Ancient Visitors

Fall – Week 45 – From Tropical Waters to Winter Air

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

As we descended, Kauai looked like a place that had escaped time altogether. The mountains wore green like velvet, and those famous Na Pali cliffs rose straight up from the ocean, dramatic as anything I’d ever seen. Through the plane’s small window, I watched the island take shape - not just another dot of land in the Pacific, but something wilder. This was what happened when volcanoes and rain had millions of years to work together, creating more shades of green than I knew existed.

Leaving the airport, the air itself became presence, thick with storm promise and the perfume of tropical blooms, wrapping around your skin like silk soaked in rain. This was not the dry heat of other places but something alive, breathing with the island’s own rhythm, air that tasted of growing things and wet earth.

We wound our way south toward Poipu, windows down, letting the island in. Each mile seemed to reveal something new. Along the roadside, fountain grass bent in golden waves, each wet blade catching light like a blessing. But it was the canopy that spoke the deepest, rainbow eucalyptus so tall they formed a living tunnel above us, their crowns meshed together in an unbroken arch. Through gaps in this green vault, glimpses of the island’s true nature. Ferns unfurled from every crevice. Philodendrons climbed toward any promise of light. Life upon life, green upon green - as if this is what taught the human tongue to shape the sound of paradise.

The beach, when we finally reached it, held its own revelations. Driftwood scattered along the tide line like the bones of some ancient sea creature, bleached white by salt and sun. Above, ironwood trees drew delicate calligraphy against the sky, their needle-thin leaves whispering in the trade winds.

But it was late afternoon when the true magic began. First one dark dome broke the surface, then another, until the ocean itself seemed to be offering up its treasures. The turtles came in waves of their own making, at one point thirty, perhaps more. Each one ancient and unhurried, wearing the weight of centuries in their measured movements through the surf. They hauled themselves onto the warm sand with such a deliberate grace, as if each gesture had been rehearsed since time began.

We sat among them as the sun began its descent, these creatures who had navigated by stars before humans ever dreamed of ships. Only feet away, they settled into sand still holding the day’s heat, their shells catching the last light like polished jade. The boundary between their world and ours dissolved in that honey-colored hour, when even the ocean seemed to hold its breath.

The sunset painted everything. Turtle shells, wet sand, our own watching faces in shades of amber and rose. Here were beings who knew nothing of our human urgencies, who moved between elements as if land and sea were merely different rooms in the same vast house. Their presence transformed the beach from mere landscape into sanctuary, each turtle deep in its own timeless meditation.

That evening, even the crickets sang differently than they do in Colorado. Their chorus fainter here, as if the island’s abundance required only whispers where the high desert demands something louder. Everything spoke in this softer tongue: the rustle of palm fronds, the silk-soft lap of waves, the quiet scrape of shell against sand.

The days that followed wove themselves into a rhythm I’d forgotten existed. Morning coffee on the lanai while birds I couldn’t name called from trees I’d never seen. Afternoons when time pooled like water in tide pools, going nowhere, needing nothing. Evenings when we’d return to watch for turtles, though they never again came in such numbers as that first night. Still, each evening brought its own gathering, sometimes a dozen, sometimes more, these creatures who asked nothing of us but distance and quiet wonder.

The island worked on me in ways I hadn’t expected. Each dawn arrived soft and certain. Rain came and went like a conversation, never the violent storms of home but something gentler, almost playful. I found myself moving slower, breathing deeper, as if my body was learning the island’s own rhythm.

The journey home began in darkness. Below us, Kauai’s few lights flickered and vanished, the island returning to the vast black of the Pacific. There was something fitting about leaving this way. Not watching it shrink in daylight but feeling it fall away in the dark, already becoming a memory.

Landing in Colorado was like stepping from a greenhouse into a charcoal drawing. Where Kauai had draped itself in every shade of green imagination could conjure, here the world had stripped itself to essentials. The mountains stood naked against a metal sky, their forests mere suggestions of gray and brown. Along the highway, cut fields stretched like parchment, corn stubble and hay remnants writing November’s sparse alphabet across the land.

This monochrome world, all pale yellow and ash, bone white and shadow, struck like cold water after Kauai’s tropical bath. Yet there was honesty in this bareness, truth in the way winter reveals the architecture beneath summer’s disguise. The cottonwoods along the creek stood naked as anatomy lessons, every branch visible, nothing hidden.

Perhaps this is what islands do. Not just surround us with beauty, but shake us loose from our usual ways of seeing. You leave, you return, and suddenly your familiar world looks foreign. The eye that grew accustomed to Kauai’s excess now notices things it skipped before. The delicate frost patterns on grass, the way afternoon light turns bare aspens to copper, how silence here has a different quality than island quiet. Sharper, cleaner, carved from winter air.

The turtles, I think, would understand this movement between worlds. They who breathe in both water and air, who carry their homes wherever they travel, who know that arrival is always temporary and departure always certain. They teach without teaching that paradise isn’t a place we find but a way of seeing - whether in Kauai’s green cathedral or Colorado’s winter chapel, where different prayers are offered to the same vast glorious sky.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane