What Death and the Water Speak of

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He ʻoiaʻiʻo wale nā mea i haʻi ʻia mai iā kākou. ʻO ko kākou ola ʻana he māhu nō ia, i pua aʻe a nalo iho, ua like nō hoʻi me ka pua o ke kula i mōhala i ke kakahiaka a mae i ke awakea, a ahiahi heleleʻi. ʻO ke ao a ka makani i puhi aku a nalo, pēlā nō ko kākou ola ʻana.¹ 

This is the one true thing: our life is but smoke, it arises and vanishes, like a flower on the plain blooming in the morning, fading in the afternoon, and in the evening falling. When the wind blows and the clouds dissipate, such is our life (authorʻs own translation).

Death

I died one Sunday afternoon in Hilo—felt the earth descend beneath my horizontal body into a grave. Caput mortuum-colored walls were covered in vines, teeming with life. I could feel my decomposing body feeding the earth through soil, microbes, and mycelial networks. I felt the reciprocal energy exchange that exists between life and death, between the living and the dead. The forest grew up through me.  

My Death stood above my grave, shrouded, features obscured except half a skeletal face which shone through the dim shadowy light. ʻAlalā built a nest of sticks in my ribcage. Generations nested and fledged. They flew out of me in such numbers they blackened the lavender-colored sky. Shadows of trees obscured the corners of my vision, highlighted by thousands of shades of green we no longer have names for—words lost to time. Death held an ʻAlalā—a raven—in one hand and a kahili feather standard in the other, which resembled a scythe in the light reflecting from beyond the trees. Death then beckoned me to follow. 

I saw a river flowing through the forest in the land of the dead. Every color imaginable sparkles in the light reflecting off the water—colors beyond the visible spectrum. Moss-covered chthonic cathedrals reach towards the heavens. ʻIeʻie climbs skyward in a palace of green. ʻŌhiʻa of all colors, kupukupu, and kōpiko grow abundantly. ʻŌlapa dances in the wind. I watched the river flow by and rush over a precipice into a waterfall. In that moment, I realized where I was. I realized what I was—my kino wailua, my soul.

“We, among the so-called living, are not in charge of our lives as we think. The real fingers around our necks or on our pulses are not our own. As a matter of fact we are hardly alive at all, here, because the real truth is that we are held fast in the grip of the dead.”

—Peter Kingsely²

Death is the great equalizer, the final threshold—ke ala hiki ʻole ke hoʻi mai, the road from which there is no return: a portal, a return home. Death is unconquerable, and everything that lives must necessarily die and must also consume the dead to keep living. Death feeds the forest through reciprocal energy exchange, through mycelial networks, through the fruit, leaves, and bodies we consume—that die so we can go on living. All of life is sustained through death. Death is inextricably linked to life, as cycles of time are inextricably linked to eternity. They’re cyclical, circular, continuums. Inseparable.

Death and the water speak of formlessness, eternity, flow. Water flows through cycles: evaporating, condensing into clouds, falling as rain, feeding the soil and collecting into rivers that eventually flow into the ocean. Water is pulled vertically and horizontally by the gravitational force of the moon and the sun in relation to each other, causing the ebb and flow of tides and currents.³

Traditional time is kept by these solar, lunar, and stellar cycles—the sun, moon, and stars—rising in the east and setting in the west. In many cultures, time is conceived of as circular or spiral. Indeed the ecliptic plane—the axis of rotation of the earth—is a flat circle the earth travels around the sun, which is what defines solar time: the Gregorian calendar⁴. In colonial societies, time is perceived as linear. It is viewed “through a narrow slit” as individual moments.⁵ Ancestral time is perceived on longer timescales, as a vast continuum, usually circular or spiral in form, which links past, present, and future. The present moment is where the past and the future converge, from one unperceived potentiality to another. Time flows like water into eternity. We cannot grasp water or time in our hands; they slip through our fingers. The flow of water can be directed with intention, like our lives. Water sustains life, but also has the power to kill.

The dead are still with us: they live on in our DNA, whose form is a spiral, like time. Each of them, each form that evolved before us, is there. The dead are in the earth feeding life. Everything that is dead eventually ends up in the ocean⁶ through water cycles. To look ahead, we must look back—to our ancestors, our own dead, to history, and ancient teachings.

