Zen Hostess, Keeper of Sacred Spaces
By Kim Cope Tait
If you are just looking for a place to lay your head for a night or two, Akiko Masuda might just send you on down the road. She will do it with love and a casual grace, so that no one is offended or hurt, but so that she is able to share the prosperity of paying guests with her favorite inn in Hilo town, and so that the spirit of her own bed and breakfast is honored.
When I ask the proprietress of Akiko’s Buddhist Bed & Breakfast about that spirit, thoughtfully she folds her hands beneath her chin, closes her eyes tightly in order to let her thoughts distill. It is an important question, and the answer is perhaps part of the larger picture of her own life. For who can separate what one does and the place one inhabits from what is essentially self? So deeply connected to the ‘aina is Akiko, so certain is she that this two-acre plot of Hawaiian land is her place on earth, she describes her relationship to it as a marriage. Being ‘married,’ as it were, to the land and the structures that comprise the bed-and-breakfast sanctuary has “allowed me to be present for other humans that come here,” explains Akiko simply.
Akiko welcomes the seeker into her ‘home’ and into the retreat she has created from the existing buildings and land in the village of Wailea. Here, the spirit of old Hawaii is alive and well, and it is honored by Akiko and her 12 neighbors, who are themselves the heart of the old plantation village. It occurs to me that she has become a steward of this sacred space, nestled against the hills along the Hamakua coast, and a willing servant to the spirit of transformation and change in lives and in the world.
“If all goes well,” says 65-year-old Akiko, “I have maybe 43 more years left on the planet. That’s not a hell of a lot of time.” She says this with a smile and a little laugh, but she speaks in all eriousness. Such a time span leaves no time to action or words that are not mindful or which detract from a life that honors its history, its ancestors, its own true potential. In fact, Akiko has already shown me her “launch pad,” one of the small cottages toward the south end of the property.
“From here, I will leave this earth one day,” she says without fanfare. Indeed, dying should be done well, just like living. This little cottage with its lauhala mats and its twin bed under a handmade quilt, with its solar power and its Butsudan, or altar—it is all that is needed for life. Indeed, for death. Time spent at Akiko’s is about that. Living well. Preparing for one’s eventual death, however far off that may be. When asked what she would like her guests to take with them when they leave, Akiko’s initial answer is this:
“A sense of oneness.” But she immediately revises her answer, scrunches her nose at the “esoteric” nature of her own words. Her second formulation of her intention is this: she wants them to leave Akiko’s Buddhist Bed & Breakfast with “a sense that they’ve been in harmony with a place…however that translates in their own lives.” She sits back, satisfied with her new response, the wall of greenery shifting beyond her in the yellow light of midday.
Completely unassuming, Akiko prepares a space for her guests to simply open themselves. She does not create or even ignite consciousness or transformation. Instead, she builds a space for this to occur…and she prepares the food that will physically connect her guests to the land. Invited to breakfast daily in the dining hall, her guests are fed exotic fruits raised on the grounds or on the island, homemade bread Akiko herself has kneaded and baked with love, her famous French toast. Such food, Akiko suggests, “is an injection of energy from here.” Guests who eat it “connect to the source immediately,” fed as they are with food yielded to them by the land they are visiting. It is about “harmony with a place,” she says. Connecting deeply to the ‘āina.
“Anything is possible,” she intones, and the words have new meaning in the context of the halls of the Pu’uhonua House, where we have come to visit and share.
“It is about the exercise of living here,” suggests Akiko, as the stairs softly creak beneath our weight, and I know she is not only talking about Wailea or Hawai‘i, but the planet. It is about the business of being alive and inhabiting a human body.
