The Aloha Paradigm, page 1
The Aloha Paradigm: Changing the Climate
Series: Eco Consciousness, Volume 1
Carol Austad
Published by Carol Austad, 2023.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE ALOHA PARADIGM: CHANGING THE CLIMATE
First edition. November 7, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 Carol Austad.
ISBN: 979-8223189442
Written by Carol Austad.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART I LEARNING TO BELIEVE
CHAPTER 1 TWO FRIENDS
CHAPTER 2 PROVINCETOWN: CAPE COD
CHAPTER 3 ANTONIO
CHAPTER 4 THE WORKSHOP
CHAPTER 5 A LIFE-CHANGING OFFER
CHAPTER 6 THE SCIENCE OF REINCARNATION
PART II ANTONIO RELATES HIS STORY
CHAPTER 7 REUNITING WITH THE PAST
PART III THE AFTERMATH
CHAPTER 8 VERIFYING ANTONIO’S STORY
CHAPTER 9 MEETING WITH KAPONO
CHAPTER 10 DISAGREEMENT
CHAPTER 11 DUELING PHILOSOPHIES
CHAPTER 12 CORPORATE COLONIZATION
CHAPTER 13 THE MEETING OF MINDS
CHAPTER 14 LEARNING FROM THE PAST
CHAPTER 15 THE ALOHA PARADIGM EMERGES
CHAPTER 16 A SURPRISE
CHAPTER 17 FUTURE PLANS
CHAPTER 18 UNFINISHED BUSINESS
CHAPTER 19 THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
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About the Author
I dedicate this work to A.A. with
undying love, respect, and gratitude.
I tried to keep it simple.
PART I
LEARNING TO BELIEVE
_
CHAPTER 1
TWO FRIENDS
Where do we go when the whole thing is over? Roof-brain chatter flooded Norah’s mind as she ambled down the stone path leading the way to Cassie’s office. Walking the halls of St. Andrew’s College was almost a spiritual experience for Norah. The Catholic campus oozed grace and dignity. The classic architecture—with its vaulted ceilings, wide corridors, Carrera marble floors, and white stone columns—provided a sacred atmosphere that glorified the values of academia. It was a testimony to the evolution of human intelligence.
Her career as a professor had hardly made her rich, but it had afforded her a distinguished and meaningful lifestyle. Her body never failed to quiver with joy when she reminisced about the ceremony that transformed her from Miss Mayer to “Dr. Mayer.” Dressed in full regalia, her robes flowed as she strode down the aisle to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Yellow and gold hues vibrated in her visual field as her gilded tassel glided from side to side. She trembled with excitement as the university president passed the miter above her head. And just like a fantasy, her dream had come true; shortly after graduation, she became Assistant Professor Mayer. She loved her life as a professor of psychology, a role she had played for decades, and hackneyed as it sounded, fulfilled her mission to pursue the truth, increase knowledge, and improve the quality of human life.
Norah emitted a deep sigh as she reminded herself how the current culture was traveling in a disastrous direction. Sadly, intellectual bashing was trendy among today’s millennials. The professor’s role was trivialized. People poked fun at ritual, and denial of scientific findings was assuming epidemic proportions. Even politicians could be favored for their ignorance, lies, and boorish behavior. She felt frustrated yet challenged.
Norah was eager to share her thoughts with Cassandra, her lifelong friend. They had met in grade school, attended college together, were maids of honor at each other’s weddings, graduated from doctoral programs at the same time, found tenure-track university positions within 75 miles of each other, and collaborated on academic projects. Now they both pondered retirement.
Norah wondered why she had begun to obsess over the topic of death and an afterlife. A few years ago such thoughts had been few and far between; they sprinkled on her brain periodically, like raindrops from a gentle sun shower. Recently, these ideas were coming faster and faster, picking up power, becoming a torrential flood in her head. Was it being in her sixties that made her acutely aware that her time was limited? Was it an alert to invest her remaining life energy wisely? Norah reminded herself to stay in the moment and be mindful of her surroundings as she approached her best friend’s workplace.
