To live successfully with multiple sclerosis, you must become an artist of improvisation. You never know when (or how) your body is going to horrify you next. MS is, I dare say, a master class in mortality. Gentle reader, we are all on the same conveyor belt, heading for the same destination. Some of us just get to have a more challenging experience resisting the inertial pull as we dodge hostile takeovers on random locations throughout our nervous system.  We need to be flexible. We need yoga. And that is why, every morning of my stay at the Temple of My Dreams, I’d leave the downstairs living quarters and make my way up the stairs, and then up the ramp, to the second floor entrance to the yoga studio.

Once I reached the pillars, this is a glimpse of what I’d see to my left:

I wish you could hear the ocean, as I did. Or the breezes. Or the birds. I would sometimes see glimpse a cat (or two) on my approach to the temple entrance on the second level.

The temple itself was inhabited by a black cat.

This cat is apparently very used to partnering in yoga.

Ostensibly, the cat and I had the studio to ourselves. But if you’ve ever taught me yoga, or shared a pose with me, be assured, I snuck you in, too. The studio was spacious. And full.

There was a reason our family had chosen to visit The Big Island. When my husband graduated college, he and his dad celebrated with an epic two day climb / one day descent of the massive volcano, Mauna Loa. What better way to celebrate our son’s graduation from Vassar than to follow this tradition? Once we learned our son had signed on with a start-up in Beijing, it seemed only logical to give him a head start on the twelve hour time change with a ten day vacation in a time zone six hours closer to Beijing time. As parents, we’d do anything to ease a transition that is in many ways absolute. We knew our son would be starting a life far outside our areas of expertise. Our opportunities to ameliorate  his life challenges were drawing to a close.

During the planning phase, my husband kept bringing up the issue of what I would do during the Father/Son volcano expedition. Sorry, I am not the volcano vanquishing MS superhero you might find on an advertisement or some other blog. (Though I’d love to be!) I’m a fairly ecstatic swimmer/snorkeler,  but in the past I’ve gotten in some trouble overheating on the beach. My husband is accustomed to being my superhero. What would happen if I were to get stranded snorkeling while he was busy scaling the volcano with our son? His idea was to set me up in some luxury hotel for the haole (white) tourists on the dry side. No thank you! I wanted to choose my own adventure.

Meanwhile, the adventure my husband and son had chosen was going up in smoke—or more accurately—in vog. (Vog being the term for smoke that comes out of an active volcano.) As packages arrived at our house with backpacks and state of the art camping equipment, so daily updates arrived in our in-boxes on the steady eruption from Mauna Loa’s sister volcano, Kilauea. My husband kept expecting the eruption to end. But the goddess Pele didn’t seem to be running out of lava. As the date for our vacation grew nearer, he finally called the Park Service, and learned all the trails were closed. The men in my life would have to cancel their epic hike of Mauna Loa. No problem. They too, are flexible. They, too, have to live with MS. My husband found an achievable walk: an eight mile hike on Pu’u wa’awa’a. Achievable—for them, anyway. I hate to write that my eight mile hike days are gone forever. I’ll say this much: the day of the Father/Son hike, I would still have to find my own way.

But once we arrived at the AirBnB, I knew it had everything I needed for a blissful day on my own.  I could do yoga, at my pace. Break for writing. Break for meditating. Break for sitting on the lanai, soaking in the sights and sounds of the garden. Break for walking down to the beach. A five minute walk. An achievable walk. I’d have plenty to do while my husband and son took their achievable hike.

One morning, as I was leaving the yoga studio, I got a text from my husband. He’d taken a walk on an overgrown road that ran along the mountain side of the Jodo Temple. My son and I had refused to go with him. It looked like this:

My husband texted that you could see the ocean from the road. The views were incredible. We should come! So we did. The views were incredible.

Sure, there was a landslide to scurry over. But everywhere: island foliage in all its exuberance. Over a low wall of carefully assembled lava rocks: a view of the ocean. And after an eighth of a mile or so, the unmistakable sound of a waterfall. The air got cooler. We found ourselves under a leaf canopy, staring up at this:

A little farther along, we stumbled on a second waterfall.

My husband said, “All this for us? You’ve got your paved road in the wild. Our own private waterfalls.”

All that for us. For me. You’d better believe I returned on the day of the Father / Son hike. It was just the perfect mix of challenge and beauty and wild wild wonder. At just the right temperature. Mahalo, Pele. Thank you. It all worked out just right.