Water, Realms, and Ritual 

Hoʻolana i ka wai ke ola, life floats on water [near death].⁷ 

In contrast to the “Western” notion of the body housing the soul, Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) believe that the wailua (the soul) houses the physical body. Wailua literally translates to two waters. Wai—like most Hawaiian words—has multiple meanings. Wai is any type of liquid (except saltwater) including blood, tears, semen. It means to flow. Wai is also an interrogative pronoun (what, whom, whose); it means to retain, place, leave, earn, deposit.⁸ When reduplicated, waiwai means wealth.

However, wailua is one of many terms we have for the soul. Souls of the living and the dead are differentiated from each other by their very nature. Words for an incarnated soul are myriad and include kino akakū, ʻuhane, and ʻula, among many others. The inner eye is known as the lua ʻuhane, the pit of the soul, which is where the soul leaves and enters during dreams and visions.⁹ Visions while awake are called akakū or kūaka; vision while falling asleep (in hypnagogia) are hihiʻo and dreams are moe ʻuhane.¹⁰ Similarly, there are numerous words for the souls of the dead including kino wailua; disembodied souls are called ʻula lele (which figuratively means esteemed favorite).¹¹

“Death marked the ending of the earth cycle, and the commencement of the existence in the unseen with akua and ʻaumākua.”

—S.M. Kamakau¹²

There are multiple realms (ao, which also means daytime, cloud, enlightenment) where a soul resides after death, at the end of terrestrial incarnation. The ao ʻaumākua is where the ancestors dwell in their celestial abodes, in the skies or on the earth, depending on the kuleana (responsibility) of the ʻohana (family). It is a vast realm with many dwelling places, and it is said “Ua pilikia ka puka, ua nui kahi e noho ai” “Narrow is the entrance, many are the dwelling places” and ʻuhane are brought there by their ʻaumakua¹³. The ʻaumākua themselves are “gods who never forgot their human descendants”¹⁴. Indeed, a person’s relationship with their ʻaumākua is important for their soul’s journey after death. ʻAlalā are one of many earthly manifestations of ʻaumākua who fetch their loved ones at leina ʻuhane— leaping places to the other side.

Certain individuals were deified and transfigured into an ʻaumākua after death through a ritual called kākūʻai—an evocation of an akua kumupaʻa. The ritual feeds the akua kumupaʻa and ensures the souls of the beloved dead are welcomed into the ao ʻaumākua. The dead who are ritually fed in this way become one with the ʻaumākua to whom they are deified and live on in their earthly manifestations, helping instruct the family on how to live.

Those with no ʻaumākua or beloved dead to welcome them end up in ao kuewaor or in Milu. The ao kuewa is where hungry ghosts search for spiders and caterpillars for food; Milu’s realm is the underworld, the pō pau ʻoleor endless night, which is actually not dark at all, but bright; ʻieʻie grows at the entrance.¹⁵ There are stories of people descending to the underworld, the realm of Milu, and returning to the land of the living. Mokulehua and Maluae each descend to Milu to fetch their loved ones and return them to the living world.¹⁶ Others embark on epic journeys and have to restore life to dead loved ones: Hiʻiaka travels from Hawaiʻi Island to Kauaʻi to fetch Lohiʻau for her sister Pele, and has to learn the ceremonies to restore his lifeless body.¹⁷ Life was restored to the body by massaging it back in through the feet, although this action was met with resistance.¹⁸ Traditionally, an ʻAlalā announced when life was restored.¹⁹

While death was usually “met with calm and courage”,²⁰ our ancestors also knew how to grieve. Kanikau is a general term for all types of mourning. Chants are composed to honor the dead—often chanted in a wailing style known as kūmākena. Some of our grief practices were violent expressions of grief including beating the chest and wailing, knocking out teeth, scarification, and cutting hair. Death feasts attended by family and friends happened after the death and a year later. The second feast released the living “from the burden of mourning” and released the dead “from the burdens of life”.²¹

“The living confer upon the dead a present moment, through our conscious attention, and the dead offer answers to the problems of the living by speaking unbound from existence or time.”

—Duncan Barford²²

Death practices honor our dead, transmute our grief, and connect us to the larger continuum to which we all belong. They also energetically feed the dead, through our attention. By making space for grief, we honor the wholeness of our humanity: we remember our capacity for love. In honoring our dead, we acknowledge our own mortality. At the end of the road, death is waiting—like an old friend—just beyond the veil of appearances.  Since my death, I have had the great honor to chant ʻuē helu (literally crying lists; death chants that recount the lives of an individual) for ‘Alalā and the other endangered birds that died in captive conservation, and a kanikau (funeral dirge) for my Uncle Tommy. I chanted at the funeral right after my cousins spoke. The room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone, including me, was crying—I was wailing while chanting, a style also known as ʻAlalā—so-named after the beloved ravens who nested and flew out of my chest while I was dead. 

