seeing the forest for the weeds

by Zia Dione

ONLY THE SOIL beneath my feet looks the same, feels the same. The solid rust-colored clay seems unbothered by the trauma of last year and the growth of this one. Just a few steps in, it is already reddening the white rubber of my soles, like it always has. Every step I take on this soil, covered by a carpet of long pine needles in various stages of life and death, feels just like every other step I’ve ever taken, every single time I’ve walked this path. But the forest is different.

This is my first time visiting Olinda Forest (also known as Waihou Springs Trail) in more than a year. The first time since fires ravaged Lahaina on Maui’s west side and burned a good deal of Upcountry, including this unchanged soil beneath my feet. This is my first time back on Maui—visiting—since I moved from Maui to Oahu four months before the fires. I’m visiting because a dear friend down in Huelo is off-island for a few weeks and I agreed to take care of her cats, caged birds, and a half-feral chicken who answers to Linda.

I’m visiting feels like a first attempt at a language no one else speaks. I’m visiting forces me to accept that I don’t live here anymore. This is new. Maui is the first place on the planet where I felt like I belonged. She is where I stopped looking for home and accepted that she was home for a good chunk of the last decade. She allowed me to be me, without pretense, without shame. Maui made me me. But Maui is different now. Maui is sad and grieving and feels like she is sick of visitors.

The energy in Olinda feels as it always has—stable, calm, welcoming. There’s something deeply spiritual about her. She feels sacred, like a cathedral, a confessional, a chant, a choir rising in song as the preacher gets to the good part of the sermon. I revered her as such when I called Maui home. She was my sanctuary, my peace. The place I went for answers, for questions, for solace.

When one of my besties shared the news that Olinda had been a casualty of the fires and had closed, she said she didn’t think it would ever reopen. But Olinda has closed and reopened before. In the wake of heavy rain and wind from tropical storms and hurricanes barreling through or close to the island, she closed so her caretakers could cut fallen trees from her paths and make sure she was safe for visitors. Sometimes, she closed for a few days, a few times for several weeks. This time, seven months. Seven months for firefighters to make sure the fire was completely extinguished. Seven months for arborists to decide which trees could remain and which had to go. Seven months for forest crews to remove all that was lost. Seven months for Olinda to get a green light.

Every step I take contains seven months of answered prayers.

Yesterday, on the twenty-three-minute flight from Oahu, I did not dare look out the window as the plane passed Lahaina and the West Maui Mountains to begin its descent into the center of the Valley Isle. Not too long after the fires, I had a dream that I was driving toward Lahaina in a line of fellow would-be looky-loos on the Pali, my favorite drive on Maui—where cobalt water meets sky of the same color on one side of the two-lane highway and the West Maui Mountains that are sometimes green but usually golden on the other. We had driven through the tunnel where people beep their horns and then past Grandma’s and then Olowalu, when our cars supernaturally sped out of control into what ended up being a more than eighty-car pile-up. None of us could avoid it. None of us survived. I understood. If you go in search of destruction, it might find you.

There was no way to look away from the palpable energetic shift I felt the moment the cabin door opened. The buzz from Honolulu, carried on the half-empty flight, fell flat and heavy. That same flat heaviness was visible in the produce on the shelves at a grocery store in Kahului, where I used to shop regularly; and in the faces of cashiers who I no longer recognized and no longer recognized me. Their eyes said, You do not belong here. My darker skin, locs hanging loose at the edge of my face, cargo pants cosplaying as capris and fresh Nike sneakers said, I just stepped off the plane!

This is not the first time in this life I’ve felt like I don’t belong somewhere. I did not belong in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where I was raised. I did not belong inside the DC city limits, where I chose to live as an adult. I did not belong in all the places where I followed the call of my spirit—not in Costa Rica or Argentina or Morocco, to name a few. I did not belong in any of the places I tried to call home before wandering my way here. But this is the first time I’ve felt this on Maui.

