The ʻUpena & The Relational Space

Anela Barboza Seliskar
Apr 29
2 min read

Updated: Apr 30

Iʻve been stuck inside of the complexity of my own making, like a bundle of knots that I threw into a suitcase haphazardly and am now trying to untangle from the inside.

In my longing to catch the right relationships inside my ʻupena, sometimes Iʻll say yes to connection, tie more knots, and then be scarce in the time it takes to care for everything inside of it.

It takes time to build community. It takes intention and creativity, and risk. And sometimes I go like hell with all of that. Sometimes I fall out of practice or tuck away for my own protection. And other times, I crash from the exhaustion of it all.

My grandpa was a fisherman. He was Okinawan, born and raised in Hawaiʻi. His parents were migrant workers, indentured into the plantation life mostly on Maui. They spoke no English.

I hear they were fisherman in Okinawa too, where his parents came from. But I donʻt know if he ever knew their stories, if he understood their language enough to collect them.

When I was little, I watched him fish often. (He was a pole fisherman, seems important somehow). I wanted to be like him, steady, cool, but with a kind of mischief that ran deep enough to appear quiet on the surface. He would attach a bobber to a pole and put a marshmallow type bait on the hook for me and Iʻd watch the red and white bobber bounce around on the surface. My mischief wasn’t yet ready for the deeps.

Unsurpsingly, I never caught anything. But I was learning from him.

Long into my adulthood, literally until I started this journey with Makawalu, I had no desire to fish. I would say that I just wanted someone to bring me a fish. Even when I sketched out the first draft of the ʻupena for this perspective, of Pilina I had only this story that if I built relationship and tied my knots just right, someone else might bring me a fish.

Its been a minute since I made progress on my ʻupena. I pick it up here and there, go hard for a time, tying and tying and tying. And then I lose steam for a while, and forget where I was. The line gets all hamajang and it takes me forever to untangle it to start again.

But every time I leave and come back, itʻs like Iʻm throwing it out there, trying to understand the waters im in a little more. Trying to learn more about the fish that I really want in this net. Trying to learn how to sew a net that is healthy and sustainable. And learning the skills of consistency and evenness, and the fullness of mischief, the things I observed only in my grandpa.