Arriving at Cassandra’s office, Norah beamed as she knocked on the formidable-looking wooden door. A familiar voice called out, “Please come in.”
As Norah swung the door open, her heart pounded when her eyes fell on Cassandra. She was seated behind a mahogany desk in the large office, framed with bookshelves haphazardly cluttered with classic works of English, French, and philosophical literature. Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling leaded glass windows and surrounded Cassandra with a shimmering light that gave her a pure and saintly look. Norah chuckled. Cassandra embodied the quintessential female professor. Her long, graying hair fell back from her face and her near-perfect complexion, now penetrated with age lines, gave her the appearance of a wise and knowledgeable scholar. Her soft blue eyes peered over the top of her cheater glasses.
Cassandra broke into a big grin. She hurriedly rolled her chair back from the desk, jumped up, and held out her arms in an inviting embrace, finally squeezing her visitor tightly and emitting a tiny squeal of delight. “Oh, Norah, it’s been too long.”
“Yes, I know. We let a whole semester pass without meeting up in person. Phone calls are not enough, Cassie.”
“Never again,” said Cassie wistfully. Her eyes teared up.
“How are you, Cassie?” asked Norah.
A long pause was followed by a heartfelt groan. Cassie tried to choke back her grief, but suddenly tears flowed down her cheeks and words stuck in her throat. “It’s difficult to believe it’s been nearly a year. I’m adapting to being husbandless after thirty years of marriage, but it’s so hard!”
Norah sensed Cassie’s forlornness. Over their long friendship, Cassie had suffered many bouts of depression. Norah’s mind flashed back to graduation as Cassie stood by her side and received her doctorate in theater and English literature. While Norah beamed joyfully, Cassie complained that it had taken her too long to graduate because her professors had been unsupportive and unavailable when she needed them. Cassie had always been moody and prone to melancholy. Certainty was her goal. Her relationships, work, leisure, exercise, diet—all had to be predictable and neat. When any of these was not what she expected, Cassie felt out of sorts. And when she was on edge, she was irritable and lashed out at others sarcastically or launched into a tirade of insults. As her long-time friend, Norah had salvaged Cassandra’s psyche, and by teaching her some cognitive therapy techniques helped her focus on the positive rather than dwell on the negative.
Norah had worried that Bill’s death would send Cassie spiraling into deeper depression. Bill had been her staunch protector, providing the patience of a saint. No amount of phone conversations had steadied her after his death. She could see the lingering pain in Cassie’s eyes.
“And how are you dealing with Bill’s death these days?” asked Norah in a soft and gentle tone of voice.
“It’s been awful, absolutely agonizing, unbearable.” Cassie sobbed. Looking directly into Norah’s eyes, she whispered, “You know, both of us are widows now, but it does not feel real. It feels as if it is not us—widows.” Cassie blew her nose and tried to regain her composure. Smiling a bit, she attempted to make light of her outburst. “Widow—a weird, old-fashioned word. I actually looked up its etymology. There’s disagreement about its history. Some offer the idea of a straw widow, a woman who lost her virginity before the wedding; others say it’s a woman whose husband went away to work, forcing her to go to the straw fields in the summer to cool down. Who knows which is correct? Look at the Greek widows shrouded in their black fabric, symbolizing the loss of their men—that they are man-less.” Both Norah and Catherine laughed. Like old times, they loved to play with words.
Norah empathized with Cassie’s plight. Norah had lost Larry two years before Cassie lost Bill. Bill had succumbed to lung cancer after a long and desperate fight to cling to life. But, unlike Cassie’s stable relationship with Bill, Norah’s connection with Larry had been volatile. Larry’s death had been sudden, abrupt, and shocking. The end took only twenty hours from start to finish. After a lifetime of inveterate drinking, his arteries had exploded in a massive stroke. Norah’s stomach churned when she recalled his last hours in the emergency room. Indelibly imprinted on her mind was Larry’s face contorted with rage as he struggled to say something to her. His fiery eyes penetrated hers as he desperately tried to deliver a message, although he could only spit out guttural grunts, sounds that were reminiscent of a wounded animal. Norah was so distressed to see this big, strong, manly-man reduced to a pathetic beast moaning inhuman noises.
