The Unbearable: Learn a New Way
Presence requires stillness, a pause that listens, a willingness to let the world around us participate in the moment.
Photo by B. Littleton, Big Island.
We have been so good at finding ways to avoid pain. We learned early on how to ignore what had too much power over us. How to step around the unbearable, how to name endurance as maturity, how to keep moving so we would not have to stay with what has no language. Avoidance became a skill. Survival became a posture.
But we are called now to learn something different.
We are called to develop new skills to bring the unbearable back into the body, back into breath, back into the places where it was once set aside for our own protection.
What was orphaned had to be orphaned. What was wordless could not yet be held. Now, we sit with the unspoken, with what cannot yet be spoken because these feelings have lived outside of language, waiting for the moment when presence would be strong enough to receive them.
We are called to remain as present as possible when meaning slips away, when the body knows before the mind can catch up, when grief arrives without explanation or instruction. This kind of presence requires stillness.
A pause that listens. A willingness to let the world around us participate in the moment.
Courage is not bravado. Courage comes from the Latin coure — heart. And what is being asked of us now is not toughness, but heart. An open heart. A listening heart. A heart willing to stay.
Especially now, as life asks us to move from one moment into another, and then to breathe again into a moment of loss.
Especially now, when words fail and the moment becomes kapu — set apart, hushed, requiring care. In these times, we turn not only inward, but outward. We ask the land, the sky, the weather, the mountains, the waters: What do you notice? What do you know? How do you hold this?
What follows is a prayer for those moments — when language falls away, when the elemental world bears witness, when the surrounding landscape offers its own form of counsel, and when the ancestors speak through wind, rain, moon, and stone. The same moon our ancestors lived beneath. The same winds that shaped their days. The same rains that marked their losses and renewals. They faced fear, grief, and the unknown just as we do now, and they endured.
We know this because we stand here as living proof.
We are made of the same stardust, shaped beneath the same cosmos, guided by the same constellations that once marked their crossings, their seasons, their prayers. I ask that we remember to reach for them as much as we reach toward the chaos. This is the balance. This is the prayer. This is the path of courage.
This is the path that waits for us, as it always has.
What follows below is a personal prayer for a loss of a loved one. It spoke to my animistic self as a way to bind our grief with the container of Nature. This soul-led tribute shows us how to find refuge in the depth of life, while accepting loss.
Thank you, Hāwane Rios.
For The Wordless Moments
I have been wordless since the third day of this month
My eyes have been on the sky and everything has felt
Kapu
The elemental world has gathered to acknowledge a life so powerfully and profoundly lived. Snow adorns the top of our most sacred mountain as creation continues to rumble at Halema‘uma‘u. Clouds covered the heavens in all directions and the greats rains danced along every pali.
We were carving ‘ohe kāpala, printing pā‘ū, and writing our dreams into reality when we got the call. A stillness filled the air. And everything felt like what my pe‘ahi looks like in this captured moment at Hōnaunau. It felt like a vortex flashed across my vision. Memory upon memory ebbing and flowing on the tides. A feeling pulsed through my body that I don’t have a name for. My feet took me outside and I looked up and saw the moon rising over the mauna I love. A chant left my lips that was only meant for Makali‘i to hear.
My thoughts return over and over again to all those she taught, shaped, and raised - the generations of people she inspired with the sharpness and brilliance of her mind and with the discipline and devotion of her soul. I am so grateful to be one of the many who bowed at her feet in reverence and love. To have lived in the same lifetime as her. To have been so viscerally intimidated by the vastness of her presence from when I was a young child and to have felt the ha’alulu rush through me when spoken to directly. To have chanted alongside her at so many different times in my life. Giving thanks to have laughed with her and been in the same room as her intellect and quick wit.
It’s all been on my heart and tonight felt like a good time to try and put words to the wordless.
- i ke alo o nā lani
Introduction written by Bren Littleton
Photo by B. Littleton, Big Island.
Tin Flea Press c. 2026
Reposting material from Hawane Rios without permission, but with credit.