Sunday Mālama: Wayfinding your MWAC Resources

Leap year has given us a rather calming way to start our March; I posted our Day One essay on Ho‘ohanohano yesterday (Saturday), but in keeping with our first weekday of the month convention our 5-Beat Rhythm will not kick off until tomorrow (Monday).

A few weeks back, as I looked ahead to this day in my Weekly Review habit, I thought about wayfinding. Wikipedia defines it this way: “Wayfinding encompasses all of the ways in which people and animals orient themselves in physical space and navigate from place to place... Historically, wayfinding refers to the techniques used by travelers over land and sea to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes.”

Ka manu kahea i ka wa'a e holo (1478).
“The bird that calls the canoe to sail.”
Said of the kioea (bristle-thighed curlew), whose early morning call was often a signal to canoes to go fishing or traveling.

Curlew by mikebaird
--- from Mary Kawena Pukui’s ‘0lelo No‘eau: Hawaiian Proverbs and Poetical Sayings (Bishop Museum Press 1983),
as selected by Melenani Lessett for the Polynesian Voyaging Society

It is this ‘historical way’ that wayfinding has been most meaningful to me thus far, and I immediately think of Nainoa Thompson who wrote the foreword for me in Managing with Aloha, and the wayfinding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society: Before the invention of the compass, sextant and clocks, or more recently, the satellite-dependant Global Positioning System (GPS), Polynesians navigated open ocean voyages without instruments, through careful observation of natural signs. As Nainoa explains,

“The star compass [pictured below] is the basic mental construct for navigation. We have Hawaiian names for the houses of the stars-the places where they come out of the ocean and go back into he ocean. If you can identify the stars, and if you have memorized where they come up and go down, you can find your direction. The star compass is also used to read the flight path of birds and the direction of waves. It does everything. It is a mental construct to help you memorize what you need to know to navigate.”

“How do we tell direction? We use the best clues that we have. We use the sun when it is low on the horizon. Mau has names for how wide and for the different colors of the sun path on the water. When the sun is low, the path is tight; when the sun is high it gets wider and wider. When the sun gets too high you cannot tell where it has risen. You have to use other clues.”

“Sunrise is the most important part of the day. At sunrise you start to look at the shape of the ocean-the character of the sea. You memorize where the wind is coming from. The wind generates the swells. You determine the direction of the swells, and when the sun gets too high, you steer by them. And then at sunset we repeat the observations. The sun goes down-you look at the shape of the waves. Did the wind change? Did the swell pattern change? At night we use the stars. We use about 220 stars by name-having memorized where they come up, where they go down.”
--- Nainoa Thompson is quoted by Dennis Kawaharada

“How do we tell direction? We use the best clues that we have.”

All of this made me think of the navigation we have come to use on our web pages, hoping that the conventions I am learning to offer are good enough, and useful enough for every reader who decides to sail these seas, which to you, may be uncharted waters.

As you read Managing with Aloha Coaching today, would you do me a great favor?

If you are reading via a RSS feed reader, please click in, and take a moment to try your wayfinding here. Over the past few weeks I have made some changes in the site sidebars, and I would love to know how useful you find them — or not.

In the past, I have done postings which will list the changes I periodically make, spelling them out in explanation. I then realized how silly that was, expecting that anyone would bookmark such a post, or even bother reading it. And besides, the navigation of a site should be intuitive, or easy to simply see as it is.

I would love to have any feedback you can give me about your wayfinding adventure here, surfing through the archives. Please let me know how I can be a brighter light appearing on your star compass, would you?

Mahalo nui loa,
—Rosa

Comments

[Wendy Morris]

You speak to my body, mind and soul with your "wayfinding" today Rosa. I have to say that of all the feeds I get, yours is one of the few I consistently keep and read.

While my own home is by a beach in the tropics of Australia - we also have the Bristle-thighed Curlew as a companion by the shore. I also steer outrigger canoes and our first regatta of the season is coming up this weekend. Your analogy of the star compass is perfect - we all use our own intuitive markers to keep us on our path - sometimes going off course periodically when the path is not clearly defined, but then, recognising the markers, as canoe seafarers did the rising sun or stars, guides us back on our own special path when we feel aligned with stars and sea.

In the canoe, my body will feel the ocean and I will look for the markers; in my mind and soul I will be sensitive to the intuitive markers that keep me on the track of my ho'ohana.

Aloha and mahalo nui loa Rosa!

Wendy (from Evolve Coaching in Australia).

[Rosa Say]

Aloha Wendy, it is so good to hear from you again! My best wishes to you in your regatta season; your words have me longing for my own next time on the cooling water, paddling with the sun's heat warming my muscles for each deep stroke... I can close my eyes and feel that ocean swell's lifting of the wa'a as I sit here and imagine it :)

[Joanna Young]

Rosa, I'm afraid I too was lost in reverie thinking about how we navigate our way through life, and hearing the sound of the curlew. I just love that saying, it speaks to me on many different levels.

I don't have time to archive explore just now, but I have been noticing your efforts (you knew I would!) and I like the way you are creating your own headings and categories to organise the material in a useful way for us.

Joanna

[Rosa Say]

Hi Joanna, thank you for noticing :) The best possible use of the TypePad category function has been a learning now 4 years in progress for me, and I think creating your own indexes is the way to go... however I deliberately say "I think" reserving the right to change my mind as I keep within my learning! Having less versus more listed on the site itself seems to be a better way to go, and it is that internal guts versus outward usefulness balance that is difficult to achieve.

So Joanna, mahalo both for that noticing, and for keeping me "good to go" in the wonderful feedback you so generously give me.