She hated having this final memory of Larry stored in her brain and burned into her soul. She fantasized about how to ablate the area that physically stored it. But she also rationalized that during her long and unhappy marriage, she had never been able to decode what Larry really meant. His inability to deliver his last message was the final end to their story. Norah was of two minds. She wanted to know what he wo
“Well, perhaps we’ll see them in the next life,” Norah said teasingly.
Cassie rolled her eyes, smirked, and with an edge in her voice said, “Nonsense. How many Napoleon Bonapartes can live on the planet at the same time? Make the most of what you have now. After a lifetime of studying Victorian spiritualism, I have not found even a shred of believable evidence that anyone comes back. Please don’t start with that nonsense. I cannot cope with it today. You know we are the closest of cronies, but I just can’t listen to any spiritual bullshit.”
“You’ve always been the skeptic,” sighed Norah.
“And you have always been the romantic!” Cassie chided her.
“I like to keep an open mind,” quipped Norah.
The two women became silent. It was a lifelong dispute. They usually avoided heated discussions in order to preserve their friendship. The reality of their spouses’ deaths made the topic more salient, and both women wondered if they should call a truce and speak about the unspeakable.
As they looked at each other, their attention turned to sizing up the changes that had befallen them over the past semester. Each passing year brought another physical alteration such as a new wrinkle, a dark age spot, or a sagging body part. What was once a smooth and tight forehead with shining skin was now a tangle of creases. The cute little micro expressions that were so sexy in youth had taken their toll on their fatigued skin. Smooth to wrinkles; that was the norm. There were options to artificially enhance the cheeks and forehead—just a couple of the numerous body parts that could be injected, lasered, bombarded with pulsating light. Both had explored the options but neither had chosen to pursue what now passed for “eternal youth.” Norah had taken a crack at one Botox injection, but she panicked when she found that she couldn’t feel her forehead or flex her brow. She searched the literature to discover that the consequences of Botox paralysis were destroyed nerve cells, resulting in a lack of facial feedback to others. The unintended aftermath? People misinterpreted the lack of facial expressions as a lack of empathy. Thus, Botox could unsettle social relationships. Her ability to communicate her sentiments to others took priority over looking younger.
Norah had struggled as she stood on the precipice between middle and advancing age. She had weathered the middle age changes successfully and was able to cope with and cover up a few wrinkles here and there. But approaching her seventies was different. She felt less able to accept the wrinkling of the hands, the blue veins showing through the thinning skin, the dark mottling of spots up and down her arms, and the chicken neck. But ultimately her attitude had become one of acceptance with serenity.
Cassie was less tolerant of aging. She despised its unpredictability as she despised any unplanned changes in her existence. The wrinkles, the changing contours of her body, the aches and pains that popped up out of nowhere threw her for a loop. Norah had discussed this many times with Cassie after Cassie had taken out her frustration and dismay not only on Norah but on her family, friends, colleagues, and, at times, even her students. After these moments of catharsis, guilt overwhelmed Cassie and engulfed her in a cloud of deep depression. She would take to her bed, pull the covers over her head, and languish in harsh self-criticism.
Endlessly ambivalent, Cassie found decision making painful, arduous work. It had been that way since she could remember over every year of her life. Her mind was a series of endless loops that played “yes I can, no I can’t; yes, I should, no I won’t.” Trapped in obsessing about all possibilities, exhausting herself by examining every permutation and combination of infinite probabilities meant she often suffered intense psychic pain. Laughter was an infrequent but sought-after friend. She searched for happiness in others. She had found it in Norah, who always seemed to be smiling and consistently on the brink of merriment. Cassie craved Norah’s contagious laughter, which could change her disposition from sour to sweet and from hopeless to hopeful. She often felt she could not go on and wondered if her life were pointless. Now that Cassie had lost her husband, she felt even more intensely aimless.