We used to live much closer to death, to the formless realm from whence we come and to whither we return. Death was all around us. Diseases took loved ones much younger in life. Communicating with the dead, at least for Hawaiians, was no great feat. Visions gifted to us from our dead, our ʻaumākua, and our akua were considered normal. In our modern era—through medicine and vaccines—death has become almost taboo. Visions are pathologized and dismissed as mental illness. Conversations about death and visions are wrought with fear of the unknown. Modern medicine has sought to make death obsolete as life is extended far beyond what it was ever meant to be. And for all this life, so few of us ever truly live.

We are pulled this way and that, busied with our calendar notifications and meetings—lost in our thoughts. Pulled from this present moment again and again, to the minutiae of our past or plans for the future: never truly here, never truly living. Always rushing to the next thing. Hurry up and live! The world is ending! We wait for some distant time when we can finally enjoy life: retirement perhaps, that next vacation. We forget to go outside and look at the moon, watch the clouds, listen to the forest—all of whom are beckoning us to this present moment, calling us to consciously engage with this terrestrial plain. Listen to bird songs. Feel the sun on your skin. Drink water.

Our bodies are mostly water, but are of the earth. Our bones hold the earth and waters that feed us: our geographic points of origin can be traced through Strontium isotopes in our bones.²³ When we die, our earthly bodies and the water they carry return to the earth, to the web of life. They feed the soil, microorganisms and fungi, and help plants grow. In this way, nothing ever really dies. Energy transmutes. Decomposition gives rise to new life. All of life is sustained by death and water.

Our soul—our essence—belongs to the stars—distant lights in the darkness spread out across the night sky from beyond the ceiling, beyond the treetops and the clouds. Look to the sky—to the boundless, expansive void that surrounds us—to our ancestors, the stars, shining in the darkness of history. The quiet deep within us reflected outwards, the quiet expansive void reflected within.

Like our bodies, sound is earth-bound. Sound is reliant upon earth’s atmosphere in order to travel.²⁴ Space is a void, a vacuum devoid of sound:²⁵ no birdsong, no music can exist there. In the same way that the sun and the moon keep time, our heartbeats keep time. Our breath keeps time. Music keeps time. The trees, the soil, the insects, the birds, all animal sounds and songs exist in time. Time as we perceive it is earth-bound—like our bodies and music. We are earth-bound and time-bound beings.

We are connected to each other and our ancestors through time, but we also are those ancestors, and our descendants will likewise be us—all the way back through each instance of creation before us to the beginning of life itself, and before this earth existed when pō wale nō,²⁶ there was only potentiality.

“A moment ago, and we were completely absorbed in the hectic ephemeral life of the present; then, the next moment, something very remote and strange flashes upon us, which directs our gaze to a different order of things. We turn away from the vast confusion of the present to glimpse the higher continuity of history.”

—C.G. Jung in Kingsley²⁷

All of life is sustained through death. Kanaloa ensured this when he bound us to this earth. That is why he is tied to death, the setting sun in the West, and the wet dark season in the Northern Hemisphere. Kanaloa is the ocean akua, linked to ancestral continuum, foundational knowledge, and environmental balance.²⁸ Kanaloa is also a poetic term for food, and something that is secure, firm, immovable, established, unconquerable. Kāne is the sun, freshwater, the sunʻs heat in the atmosphere, evapotranspiration, and growth—the giver and taker of life.^{29 30} Kāne, through sun and water sustains life. Kanaloa takes it. Kāne and Kanaloa are twins, they work together to sustain life, cause decomposition, and ensure the health of the earth—that nothing goes to waste.³¹

The year is split between Kāne, when the sun is in the North, and Kanaloa, when the sun is in the South; at the equinoxes Kāne and Kanaloa become Kāneloa and share the time with Wākea (Sky Father, the vast expanse of the sky, the sun at its zenith, an ancestor).³² Equinoxes are a time of balanced energies: day and night are equal, light and darkness balanced.  

Our ancestors were attuned to the earth and how to live in this balance. They knew daily and seasonal cycles. They planted by the moon, and knew which stars on the horizon were associated with seasonality and weather patterns, and planted, fished, and harvested accordingly. People in relationship with land still observe these phenomena. In order to read the omens in the sky, we must build a relationship with the natural world by observing the environment around us, by becoming familiar with these earthly patterns. We each have to build our own relationship with the earth and with the cosmos.

