THE ADJUSTMENT IS ART, AND THE ART IS ADJUSTMENT

“This is wild Indian sage.

Smell it,” he told me.

We hadn’t been on the trail for more than 60 seconds, and we were already “in it.” It was the first “scented hike” experience I’d experienced in my life. We stopped, and smelled, and foraged. We closed our eyes and then opened them. Looked up and looked down.

Ken (@kencannata) is a friend I met on the Big Island. He travels around the world seeking out plants and flowers and trees. His life mission is to capture the smells of these places by turning his findings into incense for his life-purpose driven business, @craftincense. Earlier this week, we had an incense “tasting” party. My mind was blown, my nose delighted, curiosity engaged with scents like Agarwood, sandalwood, spikenard, patchouli, reiryoku, baizhi, licorice, sweet grass, and camphor.

So we arrive at the trail, off the ocean highway somewhere between Havi and Waimea. We get out, pull a few leaves of Indian Sage off the tree, put our nose in everything we can, and wander for about an hour. We end up in a sea of green, with exposed red brick on hills of green. We joked about not knowing if we were in Ireland or Hawaii. At which point, Ken starts unpacking his backpack.

He has a local green tea from Mauna Kea Tea, a butane portable travel stove, an old iron tea pot, and a set of Chinese spinach jade tea cups. He lays a tatami mat on the grass, and we sit. As the water boils, our feet ground. Ken pours the water of the leaves, and as we prepare to taste, we smell tones of nutty and milky and the metal of the iron and the purity of the water. He asks me to hold the iron kettle.

“It’s heavy,” I commented.

“When practicing tea brewing, you are taught to treat it as if it were the weight of a feather. And if you have something light, you treat it as a heavy object,” Ken told me.

We stored the leaves and grasses and plants and trees that we gathered along the way, and placed it in a bag for Ken to turn into incense this week. We looked at the effervescent green tea cups and the deep blue sea, all at the same time. We were “in ceremony.”

On the drive back, Ken shared that he had a few things he would have changed for the next time he leads this experience for someone. I told him that I honored his dedication to this tea ceremony, and this scented hike he facilitated in the same way I honor a musician at a live show. Decades of dedication, the outpouring of love, and deep work for these minutes or hours of pure enjoyment for those of us on the receiving end of their commitment to mastery.

Art is an adjustment, Ken said to me.

Adjustment is art, I thought in my head.

A moment of silence followed.

And there we were. Somewhere between the art I experienced and the adjustment Ken plans next, we found ourselves here.

A couple of souls lit on fire with our hands wrapped around a warm cup of green tea on a pasture of grass in the middle of the Pacific trying to share our passion.

So far away from all we left behind.

And so close to all we came here to find.