The Day It Snowed in Maui

Maui is snowless; I don't think it's ever seen a single lonesome snowflake; yet it isn't difficult for snow to land on a Maui memory. Sipping a frozen pineapple smoothie under the warmth of tropical sun on "Sunday". "Friday" New York fed me a frozen smoothie of a completely different kind, papa frost. No flavors, no tropical fruit, just ice and more ice.

A disparity of such clarity, a world so big, it snows here, when the water flows warm there. It was a glint of the vastness of our small world. Feeling warmth and seeing rich growth abound all around, gray mist settling as dew, enriching the already rich island of Maui. Such a feeling puts the heart and mind at ease.

Tall ferns, blooming flowers, rain forests. Hana lies at the end of all that, but the road there is so twisty and dangerous its T-shirts state "I survived the road to Hana." A native with bad teeth launched his fishing line into the clear water "What is there to do here? You are in paradise!" he scoffed; he wasn't wrong as New York so eloquently taught me a few days later.

You can feel it in New York, the clouds puff like huge cotton balls as they roll low across the sky, the air dry, and expectant. Light wisps fall first grasping the ground, struggling to survive. Then it falls thick and heavy, blinding the light from the streetlights, casting live shadows. It is g-dless work to attempt to clean it as it falls, as you can have faith that it will keep on falling, undoing all that you have done.

It coops you up, it locks you in your home, and it fogs your mind and your windows. Bluster without luster, its just an ugly mush after a day. It makes you slip, slide, it makes your car turn wide. This is snowy New York in winter, and so it happens in the same moment that one person sits sunbathing, free and careless, the world limited to this locale of paradise. Concurrently, somewhere, someone wakes to a dark morning and biting cold half ways around the world.

In the mind their exists a place that is warm and welcoming, free to the extent that we can call it paradise, it sets us free to imagine a better tomorrow. On the flipside there is a dark cold unwelcoming place that puts us ill at ease. They both exist in utter communion as if it actually makes sense that winter and summer can be occurring at the very same time.

Depending on your destination you can live with a winter or summer. Oft quoted is the saying "Tracht vet zein gut", "think good and it will be good." It is true only because there truly is good everywhere, at the same time there is an unholy alliance of not good, winter, that exists in parallel. It is up to us to think, to tap into paradise the "it will be good".

For the record snow is nice, once in awhile.