Norah saw the wistful look in Cassie’s eyes. She decided to snap her out of it and said, “Well, I want to discuss my recent obsession with limited time left in my life. Things like what I want to accomplish before I leave the planet and what legacy I want to leave. What did our husbands leave us? And I mean their emotional bequests more than their material bequests. We can discuss this over lunch. And another important item to discuss centers around our workshops. I think it’s time for us to run another group. My patients are insisting, and I tell them I can’t do it without your creative theater and writing skills. Patients aside, I’m feeling an urge to redesign myself. Running a group keeps me on task, so I don’t feel like a ship without a rudder,” Norah said, laughing.
Norah and Cassie’s intellectual synergy united them. Working as a team, they had designed a group therapy that they named “Self-Authoring Your Life.” They both loved working with motivated clients who wanted to better their lives and were proud of their successes. People in their workshops learned quickly how to enhance the things they liked about their lives and to work on the things they wanted to improve.
Norah shifted in her chair. “I need to remind myself of who I am and what I’m doing, so I feel in much better control of my life. What about you?”
Cassie nodded. “That works for me.” She felt a sense of warmth and comfort. Bill would want her to run a self-authoring group again. “Yes, I’m ready. Something to look forward to.” Cassie felt relieved to be back in the loop with Norah. Her gloom lifted a bit.
“And we are pretty lucky to be able to run the group in Provincetown at the Cape Cod Psychological Symposium headquarters,” said Norah. “Purrr-fecto location. We’ll be in that Norman Mailer house on the beach. It’s filled with good spirits. Pardon the pun.” They laughed as they headed out for lunch.
CHAPTER 2
PROVINCETOWN: CAPE COD
Provincetown is magical. The dream-like beauty of its natural harbor with its stunning sunrises and sunsets lured Norah back year after year. She could think of no better place to run a workshop on transforming one’s personality. Provincetown Harbor was continuously transforming. Walking the tidal flats was a never-boring experience. Norah was forever grateful that President John F. Kennedy had preserved the unique geography of the tip of Cape Cod when he allocated acres of ocean beach for preservation as a national park. It was a happy place, a mystical place. The spirits of millions of people who had had enjoyed this national treasure since 1961 infused the area. As Norah and Cassie ambled along the beach, they stamped deep, squishy toe and heel prints into the wet, cool sand. They both recognized the wonder of being in a place where sky meets water. As they approached the horizon, Norah observed that the enormous pink and gold clouds seemed to cascade earthward, creating the illusion that they were touching down onto the surface of the sandy beach. Enveloped in a spiral of vast beauty, Norah felt like a tiny dot, but at the same time knew she was a part of something very big.
“Don’t you love the beach and the light?” Norah asked Cassie as they trekked along.
“I am enchanted...the billows of clouds...the colors...what a scene. But, unfortunately, all of this may disappear. The Earth cannot sustain this beauty if ignorant human beings continue to abuse the planet. Don’t they understand how delicate the ecosystem is? Can you feel the not-so-tiny alterations in the atmosphere? When the sun hits my skin, it feels too warm. Something is changing. And not for the good.”
Norah sighed in response to Cassie’s negativity. She changed the topic. “Let’s enjoy this moment. It’s 8:42. We are right at low tide. This is as shallow as it gets.”
Norah found the geography of Cape Cod Bay intriguing. Bayfront houses dotted the shoreline. Porch doors opened onto decks and patios that sat atop the edge of the high-water line. People in pajamas and bathing suits sat on their decks and drank their morning coffee. Some had descended the deck stairs and plunked themselves down on the sand where their back yards blended into the shoreline. Norah gazed out onto a huge expanse of broad, smooth tidal flat extending as far as the eye could see. Between the shore and the entrance to the deep sea that led to Boston, the level, smooth sand stretched hundreds of yards and ended at a sand bar that jutted out toward the water and was tipped with a lighthouse.
