'O Kamehameha Nui

I have no time to be distracted. Those perplexing little thoughts have gone up in smoke. Today, I could care less.

I'm incited again, to plunge deep into something. The language is right here in front of me, and I am just on the cusp of the most basic level of conversational. I can do it. There is a breakthrough coming.

But I want more. I haven't danced in so many weeks, but my intellect is thirsty for some broad-contexted, fate-defying, world-changing drama. I want to know what happened. I want to see the vintage photographs, study the artifacts just inches away from my fingertips behind a thin pane of glass. History is that way, a clear sheet of time.

I don't want to learn and forget, the way I did in the younger years. I don't want to sit captivated, then leave everything behind as soon as I step into life again. I want to carry the knowledge with me.

We're reading 'O Kamehameha Nui together, in Hawaiian. His is another portrait I must draw. Now would be the opportune time. Before or after I read the biography through? Or as I go? The first impression never lasts. There is always much more I discover beneath the surface of an expression.

Kamehameha I appears to have been a stern man. I know many men died at his hand. What if he were my father? Would I look at him the same way?

Dad was in war. He killed men. I never could reconcile that fact in my head. This was my sweet, adoring, affectionate father who told jokes and kissed me goodnight. It seems an impossibility he could've been warlike in war. But I know there are depths of human nature I'll never see.

Perhaps Kamehameha was a gentle man sometimes. Perhaps he was never gentle. In any case, he didn't have to be. He was ali'i. He was feared and respected and loved. That was what mattered.

I'm surprised we have so much information about his life. Surely, all we know was passed down to us through chants, and later, historical texts.

As always, I'll do what I can to uncover as much information as I can, and celebrate the knowledge I gain, somehow. The goal still calls...a portrait of each and every ali'i in the Hawaiian monarchy. We begin with the first king.