Happy Aloha Friday. 🌺
But first, the shoutout: this one's for the 316 — Wichita, Kansas. They call it the Air Capital of the World, and this edition happens to feature a window the wind spent centuries carving. The calendar keeps doing this.
Today is Hawaii Statehood Day — the third Friday of August, the day Hawaii marks becoming the fiftieth state in 1959.
I'll say the honest part first: it's a complicated day, and it should be. Sixty-six years before statehood, American businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom. In 1993, Congress formally apologized and acknowledged that Native Hawaiians never relinquished their claim to sovereignty. Some islanders celebrate today. Some protest it. The islands make room for both, which is a kind of grace the mainland is still learning.
When I first moved to Kauai, I took a Hawaiian cultural training. I'd been on the island a few months. Much of the room had been there for generations. The man leading it opened with something I've carried ever since: anybody who lives on the Hawaiian Islands is Hawaiian. Not a loophole — an assignment. If the islands are yours, so is the caring for them. I embraced that, and I tried to embody it every day I lived there.
Then he broke the ice, and I've never seen it done better. No names, no titles, no two-truths-and-a-lie. Everyone had to name a naturally occurring phenomenon — a river, a wind, a lake, an ocean, a mountain — and tell the room why it was theirs. My ocean. My river. My mountain. It took a long time to get around the room, because nobody can name their river without telling a story. And when it was over, something rare had happened: you remembered every single person. Not by their job. By their story. I've opened with that same icebreaker with every team I've led since.
My answer was my mountain — and my mountain is a story of its own.
I grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, where the trailhead for Sleeping Giant State Park sits at the base of Quinnipiac University — a hike I'd done my whole life, up to the old stone castle on the summit. Then I moved five thousand miles to Kauai, to the Wailua Houselots, and found out what was standing at the end of my street: a ridge called Nounou. The locals know it by another name — the Sleeping Giant. There was a trailhead at the base of the neighborhood, so I hiked it almost daily, because it was right there. And near the top, the wind has carved a circular opening clean through the mountain — it took more years than anyone can count. One giant wears a castle. The other wears a window the wind made.
I didn't pick my mountain. It followed me across an ocean. You don't shrug that off as coincidence — you fall head over heels, and you keep climbing.
Which is what belonging to a place actually is, I think. Not paperwork. Not a proclamation. Showing up at the trailhead, day after day, until the mountain knows your footsteps.
You already have a mountain, a river, or an ocean — something you fell head over heels for so long ago you've stopped noticing it's yours. Go stand on it this weekend, and notice what ties you to it. That's the story people remember you by.
Mahalo Nui. 🌺
— Matthew
