HAPPY KWANZAA!
DAY 6: KUUMBA - CREATIVITY
We affirm: One Love. One World. One Heart.
"To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it."
As I contemplate KUUMBA, the idea of creativity, one of the things that come to mind, strangely enough, is a man I met many years ago named John Eichnor.
John Eichnor was a pretty tall giant of a man with a bald head and thick black glasses. He looked like a cross between a hit man and Mr. Magoo.
Our paths crossed at Hina Mauka, the treatment facility in Kaneohe, Hawaii, that gave me and so many others our first big push into sober living. John was the executive director, and I would learn later it's founder.
I didn't see much of John my first couple of months except when passing by his office or when he was telling one of us to go out and pick up "dead soldiers" - which is what he called cigarette butts - from around the facility grounds.
After about 2 months, there came an occasion when John came and talked to the "house" - I remember little of what he said except that he had been in war as a soldier, captured a couple of times and sent to a German prisoner of war camp were eventually he made his escape. He had been shot in the process and dragged himself to freedom - that changed how I looked at him from that point on.
I think he started Hina Mauka as a treatment center for veteran alcoholics. It's what got me in there. Another one of those moments when my service gave me an unexpected blessing.
As far as I could see at the time this was one of Hina Mauka's main guiding principles: If you needed help they would find a way to get you a treatment bed. They were very creative with how they achieved this.
In my case, when I hit bottom, they would not have a bed for a couple of weeks. Rather than leave me alone to my own alcoholic devices they sent me to Karen and Frank M. A couple of "program people" who ran a makeshift halfway house about a 10 minute walk away. They took me in. I wasn't alone. There were about 8 or 10 others who were either waiting for a bed or were working and looking for an apartment. It was Hawaiian style, ohana, living. As much as I wanted to be a little roly-poly bug and hide in a corner and die they wouldn't let me. We ate together, went to meetings and on outings as a "pack'. For the introvert in me it was torture. But it left a life long impression on my heart.
I walked in with practically nothing and they got me hooked up with social services, took me to a doctor and a dentist for check ups and got me some clothes.
From the time my bed opened to my clinical discharge John Eichnor, Frank and Karen M. and the Hina Mauka staff were able to send me off to the next leg of my journey in a much better, more beautiful way than when I walked in.
KUUMBA: "To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it."
One day a couple of weeks before I was discharged, John grabbed a few of the residents - he said he needed help moving some beds around, the house was full and there was someone who needed a bed, stat. It turned out to be an older First Nations man, also a veteran, who was in bad shape, worse than most of us when we crawled in.
John bypassed the paperwork, the waiting period and any other obstacle and got the man a bed, some food, and some care. He and John spent time talking together. Maybe they knew each other in the war or just had similar stories. When he left we was in a better way than when he wobbled in.
KUUMBA. Creativity. It doesn't always take us to dancing and singing and painting, although those are important parts of it. It also takes us to how we live our lives in whatever clump of the global community we find ourselves.
So today, day 6 of KWANZAA take a moment to consider and appreciate how creative you have been to life and life has been to you.
Mother God thank you for all you have blessed us with, all we need to live an abundant life. Thank you for the air and the water, the grass and the trees. All creatures great and small. Open our eyes and hearts to the gifts we have and show us how to use them in loving service, in big ways and small ways, and in ways that causes any one we meet to walk away in a better place for having met us and we them.
May we do your will always.
Amen. Aho. Ase.