioners. I keep practicing, studying, teaching, and sharing everything I have learned and am still learning. To tell you the truth, I have no retirement account. When I run out of money, that’s it. It will be time to leave my physical body and existence here on earth. But I know my words and deeds and spirit will live on. I like to think I am not afraid of death. I hope this is true.  

As I write these words, I laugh and suspect very few people will want to decolonize themselves to the extent I have! It’s a constant project. We can never declare that we have fully decolonized or that we are completely sovereign. I drive on government roads, burn fossil fuels, and carry my government ID. I paid my taxes to Caesar. I receive Medicaid and food benefits. I live on crown lands, stolen and occupied. I write this on my device and post it to a corporate website. UGH! We constantly compromise.

But the more we are willing and able to hold these contradictions and persist in the larger project of decolonization, the less Musk, DOGE, ICE, Meta, Google, and all the rest can control us. Make yourself wildly and radically uncontrollable. Grace Lee Boggs starting declaring to youth in the 1990s: “The most important thing you can do is grow your own food.” Parliament Funkadelic advises, “Free your mind, and your ass will follow.” As an Iyengar Yoga practitioner, I would say the reverse, “free your ass and your mind will follow.” Or in more pedagogical language, “Learn to align your hips over your heels, thighs pressing back, and buttocks forward, and notice the spaciousness in your mind that arises.”

May it be so. Pay no mind to the colonizers. Defy them at every turn. Fly your flag of sovereignty. May it blow freely in the wind.

Good Enough

you do not have to be strong enough
nor limber enough
nor smart enough
you do not have to have the perfect balance of firmness and flexibility

you do not have to have the answer to every problem
you do not have to know it all by heart

there is no such thing as beautiful enough
there is only the fact of your face
and the truth it carries
the hurt and the joy and the uncertainty
there are only the laugh lines growing deeper
than the worry lines

there is no such thing as brilliant enough
there is only the presence of your mind
at any given moment
the fluctuations and the fullness

you do not have to be virtuous all the time
you do not have to be enlightened today
there is always the next lifetime
there is always another chance to be just a little bit kinder
a little bit wiser

take it in small doses like a homeopathic remedy
take a pellet of tapas
a tablet of svadhyaya
a tincture of ishvara pranidhani

your earnest effort is enough for today
for the path is long, spiraling, and circuitous
that’s enough for the moment
for you are good enough
good enough already

 

August 2014

More Poems for Palestine

OORI AGAH 우리 아가

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe;
and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this
may be incapable of morality.”
~ James Baldwin

even before the roosters crow
    they come searching
        the lost palestinian children
they cross oceans and countless time zones
    crying for their mothers
        reaching out for their fathers
they find the grandmothers
    awake already
        sitting up in bed
here, we say
    i have made
        a space for you        
take this pillow
    drink this water
        i have been waiting for you
suddenly i can understand arabic
    i dust the rubble off their clothes
        run my fingers through their ashy hair
i say yes
         yes
        you are safe now
exhausted from their long journey
    one child tucks under my arm
        another nestles at my back
soon we are three and four deep
    one after another
        in my crowded narrow bed
even my own mother
    and grandmother
        join me in our soft expansive nest
they chant
    자장 자장 우리 아가 jajang jajang oori agah
        제도 잔다 우리 아가 jeh do jandda oori agah*           
over and over again
    until we all fall  
            asleep


* Korean folk lullaby: 자장 자장 우리 아기/ 꼬꼬 닭아 우지마라/ 우리 아기 잠을 깰라/ 멍멍 개야 짖지마라/ 자장 자장 잘도 잔다.

Christmas Letter 2024: Mourn the Dead and Fight Like Hell for the Living

Beloved community, 

We exist and persist through an alchemy of joy and grief. In this past year, I have gone deeper into grief than I would have ever thought possible. And yet, there's joy, peeking its head, then blooming like dark purple lilikoi blossoms, waiting to be pollinated. Every occasion of grief opens my soma and psyche ever larger, so that I become more receptive to joy, such that each gaping wound invites cleansing and healing. Each year, more healing becomes possible, through the sibling practices of grief and joy.

Every single day this year, I have awoken to the wails of my expanded `Ohana around the world, crying out for justice, freedom, safety, food, water, and shelter. Every single night I pray for all who are living under occupation. I breathe my way through the unbearable, washing the path with my tears. 

