“Do you know how important you are?”
Summer Solstice is here in Oak Park, IL! The linden trees across the street are laden with fragrant flowers. I’ve started hugging the elm tree outside the front door whenever I water the plants in our beautiful new Dharma Path garden. The elm gives me deep feelings of calm and peace. Everywhere there are luscious bursts of green leaves and flowers. The weather is hot and muggy in Chicago, but there’s a breeze blowing with a promise of rain by the end of day.
I watched a documentary about Maya Angelou and David Chapelle. She told of an encounter, on the set of Poetic Justice, with Tupac Shakur. Two young black men were verbally cursing at each other. Angelou took hold of one young man saying to him in the midst of his anger, “Do you know how important you are? Do you know how our people lay spoon fashion in the slave ships in their own and each other’s excrement, urine and menstrual flow so that you could live? Do you know that a lot of us stood on auction blocks so that you could live? When’s the last time anyone told you how important you are?”
She said that then his tears started to flow and the fight stopped. She learned later the name of the young man was Tupac Shakur, now considered to be one of the most significant rappers of all time and a symbol of resistance and activism against inequality.
We’re witnessing an incredible time of speaking out and demonstrating for what we think to be right and just. Black, Brown, Red and Yellow Lives Matter. They haven’t mattered nearly enough for a long time because of deep insidious racist thinking. It’s going to take effort, but we can change, and we must.
I turned 70 this month and appreciate my parents and my grandparents and their parents for all the sacrifices they went through that shaped who I am. Hawaiians know this connection to kupuna/ancestors and understand that we are part of the past, present and future.
This month is also the 20th anniversary of my ‘uniki/graduation as kumu hula. An ‘uniki is a recognition of one’s place in a lineage. And though I consider myself an imperfect link, I nevertheless embrace my tradition and try my best to carry it forward. I have spent 32 years practicing hula, almost half of those years teaching it. Hula nourishes me. It reminds me of my deep connection with Nature for Hula is Nature and Nature is Life.
We dance for the sake of it. Hula is the energy of Nature, of our kupuna, of life, and of divine love. It is a gift of grace for our times to help us to become clear about truth and how to stand for it.
Do you know how important you are?
Malama pono (take good care of body, mind, and heart)
June Kaililani Ryushin Tanoue
Kumu Hula, Sensei