Regarding Deja Vu

I opened my blogger app to warm up the wires, getting ready for my next overseas trip and the writing that would come with it. The first thing I saw was some half-baked notes from my spring trip to Moloka'i, where I was putting away some time in the condo before my parents sold it for less populated vacation quarters. They described a hike I'd taken into Middle Earth — this squishy-moss place on the islands's eastern mountains that can only be described as Shire-like. The only things missing were the tiny doors, and I'm not entirely convinced they weren't there somewhere. 

The notes reminded me immediately of the strange clan I'd headed up with — including a mystic, towheaded farmgirl who'd spent the last 30 years skiing and body-working in Lake Tahoe. Now in her fifties, Gaye's hiccuping giggle and wise playfulness had caused me to follow her around the island — to beaches and yoga classes and hikes that went really far up. I barely knew the two men who joined us, friends of Gaye's, but they had backpacks and hiking shoes so it seemed fitting. 

Gaye's joy in everything she does is the opposite of annoying — which in the past has been my gut reaction to the very, very happy. But I couldn't help it. Her T-shirt on the day of the hike was white, sporting the blob-u-lous form of an orange tabby cat wearing a blue jean baseball cap. The letters over its grim face read, "Around here the cats are in charge." It suited her perfectly.

We crept up, through pine forests and rocky outcroppings, then a guava forest and green meadows, and finally into the clouds and under the sprawling mossy trees of the mountain crest. At one point I put my foot down on a slick bed of guava leaves, wet from constant mountain mist. I paused and looked at the smooth brown trunks around me, the red and brown and yellow and green leaves. When I heard Gaye's laugh ring out from above me, I knew that weird sameness, that once-again-here-we-are of deja vu.

Our destination was an overlook completely overhung by branches and vines, bordered by a sharp drop and view to the other side of the island. It was supposedly stunning. But as we sat upon wet leaves, eating peanut butter sandwiches and brownies Gaye had made with extra chocolate and chili powder — and a promise that she hadn't added her other special ingredient — we gazed only into the cloud bank. 

Now I'm not one to dwell on ah-ha moments in nature, to lean on the woo-woo factor before my pragmatism. Or perhaps I'm exactly that one, but I'm not proud of it. Either way, after half an hour, anticipating the long way down, we got up to leave. At that moment some separation in cloud cover occured, and we had about a minute and a half of perfect view down the mountain's steep slope and to the very distant north shore. 

We're dancing with the angels on a hike like that," Gaye said, as we headed back home along the ridge.

After several hours of ironic evidence that down is often harder than up, we arrived at the last, steep rock climb before the base of the mountain. I heard the man at the bottom before we got there, hollering form beneath the tree canopy at the edge of a river. He faced the plateau, calling, emphatic. His round vowels were so loud and whole, planets of air and sound hurled over the heiou, cupped by firm p's and k's. His voice was the skin of an apple stretched taut around its fruit. His words were the sharp curve of a skythe swinging through tall hay. I've looked for a plainer way to say this. I have failed to find it.

When we got to the bottom, the smiling Hawaiian man greeted us. He explained why he was calling out. Talking to the heiou, recalling the past. 

"You think God made all this beauty so we can live one hard life, work all the time and die, then go to heaven? Nah, we come back see. We come back. Look at this place. We come back and we live again, and again, make better and better lives. We evolve ourselves, we grow."

The proof was right in front of us, he said.

"You ever feel that deja vu? No mistake, that's memory. Genetic memories from your past walking on this earth." 

I thought of the movie the Matrix, which I had been watching the night before. Their explanation for deja vu was a glitch in the system. Some larger network we're not aware of. I've also heard that it's really a lapse in consciousness, so brief that when we return to the moment at hand, it is as if we are experiencing something old and familiar instead of a return to the immediate. 

And what about the thing I read on some Facebook link about how all matter in the universe is a shifting mass of molecules that blink in and out of existence rapidly. And what if my deja vu is what comes right after the moment that I briefly ceased to exist in this diminsion. And if that's where my mind is going, what about what Gaye said on the previous week's hike, that all time is happening simultaneously, and that our minds can travel betwen times and dimensions and geography and other selves to exist in different places and eras. What if that moment that i stepped my foot down on onto the slick guava leaves and heard Gaye laugh, my mind traveled to 9th century Spain to be a Catholic nun, and when I reentered my present consciousness I tripped over the now ever so slightly. 

I had a conversation this morning with one of the other Rainier graduate students, about our genetic memories for place. That inexplicable feelding of belonging in places we've never visited. Is it memories of past lives, genetic memories passed down from ancestors, or some much larger truth? I have no idea. I'm just going to continue wondering, and following around the people that don't mind wondering aloud about it with me, regardless of the woo-woo factor. If you're interested, you can find them too, or maybe or probably you already have, they're everywhere. Just look for the cat T-shirts.