Adventure, Nature & The Pursuit of the Unknown - Awaiting Return to Pō
Who am I? Where did I come from? Where did WE come from? And where exactly are we going?
Have you ever asked yourself these questions? I can think of several points in my life when these questions were unavoidable, and unearthing the answers became a matter of survival. Perhaps navigating our world of COVID-19 and lock downs, canceled plans and quarantine, isolation and postponed dreams has launched these very same questions at you like an attack on all that you assumed to be certain in life.
Isolation has that effect on us and if we lean into the answers, it can have the power to shape us, as it did for my friend JE.
To the literary world, he’s Jon-Erik G. Jardine, but I knew him initially as JE, my husband Patrick’s dear friend and a talented ultra-runner living on Hawai’i Island. As a young adult, JE chose to leave behind his home in Washington and all that was familiar, responding to an innate need to explore the source of life and its purpose.
This pursuit led JE first to Hawaiʻi, one of the most remote places on Earth (located in the Central Pacific Ocean, the Hawai’i archipelago is 2,390 miles from California and 3,850 miles from Japan, making it the furthest from any landmass in the world) and then on to the uninhabited island of Kure Atoll in the belly of the Pacific Ocean.
Kure Atoll, also known as Hōlanikū or Mokupāpapa, is the furthest northwest of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (one of the world’s largest marine conservation areas).
Jon-Erik is a runner, writer, and educator. A runwriteducator!
Isolation and the Kure Atoll
Kure’s population is comprised of Hawaiian monk seals, green sea turtles and other marine species, the countless seabirds that visit each year to mate and raise their hatchlings, and small crews of habitat restoration technicians.
After a week at sea, these committed crews arrive by ship, prepared to spend either the summer or winter season living and working on the tiny wildlife sanctuary. If you can’t live without the internet and prefer electricity, than Kure is not for you! Life at the atoll’s outpost is incredibly remote and simple to say the least, and it’s what inspired JE’s book Return to Pō.
"Being there, I had to wrestle with the atoll’s meaning, beyond its role as a remote conservation area,” JE explains to me as I catch up with him while on his lunch break (when he’s not running and writing, JE works as part of the horticulture team at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, WA). “I had to examine what the atoll’s relationship was to the rest of Hawai’i and to myself.”
On Kure, crews bring their supplies and food, rain catchment provides fresh water, and there is little communication with the world beyond the atoll. And with no modern modes of entertainment to distract him, JE was able to dive deep into these concepts of the human connection to Kure.
“Looking back, I can connect the dots,” said JE. “I can see that I was grappling with the human connection to place and nature, and how that relationship helps foster a kind of identity, which affects one’s path in life.”
Our connection to place and nature plays an integral role in our relationship with and responsibility to the world, as JE came to learn. It’s a lesson that, once learned and put into practice, can change us all for the better!
Although connection and isolation are seemingly at opposite ends of the spectrum, JE affirms that in retrospect, such a time of isolation on a remote island taught him the most essential lessons on connection.
The Pursuit of the Unknown
Return to Pō is a series of essays about JE’s young adult life in Hawaiʻi.
“Pō literally means ‘night.’ It’s a time of day, but it’s also the idea of obscurity, darkness, and the unknown,” says JE of his fascination with the juxtaposition of day and night. “Pō is the unknown and we have to have a relationship with that.”
JE points out, however, that most of us are inclined to avoid Pō, because there’s a weight to the unknown that can be unsettling. “But the more I learned about it, the more I was drawn, almost obsessively, to the unknown.”
In this season of global uncertainty, Pō is no longer merely a philosophical subject. It’s a reality, and as such, the essays in his book Return to Pō are more relevant than JE could have anticipated when he began his literary journey.
Return to Pō will challenge its readers to consider what value the unknown holds. The book leans into ideas such as the afterlife, the death of an era, the death of a species, and the death of loved one. JE’s words on these concepts are written from personal experience.
“My life on the Kure Atoll, where I witnessed firsthand how capable debris is of killing wildlife and destroying coral reefs, prepared me to cope with tragedy,” JE reflects, referring to the sudden death of his younger brother, Taiga, in July of 2018. “It opened my eyes to the necessity for change. Something has to die for something else to be reborn. Return to Pō is where we come from.”
In Return to Pō, JE suggests that every endeavor is “a journey of existence into the unknown,” whether that be coping with unexpected hurt and heartbreak, or navigating the inescapable unknowns of life during a pandemic.
“Return to Pō is my own personal journey of arriving at the source of life, the threshold of consciousness,” says JE of the leap he took into this relationship with Pō. “It is a call to ring the resonance of remembrance of who and what we are - that our well-being is intrinsically married to the well-being of all life.”
The Starting Point
“Every endeavor is a return to the darkness, from which we are born, from which consciousness was, and is, created from,” offers JE.
Every endeavor, including a race that takes one further than any distance we’ve run before, or the monumental undertaking of writing one’s first book. For anyone out there who has always wanted to write a book, but just doesn’t know where to start, JE has some advice and answers the most common question first-time authors pose:
JE, how can I find time to write a book?
Two words: Social Accountability. I didn’t have time! I thought writing a book sounded overwhelming. But I found a program for first-time authors that was created in 2016 by a Georgetown University entrepreneurship professor. He established the Creator Institute to help individuals discover and demonstrate their purpose through creating a book.
Publisher New Degree Press sponsors the Creator Institute. And their mission is to help us publish and use our books to create impact. After you take the course, you can decide whether you want New Degree Press to publish your book.
In this course, I joined a cohort of authors and we learned how to write a book. We learned how to overcome the barriers and how powerful it is to have a circle of authors to check in with every week.
This shared experience made me feel connected. Part of a team! There’s a collaboration aspect and an accountability aspect, as you don’t want to let anyone on the team down. The course enabled me to believe that publishing my book really was a possibility!
So in between running and working at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, WA, I decided to write this book, because I see a need to preserve and practice spirituality in a secularizing world.
A black-footed Albatross chick on the shores of Kure.
Where can we get Return to Pō ?!
Excited to get your hands on a copy of JE’s book?! Me too! Return to Pō will publish in December 2020 (just in time for Christmas)!
For more info, visit www.returntopo.com. And be sure to follow JE, ahem, Jon-Erik, on Instagram to get updates on the book release (and see stunning photos of the Albatross chicks born on the shores of Kure, of course)!