Meanwhile, I sing, dance, write, moan, hike, swim, run, jump, and flip upside down with my grandkids. We make up songs and dances and games and laugh like crazy. We are here to nurture future generations, to care for the land and sea, to drink the life-giving juice of every moment. All the while, we carry the grief like a swaddled infant. 

We refuse to ignore war crimes. We cannot avert our eyes from atrocity. We cannot turn our backs on genocide, especially when it's committed by our own government officials. Friends, keep fighting for Palestinian freedom! Otherwise the moral injury of inaction will wear us down, make us ill, cause irreparable harm on every level, from the intensely personal to the global.

Grieve with me. Hold my hand and walk with me. Come to the stream, the ocean, the mountains, with me. Help me spread the ashes of our suffering. Let's break our hearts open, over and over again. Let us compost all we have lost, and bask in the solstice, refresh to enter the New Year, and embody the power of Umoja, true unity, on this first night of Kwanzaa.

Free Palestine, Free Hawai`i, Free Korea. Stop genocide everywhere. May all people be free.

Ever fighting for your freedom and mine,

Peggy Gwi-Seok Hong 

Back on Familiar Soil

When I arrived back in the land of the Peoria, Kickapoo, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations of Turtle Island (aka the Midwestern USA), the trees and flowers waved to me. This is the place I lived for decades of my young and middle adulthood. The Brown-Eyed Susans nod their welcome. The maples swing their branches hello. Along the train tracks and highways the Queen Anne’s Lace bob and sway. I feel waves of love and affection as I reunite with the plant life here. I am filled with somatic memories of the middle third of my life, the joys, the lessons, and the sorrows.

Gone are the succulents and bromeliads of the monsoon rainforest of Chittaranjan Vatika, siblings of the plants of my subtropical Waimānalo home. Now I am among the drought-hardy, deciduous plants of Illinois.

The people have also turned over. Gone are the airports populated with Muslim families and Arab voices. No more Marathi and Hindi filling the air. Most of the shades of Brown and Black skin are gone. For the first time in what feels like years, I am among majority white folks, a situation rarely occurring in the occupied Hawaiian nation. I’m no longer used to the rounded r’s, pale white calves, blue eyes.

When I left my marriage in 2010, 95% of my friends stopped contacting me. It’s not like they broke up with me or rejected me, they just quietly stopped reaching out to me. I was deeply established in my white community, as a poet, dancer, mother, and Iyengar Yoga teacher. I had “achieved” a certain level of status and respect in the city of Milwaukee. Frankly, I was valued as a safe POC. Not too radical, not scary, but middle class, educated, and assimilated. But when I left my marriage, after some years of becoming more visibly and vocally radical, the community—mainstream, white—seemed to know that my decision to divorce my husband signified something much larger than a personal relationship. It represented a decision to leave behind the dominant culture. Not just the stability of my marriage, but my foothold in capitalism, the status earned in white culture and the arts, plus the trappings of neoliberalism.

I told one of the few friends who stuck by me, a Black woman, that I felt abandoned and alone in the absence of my marriage, and all it represented. I told her I felt like I was on a boat, all alone, in the middle of an immense ocean. She said, “But the rest of us are on another island, waving to you, saying, come on over, you can do it, keep paddling!”

I have devoted myself to that island, a place of resistance, a place of revolution. We have rejected many of the teachings we were indoctrinated into. We embrace interdependence rather than individuality, radical abundance rather than competitive scarcity, solidarity rather than charity. Currently, I live on a farm in solidarity with the Southeast Asian community. In truth, it’s messy and imperfect, but it provides a framework to live more intimately with the `āina, surrounded by mountains, forests, ocean, and the Kanaka maoli community.

So to be back in Potawatomi nation feels….awkward, like coming back to a past relationship. Yes, it’s beautiful, I love it and appreciate it. But neither do I feel completely at home.

Besides the land, the people represent a different matter. Can I re-adapt to white culture? What does that look like and what does that mean? I feel reluctant and cautious. Can I relate to white culture differently than I did when I was younger? Can I overcome the internalized pressure to assimilate, and instead be fully myself, without fetishizing or exoticizing or capitulating? This is the first time I’m back in Urbana since March 2020, right before the global shutdown. So much has happened since then.

