About: Ka Ua Kuahine

The Kuahine rains of Mānoa Valley

Mānoa Valley, May 31st, 2022

2022 explainer:

In January 2022, before the ultimate conclusion to my PhD that was all about Hawai’i, I began building a new WordPress separate from this original “Ka Ua Kuahine” site, which I hadn’t updated since 2017 and was meaning to take offline. I decided on the name “Metaphors & Metaphysics,” but repeated kafkaesque delays due to the PhD and tech issues held me off from publicizing it until I felt ready.

Most of my tech issues revolved around wanting to change my username/login kauakuahine, which I no longer felt suitable for my post-Hawai’i work. I focussed on back-and-forth attempts at changing my login and email addresses for the new site to stop it from being linked to the old one (and felt uneasy about fully deleting the old name since it was linked to 2015 original writing on Maunakea). My failed attempts concluded with simply changing the visible username to “KarinIsSharing” as I use on multiple social media sites.

More tech delays meant that by May 3, I still hadn’t launched the new site “Metaphors & Metaphysics” properly, after posting 3 new posts there that were only visible to me. When I found the time to focus on publicizing the new site in late May 2022, I was sitting in Mānoa Valley with a window view to the exact same location of the Hale Kuahine dorm next to me. Since most of my 2021/2022 tech issues I battled during the PhD had some ulterior meaning of “in due time,” I began contemplating if being unable to make my new site public in the ways I wished to share, maybe I was supposed to keep the old site up, instead of burying it from its existence?

I decided to customize the old “Ka Ua Kuahine” site, thinking about my recent social media claims of “the new Karin is the old Karin,” by making more contemporary (2022 vs. 2015) layout changes and reposting my May 3 blog posts here.

I waited for the occasion of Kuahine rains in the valley to ponder if there was rhyme and reason to keeping the old kauakuahine as the new one. The metaphors and metaphysics of the specific form of soft often vertical drizzles of rain, like mists suspended in the air reflecting and refracting light in its water droplets, are found in my new ponderings on “ambon”/”embon” drizzle/dew and the formation of rainbows in Andean skies and weavings.

Sitting in the Kuahine rains that give the valley its rainbows and gave my PhD its meanings illuminated and enlightened the intention of keeping the combined name “Ka Ua Kuahine” and the taglines with the added title “Metaphors & Metaphysics.”

Mānoa Valley, as drawn by me in 2015

2015 explainer:

“kauakuahine” was the username I chose when I first started anonymously blogging about Mauna Kea in early April 2015. I was worried that I was appropriating the name Kauakuahine from Hawaiian legend, yet at the same time I felt that not using a name that connected to Hawai’i would leave readers questioning “who is this blogger and why should I believe her”.

I was far away from both Mauna Kea and Mānoa, but Mānoa was my home for several years, and the first 1.5 of that I lived in the East-West Center dormitory called Hale Kuahine. There is a personal significance in the name of the misty rain of the valley that doesn’t apply to any other Hawaiian word or reference I could think of, and it helped keep my affiliation to the previous blog anonymous.

Because, wordplay:

I wrote it in small caps and as one word to leave ambiguity in “ka ua” (the rain) and “kāua” (we 2 inclusive, the reader and I), since usernames can’t incorporate Hawaiian diacritics. I also found out that “kaua” (war, battle, army) and “kauā” (servant or slave) could be interpreted from it, which I thought was interesting to note for the protection of Mauna Kea in the context of illegal occupation and settler colonialism.