I first visited Maui back in 2010 for a wedding. My roommate from the year I lived in Las Vegas, for my last year of law school, was getting married in Lahaina. Since I’d been there the night she met her match and the days they fell in love, there was no way I was about to miss their subsequent leap into forever. After a week of running around the island with my little sister, who came as my plus-one, I didn’t want to leave. Somewhere between waterfalls on the Road to Hana and horseback riding at a ranch in the hills above Lahaina and flatbread pizza in Pā`ia and the soft humidity and the slow and the love and the genuine kindness, I realized I could do without DC. On our last night, as we sat watching the sun slide into the ocean, sipping Mai Tais at Cheeseburger in Paradise in Lahaina, I mused to my little sister, “I could see myself living here.”

It was easy to get caught up in the beauty and the aloha and the dream of laid-back island living. But the reality was something else entirely. I could not afford it. The price of paradise is no joke, especially when salaries don’t match the price tag. A five-dollar pack of sausage at my grocery store back in DC rang up for thirteen out here. Three-dollar hot dog buns at home, eight dollars here. My more-than-adequate city salary was looking rather not enough at checkout.

A year later, I left behind a performative and pretentious DC law life, where I truly did not belong, to follow my spirit wherever it was called. Three years into my journey, I started hearing Maui’s call. Come. I first heard her all the way in Rincón, Puerto Rico, where I’d spent the past year trying to belong. Come, she said. I ignored her. Refused her, even. I can’t afford to live there. I’m out here struggling in Rincón where the cost of living is less than half of Maui’s, how I’m supposed to make it out there? Maui kept at it. Come. I heard her call as I made my way to the Bay Area with an ill-timed plan to trim cannabis for a few coins, until I ran out of money. Come. I heard her call the entire summer, from my oldest sister’s house on the South Carolina-Georgia border, where I was about as broke as a little kid’s joke and determined to go back to Rincón. My little plan did not matter at all because I could not find a job to save my life. Most remote attorney jobs required the work to be conducted in the state where you were licensed, and Maryland was not Rincón. At the beginning of September, I threw my hands up and said, Okay, Maui. I didn’t know how I would get there or where I would live, I simply trusted as I had for the past three years that the net would appear. Within a week of saying yes, a high-paying legal research gig along with another remote job that I could work from anywhere fell into my inbox. A friend I’d met in my travels bought me a flight to Denver so I could road trip to California with another friend and be that much closer. And still, I refused to believe that I could afford to live on Maui. In October 2014, I took everything I owned and moved to Hawai`i Island, also known as the Big Island, because it is.

A year on Big Island let me know that I could no longer afford to not live on Maui. This truth became clear on a night I was talked into going to an all-night electronic dance music rave in the middle of a field somewhere out in Puna. I am not a fan of EDM or raves or staying up all night, but I went anyway. About three hours into the party, every rain drop ever showed up and flooded the entire field, including the parking lot, so we could not leave. I ended up stranded on an old 70s brown floral-print couch with water up to its cushions under a pop-up canopy tent until morning. Yes, Big Island is beautiful and lovely and so very healing, but in a punch-you-in-the-throat kind of way. She left me stranded in the middle of a personal hell to remind me to trust myself.

One week and a lot of magic later, I landed at an inn in Pā`ia, where I traded twenty-one hours of work every week for a place to live. A few months later, I scored another work-trade as an ultra-part-time nanny for three babies, working two half-days per week in exchange for my own apartment on their property in Kula. I spent my other days on an organic farm exactly one mile from my new place, earning a few coins while befriending the land. In the dirt, Mama Maui (what I came to call her) nurtured the hell out of me. I could feel her quiet energy softly stroking the pain and the hurt and the trauma of growing up in the shadow of a DC that stood for Dodge City in the 1980s off of me. She held me and whispered, Heal, baby, heal, in both ears; brought me back to life; reminded me of who I am.