We have all grown much more intimate with death. The COVID pandemic has not truly ended, and may never completely wane. We all have friends and loved ones we have lost to the virus. We are all that much closer to our own mortality. Additionally we survived the election of 2020 in the USA, which brought an end to the Trump rampage, but revealed a failed democracy, resulting in an evermore split and polarized society, an extremist Supreme Court, and responsibility for the current war crimes of the worst genocide in ages, sending USA bombs to Israel. Yesterday alone, 66 Palestinians were killed, including 36 at a field hospital full of refugees.

However, denial and individualism persist as the trademark of the dominant white culture. Urbana remains an idyllic university enclave. I rode my friend’s bike through the loveliest of neighborhoods, filled with 100-year-old houses, mature trees, even cobblestones. But on some level my body experiences it as violence.

My most superficial outer body feels at ease, surrounded by beauty, calmness, and spaciousness, especially in comparison to the bustling crowds of Pune, India. But the somatic layer below that feels suspicious: why is it so quiet and seemingly peaceful here when so much of the planet is being devastated? What imbalance do I need to discern and address?

The deepest layer of somatic experience recognizes our unity as living beings, the graciousness and regenerative power of the `āina, and the inner infinite, puruśa. But I cannot deny that middle layer of consciousness which perceives the extreme imbalance and unease among the people.

This week of Lois Steinberg’s Iyengar Yoga intensive will be a study of these layers for me. I vow to never forget or disregard my siblings and cousins in other parts of the world, who are suffering. I vow to direct whatever healing power I can muster, not just to my own healing, but also to the greater cause of solidarity. I strive to recognize more and more ways I can direct my energy to the alleviating of suffering globally. We each have more power than we recognize or utilize. Collectively we can achieve anything, if only we could prioritize our greater communities over individual comforts. May it be so.

Giving my hands to struggle

Tomorrow I leave India. This month has been an absolute privilege. I've been able to devote myself to rest, healing, nourished with joy and insight, friendships old and new, and deep immersion in sadhana and sangha. Yesterday I started packing, to make sure I had adequate luggage space, and to mentally begin the transition to the States.

As sad as I am to be leaving, my seventh pilgrimage to India and RIMYI, I am also feeling ready. Just as my body yearned for my children when I had to leave them to come and study when they were young, my body is starving for the embrace of my grandchildren. I miss Solomon's drool and runny nose, and his ear-piercing shouts. I miss Silas's stories and playing Hotwheels with him. I miss my conversations with Coco and our cartwheels and imaginary games.

I also miss my people. I need to feel my feet on the ground in active resistance to the devastation and oppression happening in this moment. The official death toll in Gaza nears 40,000. Sonya Massey has been murdered in cold blood by the state--SAY HER NAME. MF Netanyahu addresses Congress and is met with standing ovations. 

These are the times I know I will never be a pure yogi. I am not temperamentally suited to retreat fully into abhyasa and vairagya, practice and renunciation. My body longs for my drum to bang on at protests and rallies. It kills me to be missing so many events in occupied Hawai`i, resisting the military wargames of RIMPAC, and demanding citizen's arrest of Netanyahu at the State Capitol. My vocal chords cannot be fully satisfied only chanting the invocation to Patañjali. I cannot fully channel my tapas into yogic devotion. I need my feet to be pounding the pavement in solidarity with the people. I am ready to re-enter the fray.

I need my yoga practice to daily purify myself for warriorship. I need to daily metabolize and process the unspeakable shit that is thrown at us, and make myself robust enough to withstand it, speak out, and act decisively.

The spiritual path leads too easily to bypassing. Yes, we are all one, and Trump, Biden, and Netanyahu are all projections of myself. Yes, the `āina belongs to no one, and we are all indigenous to some place. Yes, we can save no one and it's not our responsibility to do someone else's spiritual work.

But, DAMN.....

I cannot stand by and be silent in the face of state violence. I cannot witness the mauling of children and do nothing. I cannot claim ignorance when I live in 2024 and see with my very eyes what unfolds before us. I cannot deny what my body perceives and conveys. It starts with the daily oppressions of caste and class, the demands of capitalism, the abuse of the natural world. It grows into political clashes and ongoing theft of land and resources. It heightens into genocide.

I remain eternally grateful for the profound practice of Iyengar Yoga, and my illustrious teachers, the best in the world, let's face it. And I am now poised to relaunch into the prakrtic mess which is this world. Send me. Use me. May I devote all my power to the healing of the people, the restoration of community, to confront wrongdoing, and do the needful. May I be imbued with wisdom and courage to be staunch on the path of right action.