One Year on an Island That Keeps Changing Me
When I got orders to Hawai‘i, people in my global family commented, “Lucky you,” or “so you're not going back to Germany?” Some even suggested I’d won a sweepstakes and would spend my days forever floating in turquoise water with a flower behind my ear.
So what really happened? Well, I landed with two suitcases, started a job that demanded the attention of a small village, and a brain still wired for European roads and German grammar. My Wahlfamily didn’t mention that moving to an island feels a little like stepping into a snail-paced dimension where time stretches, and wool isn't a clothing option. Most likely, they had no idea. I also quickly learned that the sun, mountains, and the ocean call the shots.
On my first weekend here, I hiked up mountains to bunkers and crouching lions to see what the island looked like. The trails weren’t necessarily long, but they were steep, with warm tropical air, scattered with occasional pig hunters, lipstick palms bleeding color from their stems, and fresh guava scent drifting along the forest floor. That’s when it hit me: Hawai‘i isn’t “the brochure beach.” Hawai‘i is layers. Forest, flowers, fruits, stone, lava, cloud, culture, history. Suddenly, I was a kid starting life all over again.
The year unfolded with discovery after discovery. I learned that the moon over O‘ahu puts on a rock-concert light show, dazzling the night with brilliance. But when I really wanted that Moonshot, it was impossibly bashful, hiding behind the clouds on the horizon. I learned that makai and mauka are better directions than north and south. I realized that planes glide right over the old Fort Kamehameha housing and chapel, still standing watch over the Pearl Harbor entrance, like a perfect sentinel, but without the big beach guns. I learned that the ocean will humble and tumble you, the mountains will test you, and both will offer healing if you show up with a good attitude and decent hydration.
Work was its own story — leading a division through transition, trying to be steady when everything wanted to be complicated. Some days I came home drained; other days I came home proud. Always, I came home with gratitude.
Photography kept me sane. I shot moonlit basalt stones, mountain vistas, flowers and street scenes, boulders guarding trails, reflections pretending to be me, and that one moment when sunlight burst through a hole in the cactus pad. This island gifted me light —sometimes — you have to be awake enough to catch it.
I embraced AI as a research tool. I learned that my Option-Shift-Hyphen (AKA em—dash) punctuation mark was a sign of AI rather than proper, and should be used more often, as a grammatical pause greater than a comma, but not as final as a semicolon.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, Hawai‘i stopped being “the place I moved to” and started being “the place that’s changing me.” I learned aloha ʻāina isn’t just a phrase; it's an invitation to pay attention to the land, and I did. I started volunteering with the Global Restoration Initiative, taking on projects in local parks to give back to the land and the people, and to make stories with others.
One year in, I’m still learning. Still hiking, still riding my bike, paddling occasionally, still photographing, still tripping over Hawaiian words but trying anyway, still building a life that feels like it belongs here — even if I'm a Midwestern groomed, Navy-trained, European-cultured forever kid with a camera and a head full of words and a German vocabulary that shows up at the wrong moments.
What I know for sure is this:
Hawai‘i didn’t just give me a place to live. It gave me a place to grow.
