This semester I decided to enroll in Kaʻiu’s Hō‘okele class. Part of it was simple. I wanted to be a student again. I wanted to fill my cup. It has been almost twenty years since I last took this class, and yet there is something quietly reassuring about returning to it. It is the only class I have ever received an A+ in — not because it was easy, but because it felt less like learning and more like returning. Kaʻiu is not worried about me with the content. Even if I have to miss a class or two because of my dad, there is trust there. The foundation is solid.

But the deeper reason is harder to explain.

Kaʻiu is the connector for me. I met her years ago on Kahoʻolawe. At the time, I was taking Hō‘okele from Carlos and Pua after helping with Kānehūnāmoku for Hālau Kū Māna. I was still involved with PKO. I was curious, hungry, orbiting the edges of something bigger than I could name. That weekend I asked her a million questions, and by the end of it she invited me to come sail on Hōkūleʻa. That invitation changed my life.

So sitting in the planetarium listening to her speak about stars and navigation did not feel academic. It felt circular. It felt like returning to the place where my course first quietly changed.

Voyaging is relationship. The stars tell us our direction through their relationship to one another. We move over the ocean by reading wind and swell, guided by forces larger than any one person’s effort. The canoe itself is relationship — its parts lashed together, no single piece imposing on another, everything bound and working in concert. Nothing stands alone; everything depends on what holds it and what it holds in return. That is what voyaging has always represented to me.

Orientation.

When I sit inside this world of navigation, something in my body settles. My breathing slows. My nervous system softens. My naʻau feels aligned. It is my calibration point. Truth has a way of reorganizing everything around it.

I tend to move. When things are uncertain, my instinct is to mobilize. When there is pressure, I generate momentum. When life demands endurance, I lean in rather than step back. That instinct has carried me through caregiving, through grief, through systems that do not easily bend. Some people describe me as intense, and I never quite know what to say to that. Intensity, to me, feels like care. It feels like commitment. It feels like refusing to sleepwalk through a life I have been entrusted with. It feels like loving something enough to move toward it with energy.

Even in a simulated sky, the orientation was real.

And it reminded me that there is a difference between intensity and direction. On a voyaging canoe, you do not force movement. You do not muscle the ocean into compliance. You trim sails. You read signs. You adjust. You orient to Hōkūpaʻa, or whichever stars you are using to guide. The power is not in pushing harder. The power is in knowing direction.

There is a version of me that generates momentum, and there is a version of me that simply stands still and remembers who she is. Voyaging has always been that remembering. It is not about being impressive. It is not about proving anything. It is not about doing more. It is about knowing where you are.

Maybe what some people call intensity is simply someone who has felt the wind in the sails and does not want to drift. And maybe what I am learning now is how to hold both — motion and stillness, effort and ease — without forgetting that the stars are still there, even when the clouds cover them.

Sometimes the most grounding thing is not learning something new. It is being reminded of the direction your body already knows.