On June 21, 2025,
Maya led a group of 20 friends, associates and fellow students
in a half-day experience in the tropical forest high above the
towers of downtown Honolulu, Hawai’i
This page witnesses her 12-minute narrative,
spoken spontaneously, inspired by the moment and the primal setting:
Shared Wilderness Meditation
Wa’ahila Ridge Park
Honolulu, Hawai’i
We’re going spend a few minutes to think about you as a relational being, in relation to ‘aina, to wai, land and sea, to all that is around us — sentient, wise and healthy — and in need of healing.
We’re going to think about our relationship to one another and to other communities — “inter-being,” as Thich Nhat Hanh said — in all of our shared soil and aspiration, need and endeavor.
Let your breath make you feel connected to everything here.
These trees are offering you oxygen. You are giving the trees what they need to thrive as well, in your breath. So, see and feel that inter-being.
Become aware of the mycelium beneath the forest floor.
Consider the unseen threads of relationship that hold all life.
Feel your own individual strength and potency, your capacity, in a world of fraying threads, to be weavers.
Your ability, in a time of broken trust, to mend — to restore faith, to bind wounds.
In place of wounded histories, your responsibility, your kuleana, your capacity — to offer healing, repair, forgiveness, and to be forgiven.
In place of aching hearts, the love that you give is incredibly powerful and mending.
Each of you is a beautiful planter of seeds.
You plant with your words, with your actions, with your presence, with your reverence, with your humility, with your guiding mentorship, with your care.
Perhaps bring someone to mind right now with whom you feel love and ease.
I want you to visualize planting a seed for a plant beneath you, between you, around you — it will flourish.
A plant of joy, collaboration, and kinship.
What is it? What is that plant?
See it, planted together with this person.
And now in this moment, watch that plant grow tall with shared care.
See it reach up and out, and flourish.
Now, bring someone to mind with whom you feel some distance or hurt. Maybe this is someone you know. Maybe it is someone you see in the public eye.
Maybe it is an ancestor. Maybe it is progeny.
Without forcing anything, imagine planting a humble seed of peace. Not to erase the pain, but to offer the possibility of new life.
I want you to take a minute in silence to water that seed, to give it your breath.
To invite the sun to shine on it, to nurture and nourish it with willingness, with grace, with forgiveness, with temperance and wisdom.
Now look outward. See this forest of relationships growing all around you. See our beloved communities, our island earth.
See all the life in the oceans that we need to support, protect better, need to see more fully.
See the families and communities and neighborhoods that may be struggling or suffering, whether with lack of resources, respect or opportunity.
Every word of kindness, every effort to nourish community ground-up solutions, every honoring of the gifts of these communities and families, is like water.
Water the seeds all around us in your mind.
Every act of courage that you bear witness to in the presence of uncertainty, fear or anxiety.
Every act of service, the curiosity and the respect that allows us to listen to one another –all of that is sunlight.
Let the sun shine brightly on these families and communities.
Every boundary set with compassion is pruning, and most importantly, please feel that you are not alone in the garden. You are surrounded by other planters, growers, farmers.
You are part of this living ecosystem, a beautiful matrix.
All of this is so worth tending. We will not give up on our beloved communities. Let a vision of all of us, hands together, efforts braided, let it root itself in you.
As we face challenges or worries, thin to all these other growers, who may be different, but they are part of our gorgeous inter-being.
We can still choose when we think of them:
Compassion and care over cynicism, connection over isolation, understanding over anger and rancor.
Or we can choose the kind of righteous anger that is not paralyzing or destructive, but an opportunity to transform conflict into something productive, more just and beautiful.
Peace begins not in perfection, but in planting.
So let’s make a commitment, right now, to be planters, tend to our own little patches of land. Or better yet, helping someone else with their garden.
Say to yourself with your next breath: may I be a gardener of peace through my words, in my relationships, and in my community.
You as gardeners, with others. Not just in quiet contemplation, but in seeing pieces — action,
Embodied social justice. Non-violent positive change, where needed.
Feel the real value of creating a sense of intimacy, with one another, and with all of nature.
In our next steps.
Video Meditation
(4 minutes)
written and spoken by Maya Soetoro
portions photographed by David Castellano
recorded and transcribed by Michael North
complete audio
(12 minutes)