One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting in a sunny classroom with one ear on the teacher and another on the chirping of things going on outside the window. For the most part I was a good student but it was always really, really tough for me to concentrate on what was going inside when all I ever wanted to do was run headlong into the outside world. And the requisite nap time? Ugh, major unnecessary time kill! We joke in my family that I have always had A.D.D. (along with the other alphabet soup, O.C.D.) but I think it was just my not being able to contain all the ideas swirling in my head, all the ideas that seemed to live always outside of any contained space I’m forced to sit in, that gives me so much restlessness. My sisters and I were raised to be very well behaved (so we sat still usually) but inside my head, geez, a complete calamity. Couldn’t wait to grow up fast enough so that I could see if I couldn’t put some of those ideas to test…or to rest.

The good news is that I am still well behaved, for the most part. The bad news is that no, those ideas–or as I call them thought distractors–don’t stop coming just because I now have to grow up and tend to responsibilities. Anyway, the reason I wrote all of this at all is because this morning I woke up completely unsure what time zone I was in. I’m in Europe, the US finally just changed its clock a week ago to synch up with Europe, and I have a conference call with a company in India where the time does not change and is X hours ahead of the US plus 30 minutes. Math is not my strong suit. This is the chaos that is my work life, but you know, it all makes sense. In some ways, the chaos helps mitigate the thought distractors; I have little time to sit long enough to get consumed by them. So you see, the universe always knows how to make everything work out, even for frazzled little girls like me who thought it would take an eternity to escape that classroom. The girl-me would have gotten a huge kick out of knowing she would one day see this enormous banyan tree in Hilo…

around which you must walk to follow uphill to find the source of this Rainbow Falls:

Anyway, no fashion-related news (yet) from here. It’s drizzly outside my window as I book travel arrangements for Paris to see a client in a week. There’s no point for me to show you a picture of rain so instead I’m featuring more photos from the Big Island of Hawaii as a continuation of the last post. So at the top of Rainbow Falls, you can navigate the rocky terrain…

to dip your feet into the currents…

And if you are brave enough while carrying a waterproof camera, you could go all the way to the edge and look down at the waterfall rushing below your feet. Resisting the urge to jump headfirst on this day is no different from the urge of running out of the classroom before the bell rang all those years ago. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Not too far from this waterfall is another lookout for the Akaka Falls:

To get from one waterfall to the next, you can drive, bike or hike along the coastline and behold views like these:

Can you see that tiny house way up in the hill in the photo just above? That must be what living in paradise means to a lot of people. And while I love a house with water view, my first thought is how dangerous of a drive that must be for the Fedex guy to deliver packages to me by noon in paradise. But heck, he’d be a Fedex guy driving around paradise instead of some concrete jungle. See what I mean about the universe balancing everything out in the end?

Before we left Hilo we ran into this pit stop:

Now a pit stop in paradise is not like your average pit stop. It comes with a backyard like this…

and fruits picked right off the trees…

This is my favorite definition of a snack:

Then before I knew it, it was time to go back to the hustle and bustle of Honolulu and to one of my favorite ramen places in the world:

When I’m out in nature, I am thankful most for my eyesight. When I’m back in a big city, I’m thankful for my life. But in Hawaii, blessings are abundant. Where else but here can you get rainbows, waterfalls, rambutans and ramen all in the same day? They don’t call it paradise for nothing.