On the organic farm, my job was pretty much weeding. I spent most mornings on my belly, being serenaded by tiny buzzing co-workers, while pulling new sprouts from beds they didn’t belong in. Weeds aren’t necessarily bad plants; they’re just plants growing in places where they aren’t wanted. I dumped most of the weeds into a compost pile, to be broken down into recycled fertilizer. But some weeds—the kind that tend to be invasive, whose seeds don’t die in compost, like Morning Glory and Canna Lilies—were carefully placed into a metal bin, where they would be burned. When I first started, I had trouble figuring out which plants were which. Every new leaf looked the same to me. I tossed everything into the invasive pile, so I didn’t make the mistake of putting something in compost that did not belong. But over time, I could quickly spot the difference between the heart-shape of a Morning Glory leaf and the heart-shape of a Taro.

There’s a bunch of new life growing from the ashes in Olinda Forest. Bright green rising to meet scorched bark and covering pathways that were once open. It’s hard to look at but unavoidable, like the flat and heavy energy visible in the produce section at the grocery store in Kahului. I stare at the new growth with the tight eyes of a cashier: You do not belong here. I don’t know what this new green is going to do to Olinda. I immediately think it’s all invasive like the Albizia overrunning so much of the land and the forests here. At first glance, I can’t identify this new green. I can only see that it’s new and it’s green and it’s everywhere. I see myself in this new green and cannot look away. Here, in this moment, I feel invasive. Bright green in a sea of mature, dark green leaves that in the past have fallen in gusts of wind, showering and leaving me weeping in wonder and magic. I want to belong here like I used to. Like when the Circle of Trees said, It’s not the physical but the spiritual makeup that determines who belongs. You belong, they said. But maybe I just made that up to justify being in a place where people from here can no longer afford to, when I lived here for free, for almost a year.

This feeling makes me want to leave the forest, the island, the islands. I tried to leave before, but did not belong out there—it’s hard to connect with others when you speak the language of the trees and the land. There is no place to go back to. No place to go forward. And I can’t tell if I’m a weed, growing in a place I am not wanted; or if I’m invasive, taking over and causing destruction, one forest, one island, one continent at a time. I know the people I come from have struggled against being pulled from the ground since we were stolen and brought to land that belonged to others, where we did not belong. I know I carry the blood and the memory of generations of women before me who refused to belong. But I’m here, willfully living on stolen land. New green.

That flat, heavy energy I felt in Kahului joins me on the path. It takes my hand as I approach the loop. Here, the pine forest turns into a mix of Koa, Eucalyptus, Redwood, and those aforementioned Albizia trees. The fire was here. I see it carved into the scorched bark of still alive trees. I step as lightly as possible, to be as gentle with the forest as Maui has been to me. That flat, heavy energy does not care. It marches through, dragging me along against my will. And I feel afraid. Afraid that my tree friends didn’t make it and have all been replaced by new green.

On the loop, I walk the familiar but changed path. Stop and touch the burned bark of a Redwood. Compare her skin with my own. I see me in her. And her in me. We don’t look like new green. The picture I take of us confirms this: an oblong onyx stone set in silver swallows my middle finger and matches her burn; the brown of my skin is the brown of her bark. But just because we match doesn’t mean I belong.

I continue moving up the curved, slight incline toward my favorite tree, not just in the forest but ever. That flat, heavy energy no longer walks with me but sits on my chest and feels dark and foreboding, like an EDM bass track in the middle of a flooded field. Many of the trees along this side of the loop are gone or burned to death and still standing. This part of the trail is not what it was last year. More narrow than I remember. Fewer trees. I stumble over my breath, trip on each exhale, I can’t find King Tree. I call it King Tree because seven Eucalyptus trees joined together and formed what looks like a crown. It’s the tree that called to me from the trail four years ago, when the COVID lockdown was new and I started worshiping here more than I did in Makawao Forest; it’s the tree that’s invited me to sit and stay awhile on more than one occasion; the tree that’s a little way off the path but is easily found by those who should find it. The trail is different and I’m disoriented. Where in the actual… When I realize King Tree is still alive, I’m past the point where I usually veer off to sit with it. New green covers what used to be brown and flat. New green is confusing.

Someone has cut a path through waist-high new green to King Tree. I run through it and hug King Tree like a friend I haven’t seen in a minute. I see that its trunk is scorched on two sides at the root, burned pretty bad on one. I see that the tiny wood door someone had placed at the base facing the trail is gone. Like all the gifts left behind by others and those from me—the lei, the piece of High John I left the day before I moved to Oahu, back when King Tree whispered, There are others there. They will call to you. King Tree was right. Or maybe I’m just making this up to justify leaving.

