Follow Your Bliss

Campbell says, "if you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time" (93).

What really turned my crank was exploring the legends and myths of the islands, especially the legend of the tangimauthea, a six-inch plant that bears bright red diminutive flowers and only grows around Lake Tangimauthea, peculiarly situated almost smack on the top of Taveuni, at an elevation slightly above the 4,000 foot mark. Efforts to transplant the tangimauthea by world-class botanists have failed time and time again.

In Fijian tangi means tears.
Mauthea can be interpreted as either sleep or dream.

A beautiful young Fijian maiden princess of the Taveuni matingali (clan), the most warrior-like matingali in all of Fiji, fell in love with a warrior, who happened to be a commoner. Her father, the chief forbid her to marry her love and banished the young warrior. Heartbroken, the girl threw herself down on the shore of the lake and died. Before she passed away, her tears gave rise to the tangimauthea with the blood-red flowers.

On a particularly fittingly mournful rainy day on Taveuni,there was a funeral for the local Chief. I felt sad but it would have been presumptuous of me to have attended the funeral. I decided instead to hike up to Lake Tangimauthea. I hired a taxi to take me as far as the road allowed, which was about the 2,200 foot mark.

The trail up was a hard scrabble. The clouds closed in and I soon lost all sense that I was in the tropics. I ended up in short order soaked to the skin but I did eventually reach the lake. Discovering the flower that I had come to behold was not difficult. In spite of my shivers, I spent some time looking out across the lake that was probably about a quarter of a mile wide, if that and shrouded in mist a fitting backdrop to my mood.

Although, I never did learn much more about the Myth of Tangimauthea I did experience more and that was what counted. I was somehow satisfied. What I did not fathom, I could imagine. On the slippery hike down, in

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