Life itself is a balance between perceived opposites: night and day, life and death, summer and winter. These balance points become more obvious at equinoxes when the day and night are equal. All things having to do with time are cyclic—night transforms into day, day into night, summer into spring, fall, and winter. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, oscillates between the North and the South depending on the tilt of the earth. And so it is with life and death. Our life blooms in the morning, fades in the afternoon, and in the evening, falls. We return to pō, the unseen realm.

Rebirth

“Everything is alive and death is just a name for something we don’t understand”

—Kingsley³³

As I stood beside that flowing river, in the abundant imaginal land, my soul’s true home, I thought of my dogs and my partner. My consciousness was immediately transported and hovered above my house—over 20 miles away. I stared down at the dogs laying on the porch and my partner working in the yard. I chose to come back. The river rushed by me, water glistening in shades of pink. I revived myself like Hiʻiaka revived the lifeless Lohiʻau and I returned to my body. My eyes opened, I was alive. I had returned from the land of the dead.

Meeting my Death changed me. Before I died I struggled with suicidal ideations off and on for most of my life. The few years leading up to it were the worst they had been. I wanted to escape this flesh prison and get back to the expansiveness of the stars. Since that afternoon when I died in Hilo, the ideations have more or less ceased. And the truth is that I have died and been reborn to myself a thousand times. In the end, I know that my Death and the ʻaumākua will welcome me back to the unseen eternal realm from whence we all come, to whither we all return. There is no need to rush it, and no need to avoid it either. Death is not a question, it comes for us all. The question is how we live, how we engage with each moment we are given. We can die and be reborn in every moment, in every season. Acknowledging the cyclical nature of time and continuums is medicine. Acknowledging the transience of life and the inevitability of death is essential. 

Our time on this earth is short—the blink of an eye in geologic terms. These bodies are shells, vessels. If we are lucky, they grow old; they pass away. What is left? Something eternal, formless: our consciousness which is connected to all consciousness—both living and dead. Just beyond the thin veil that separates this illusory slice of reality we perceive with our senses is a greater reality—a reality we can access through altered states of consciousness—visions, sleep, psychedelics, hypnagogia (the transitional state between awake and sleeping), hypnopompia (the transitional state between sleep and waking), and death. The ʻaumākua—our dead, the ancestors—communicate with us in these states through dreams and visions. These ancestors guide us in life, and after: they help our souls on their journey home to the great beyond.

In life, we wear masks to distract us from the expansiveness of who we truly are. We see ourselves as individuals—much the way we perceive time as moments—but we are reflections of something greater than all of us, waiting to be recognized—for us to recognize ourselves. We can feel this expansiveness in flow states: when we dance, when we swim, when we watch the shifting spectrum of light reflecting off water. We can feel it when we watch new land erupting from a volcano. We are reminded of our expansiveness when we gaze up at the night sky, to the ancestors who dwell in the stars and in our hearts. Everything expands outwards from each of us, in this present moment, to eternity.

We are the centers of our own universe.³⁴ We are the still point which all else orbits around—the sun rising and setting, the procession of stars through the sky, the light reflecting on the face of the moon. We are solid, affixed to the earth. Within ourselves is a balance point between perceived opposites—always circling, commingling—beauty and horror, night and day, birth and death, darkness and light, receptivity and action. The balance point is as fine as a knife blade within us. At the center of our being a tiny cliff reaches up into the expansiveness of the sky. And we are both the cliff and the expansiveness, the ocean and the fires bellowing up from the center of the earth. We dance between these divine elements—we become them—remembering and forgetting ourselves in the chaos, always able to bring ourselves back to that stillness within.

When you become the mountain—the solid, ancient earth—you remember what is ancient within. When you become the water—formless, shifting, moving with the cycles of the moon—you remember what is formless within you. When you become the pele (the lava) you remember the creative fires always burning within—fires that connect to the core of the earth, to the sun, to all suns, to the entirety of the cosmos. When you become the aether, you remember what is expansive within—the container, the spaces in-between that connect all beings through breath, through respiration. All this, the ancestors knew.