A youngish dude approaches King Tree as I walk around it touching the bark that is scorched in some places and peeling in others. I don’t stop when I see him, because I know that he knows. He has to know if he is here. Our eyes meet. We smile, we know. He asks if he can share space and time with me and the tree. “Of course,” I say. He says, “This is a very special tree.” My nod says, I know.

He sits on the side facing the trail, in the spot where the little wood door used to be. I sit on the opposite side, facing what used to be an open clearing but is now covered by new green. New green crowds the base making it difficult to sit on one of King Tree’s roots where I used to worship in relative comfort. New green doesn’t care how it was.

Leaning awkwardly back into the root, I notice Pōpolo berries on a bush where King Tree is burned the worst and squeeze a few of the tiny purplish black berries between my fingers. It’s not lost on me that Pōpolo berries are native to Hawai`i and are medicinal. Mama is growing her medicine. I know this because I looked it up after being called Pōpolo when I first moved to the islands, but before I snapped, unsure if it was a slur. Native Hawaiians call the people with darker skin, some of whom were stolen and taken to stolen land, Pōpolo. I talk to King Tree about the berries and about belonging and finding home on Oahu and the tree I met at the corner of Young and Ke`eaumoku that has a plaque to say it is exceptional and how it is and how I miss King Tree and am so happy to finally have the chance to visit. We do not dare discuss the fire.

Back on the loop, I’m brought to tears when I see that several of my beloved tree friends are gone. Corkscrew, the tree whose trunk curved like the letter C, likely from a larger tree that rolled into it, is gone. I completely lose it when I realize the trees I called Twins are gone. I called them Twins because they were connected at the base and the exact same diameter so when you stood on either side and looked at them head on, you would only see one. I stop. Press my knees into unchanged clay, set my hands on flattened stumps that held life the last time I was here. When I see a couple approaching this section of the loop, I try to stop crying, try to stop mourning, try to stop being the crazy lady in the middle of the trail, holding onto something that is no longer there. I cannot. Their eyes look at me with question. I assume they didn’t know the forest before the fire. They must be new green.

I weep again when I see that the Circle of Trees, a group of Redwoods standing to the left of switchbacks leading down to the Waihou Spring, who once reassured me I belong, are still here. They are completely surrounded by new green that is taller than I am so I cannot reach them, but I can see them. I can feel them. I scream over the forest a promise to come back and hopefully sit with them again when the island says I can. If.

A reluctant foot on the gas takes me back down Olinda Road, along its turns and curves, past houses that sit among trees, past Oskie Rice Arena and Seabury Hall until Olinda Road turns into Baldwin at Makawao. I go from forest to town where former trees stand as boutiques and cafes that used to be something else when I first moved to Maui, except the Komoda Bakery on the corner, which has been there since forever and still pulls early morning lines down the block for their famous malasadas. I find myself saddened by all the change in the forest, all the change in town—I’m sure Native Hawaiians feel the same about the time before I first came to Maui.

Ten days before the fires, I filed a petition to legally change my name. That petition was approved by the state on the second of January this year—I left Maui as Rachel and visit as Zia. I, too, have new green. Beyond the change of my name, I’ve not yet identified all the new green in my life. I do know that my new green has narrowed paths to and through me, serving as boundary and protection in places where I had none. I do know that it is replacing things that had been destroyed, things that I might have held attachments to but were ultimately unsafe. I do know that in many instances, it is a salve, gently stroking new and old wounds the way Mama Maui once did, because I, too, have learned to grow my medicine. I feel like maybe Olinda Forest called me to come so I could remember to sit with my new green before determining whether it does or does not belong. Or maybe I’m just making this up to justify visiting.

About the author:

Zia M. Dione is just a soul enjoying a human experience and wandering between worlds. Zia holds a JD from the University of Baltimore School of Law ('05) and an MFA from Pacific University ('25). She writes, she grows, she flows. And yes, she has changed her name.