Scorpion...


 I don't like scorpions. When I was about 10 years old, I was running our dogs at an old airplane runway at Kalaeloa with my mother. I spotted an old tire in the bushes. I reached down to pick it up and flip it. As soon as I grabbed it, something stung my finger. The pain was so intense I cried so hard. My mother took me to the dispensary on the military base and they bandaged my finger. When I dropped the tire, my mother had spotted a brown scorpion scurry away. I never forgot the pain of that experience. About 20 years later, on Maui, I was helping to cover eroding ancestral Native Hawaiian burials which were coming out of a large sand dune hill near a golf course. We had to lay down Jute netting to stabilize the sand and let vegetation grow over the netting to keep the sand from blowing away and exposing our iwi kupuna. When we arrived, I went to get the large roll of Jute netting laying in the grass which someone had dropped off earlier in the day. I bent over and was just about to put my hand in the end of the tubing when something made me pause. Instantaneously, a large brown scorpion came right out of the end.  A shiver went up my spine at the narrow miss. It would have ruined my day. It would have made me question whether what I was doing was right. Pono. It would have been a bad omen. My kupuna intervened and made me stop and hesitate for no apparent reason through my na'au. That is the power of our kupuna. And I thank them everyday for helping me with such little, but important, decisions...

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