Ran across this item because I’ve been keeping an eye out for mentions of slack key guitar in general, and George Kahumoku’s concert series in Maui in particular. Both topics are mentioned in this article from the Maui News, but what the writer has to say about true family values is worth noting:

MAKING THE SCENE: All in the family

For all the talk of “family values” in recent years that has actually been used to drive cultural wedges between groups of people, our chance to tag along on this Maui vacation was more of a spiritual homecoming. It was a great reminder that “family values” aren’t polarizing and rhetorical, but something real and alive and central to life here in the islands.

Whatever ethnicity it may start out with, it doesn’t take long for that family to turn into a little island-style United Nations. No matter what color the cousins may be, or whether they’ve got two legs, or four, or fins or flippers, it’s really all the same family –with a big welcoming hug for anyone who wants to join.

Oh, can I get an A-MEN! This crystallizes some ideas I’ve had for some time after many visits to the Hawaiian Islands; that the true spirit of aloha is something more than a cheesy travelogue come-on. It’s a state of mind, and a state of grace, and a state of being in harmony with nature and with the larger community.

Hawaii has much to teach the rest of the US, if only we were capable of listening.

At one of the concerts mentioned in the news article (the slack-key guitar series at the Ritz), host George Kahumoku introduced two young relatives of his who perform together. They’re first cousins, and one is dark and sort of exotic looking, and the other looks like someone whose great-grandparents came from northern Europe and Spain. As George said, they don’t look anything alike, but are related.

I look nothing like the whales we love to see frolicking in the water when we’re in Hawaii, and I look nothing like the turtles we occasionally encounter. Nothing like the locals, either. Yet on a deep level I feel more related to them all.

Which is probably the reason I find the whole “intelligent design” disguise that the creationists keep pushing so incomprehensible.

If I look at a whale skeleton (and I have, close up) and see that the flipper bones form a five-fingered hand that has been adapted into a powerful swimming limb, I can see the hand of God in that whale’s design, and in my own… and they are not incompatible with logical change and adaptation over time.

It seems more of a miracle to me that the Divine could make all of Creation in its myriad forms the logical result of one act, making light from dark, being from unbeing, matter from void.

For if human consciousness, a whale’s flipper, and the amazing diversity of the great ohana (family) of life on Earth were the logical result, then what is all the fuss about evolution?

In a way, Genesis anticipates evolutionary theory – admittedly in a highly condensed way. I’m not a literalist, obviously. But I do note that the creation that took place over 6 days started with light, darkness, the Void, the Firmament, and then on to more and more complexities. Plants, then things that creep on the earth, and more highly… well, evolved forms like birds and animals followed, and then Man and Woman.

Seven days? Requires a leap of faith. Seven ages? Seven eons? Then all that is required is the imposition of logic upon chaos, and time.

I’ve always said; the Creator is the first Scientist, and we are His Research Assistants.

All this from a little item about the universality of real family values. Really bakes your noodle, don’t it? 😉