It is my last night in Kauai, and the first one that is clear and relatively warm. I have finished my packing and decide to take a walk around the grounds of the apartment I have rented. It is spectacularly beautiful. A bright blue-black sky, spotted with so many stars. The magnificent variety of trees provide a backdrop to the intoxicating night sky.

I walk the lighted path, and am stopped at a fork around a tree that captures my attention for several minutes. It is gnarled and twisted with a surprising wide and uneven canopy of fluffy leaves. It looks like a tree a small child would draw.

I haven’t been here for over 20 years, and the island is unrecognizable to me. Not in an ‘oh my gosh, everything is so developed’ kind of way, but in an ‘I forgot how beautiful it is here’ way. The weather has been abysmal, cold and rainy nearly every day. I have not gone to the beach at all, and only just took my first scenic hike today.

I’ve also been busy with the program I’m attending – a course to bring personal stories onto the stage. I have so much to say, so much to share, and yet it feels too raw and personal to bring out into the light. I am told, over and over, that I have not dug deep enough, I am still keeping the most important events and emotions secret. I feel like I cannot reveal any more than I have without losing my objectivity, without the art dissolving into something unpalatable.

This week has been extremely transformative. I have watched a room full of people divulge their deepest, darkest secrets. I feel like I know more about these people, with whom I have spent only hours, than most of the people in my life. There is an intimacy here I experience so rarely.

As I stand, at the fork in the path, I study the tree, and try to understand why I am so rapt. There is no shortage of magnificent foliage on Kauai, the garden island, but this tree, in the light of the stars, captures me. Is it beautiful, or is it hideous? Is it perfect, or is it completely flawed? It’s almost ridiculous to ask those questions of an item in nature. Everything is perfect, as it should be.

Then why do we insist that within ourselves, there is the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the beautiful and the terrible? I think about the gnarls and twists of my own life, and how they have created the stories I must tell. Would I rather the tree of my life have perfectly smooth bark, and stand in plumb perfect alignment? Yes, sometimes I do, but not now. All of those lumps and curves, everywhere the tree had to start and stop, bending around whatever was in its way, has made it breathtaking. I take this in.

Instead of picking one of the two paths around the tree, I turn back, and return on the path that brought me there. My pen and paper await. There is much work to be done.