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References

1. Timoteo, E.S., Pali, P., Makekau, C.S., Meheula, J.A., Koko, S., Kupau, L.K., Seong, J.K., Wa, M.C., Hiram, L., Hoopii, K., Laiekealoha, Ako, H. He Hoalohaloha no Mrs. Rebecca B.K. Mololani, Ka Puʻuhonua o na Hawaiʻi. 16 February 1917. ↩︎
2. Kingsley, P. 2021. Catafalque. Catafalque Press, London. p. 369. ↩︎
3. Nuʻuhiwa, A.K. “Hina”. Papahulilani. Feb 25, 2025. Online. ↩︎
4. van Biezen, M. 2014. Astronomy – Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (2 of 23) What is the Ecliptic Plane? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrP4a4MCo8A> ↩︎
5. Ouspensky, P.D. 1970. Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World. Vintage Books, New York, NY. p. 35. ↩︎
6. Kanahele P.K. 2022. Uliuli Intensive. World Oli Movement, October 21, 2022, Hilo, Hawaiʻi. ↩︎
7. Pukui, M.K. and Elbert, S.H. 1986. Hawaiian Dictionary. University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, HI. p. 377. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Handy, E.S.C., Pukui, M.K. 1998. Polynesian Family Systems in Kaʻū, Hawaiʻi. Mutual Publishing, Honolulu, HI. p. 146. ↩︎
10. Kamakau, S.M. 1964. Ka Poʻe Kahiko, The People of Old. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, HI. p. 55. ↩︎
11. Pukui, M.K. and Elbert, S.H. 1986. Hawaiian Dictionary. University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, HI. p. 377. ↩︎
12. Handy, E.S.C., Pukui, M.K. 1998. Polynesian Family Systems in Kaʻū, Hawaiʻi. Mutual Publishing, Honolulu, HI. p. 159. ↩︎
13. Kamakau, S.M. 1964. Ka Poʻe Kahiko, The People of Old. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, HI. p. 49. ↩︎
14. Pukui, M.K., Haertig, E.W., Lee, C.A. 1972. Nānā I Ke Kumu Volume II. Hui Hānai, Queen Liliʻuokalani Childrens Center. Honolulu, HI. p. 177 ↩︎
15. Kamakau, S.M. 1964. Ka Poʻe Kahiko, The People of Old. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, HI. p. 51. ↩︎
16. Kamakau, S.M. Ka Moʻolelo Kahiko. Ke Au Okoa, 6 (26), 13 October 1870. ↩︎
17. Poepoe, J.M. Ka Mo’olelo o Hi’iakaikapoliopele. Kuokoa Home Rula 1908-1911. ↩︎
18. Beckwith, M.W. 1970. Hawaiian Mythology. University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, HI. p.145 ↩︎
19. Ibid. ↩︎
20. Pukui, M.K., Haertig, E.W., Lee, C.A. 1972. Nānā I Ke Kumu Volume II. Hui Hānai, Honolulu, HI. p. 242 ↩︎
21. Handy, E.S.C., Pukui, M.K. 1998. Polynesian Family Systems in Kaʻū, Hawaiʻi. Mutual Publishing, Honolulu, HI. p. 157. ↩︎
22. Barford, D.  2025. The Going Down, an Esoteric Novel. Sphinx. Lewes, UK. ↩︎
23. Bentley, R.A. 2006. Strontium Isotopes from the Earth to the Archaeological Skeleton: A Review. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13 (3). DOI:
    10.1007/s10816-006-9009-x ↩︎
24. Impey, C. 2024. Is there any sound in space? An astronomer explains. Astronomy Magazine.https://www.astronomy.com/science/is-there-any-sound-in-space-an-astronome r-explains/ ↩︎
25. Ibid. ↩︎
26. Kalākaua D. 1889. Pule Hoʻolaʻa Aliʻi He Kumulipo no KaʻIʻimamao a ia Alapaʻi Wahine.
    In: Beckwith MB. 1951. The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ↩︎
27. Kingsley, P. 2021. Catafalque. Catafalque Press, London. p. 369. ↩︎
28. Nuʻuhiwa, A.K. “Nā Polohiwa a Piko”. Papahulilani. Feb. 4, 2025. Online ↩︎
29. Ibid. ↩︎
30. Kanahele PK. 2021. Energy Sovereignty Panel Discussion. Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi. ↩︎
31. Ibid. ↩︎
32. Nuʻuhiwa, A.K. “Nā Polohiwa a Piko”. Papahulilani. Feb. 4, 2025. Online ↩︎
33. Kingsley, P. 1999. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Golden Sufi Center Publishing. Point Reyes, California. p. 164 ↩︎
34. Nuʻuhiwa, A.K. “Hana Hou Papahulilani, Nocturnal Zones, & Lewa”. Papahulilani. Feb. 12, 2025. Online. ↩︎