Coming to stay at Akiko’s is inherently an act of consciousness. It does not require any grand vision and should not be weighted with any particular expectation of change or epiphany. One has simply to arrive with the humble intention to give and receive in the natural flow of reciprocation between people and the land. The humble intention to learn and grow as one may. Akiko is as unassuming as she can be, talking to me today in jeans and a tank top, surprising me again and again with her wry humor as we walk through her lush grounds under fruit trees and a web of sunlight. Like this, she has moved through the various buildings and around the grounds, pointing out each individual lodging; the rural Japanese monastery-style Main House; the open-air temple she re-built in gratitude to the ancestors, nestled into the hillside and resplendent amid ti leaf and ferns. On the “foundation from the past,” explains Akiko emphatically, holding her fist in the air and landing her elbow firmly in her other hand, to suggest the solidity of such roots.
Akiko hits ‘play’ on a little boom box as we come up the stairs of the Pu’uhonua House. “The spirits like music,” she says placidly and lights a candle at the little altar adjacent. I get the sense of speaking to someone my own age and have to remind myself that she is nearly 30 years my senior. Her youthful energy is balanced by the serene wisdom of having lived simply and well and having walked the planet honorably for well over a half-century. She has transformed an old Shell service station into a haven for the weary seeker, a nest for the kind of spiritual work one does in retreat and in silence.
This is that spirit Akiko talks about, I decide. To honor the intention to do that kind of work. To honor experience. Whether in a transcendent moment of meditative bliss or in eating the preserves made by Wailea village grandmothers (potentially also transcendent), one honors what is our human experience. One honors the land and the ancestors. One honors the healing and harmony that are possible in the world. Our own human potential.
Footprints:
In 1991, when Oahu-born Akiko Masuda first stepped foot on the land that is now Akiko’s Buddhist Bed & Breakfast, it had been abandoned for seven years. She stood amid broken glass, car parts, grease, torn screens and fallen leaves and said, “This is where I’m gonna die and be buried.” The young suitor who had brought her to the place, presumably with dreams of a shared life there with Akiko, must have found that a strange comment. When she rejected his idea for converting the space into “a great Japanese restaurant,” he left angrily. Akiko recalls his impetuous suggestion that she “buy the damn place [herself]” with a knowing smile. She had immediately recognized the place as where she would build a temple of gratitude to honor the ancestors and as the place she would spend her days from that point forward. Having lived simply for 12 years, she had saved some money and, miraculously, the property became hers.
With her M.F.A. in Dance, her many accomplishments in the arenas of art, horticulture and writing, Akiko says to me across the coffee table, “I do fairly decent toilets. I use a sickle, I weed whack.” Her life here, and the accommodation she provides, is about “living with a sense of trust, hard work and common sense,” she tells me. “Old values.” Among these values are the support and perpetuation of local cultures and traditions, as well as the appreciation of the Hawaiian land on which it all happens. Akiko’s is the venue for a host of events throughout the year, all of which honor those values through human fellowship and good fun. Recently, she hosted the 12th annual Traditional Mochi Pounding for the New Year. The mochi-tsuki celebration included the sharing of stories of plantation-era times by the “old timers” of Wailea, and everyone took a turn at pounding the glutinous sticky rice “for good luck.”
Ongoing events include “The Morning After (the Full Moon) Hikes” down into the Kilauea crater at sunrise; “If Stones Could Speak,” 4-wheel drive explorations with rock-sculptor and sociology professor Dr. Fred Soriano to collect the stones that become one-of-a-kind Japanese stone lanterns and water basins, and Buddhist and Hawaiian deities; visits to the studio and gardens of local potter Clayton Amemiya in Hilo; and “The Best Kept Secret” Hamakua Coffee Tour where guests share a unique morning with local hosts Netta and Wendall Branco on a tour of their estate coffee farm above Honoka‘a.
Up next on Akiko’s calendar is a photo workshop called “Images of Gratitude: An Inner and Outer Journey” from March 12th to 21st, 2010 with master photographer Douglas Beasley. This and other events hosted by Akiko can be further explored on her website: http://www.alternative-hawaii.com/akiko. ❖
