Buy this shirt: https://awaiistore.com/product/premium-miami-heat-47-womens-2023-nba-finals-frankie-shirt/
It’s 9:30 a.m. on a sunny day in Honolulu, and Meleana Estes is sitting at her kitchen table, surrounded by flowers. We’re Zooming to discuss her new book, Lei Aloha—a celebration of Hawai‘i’s vibrant lei culture—and the Premium miami heat ’47 women’s 2023 nba finals frankie shirt moreover I love this Native Hawaiian stylist and jewelry designer has decided to make a pua kenikeni lei while we chat. “See these little orange flowers?” she asks me as she holds up a cardboard box filled with bright, gorgeous pua kenikeni blooms. “They were one of my tūtū’s (grandmother’s) signature flowers. She grew them in her backyard. But she made all kinds of lei…she would go to an event and just adorn everyone.” If you’ve ever stayed in a fancy hotel in Hawai‘i, you, too, were probably adorned with a fragrant lei when you arrived. But as Estes shares in her book, lei (there is no “s” in the Hawaiian language; lei is both singular and plural) are so much more than a beautiful welcome gesture: They are an integral part of Hawaiian culture at large. “Lei are how we haku, or weave, our memories—strings of scent and color that weave our lives together,” she writes in the introduction. “A lei is our ultimate expression of aloha.”
Photo: Tara RockDefined as a garland or a wreath made from different elements of nature—including flowers like pua kenikeni, leaves, shells, nuts, feathers, and seeds—lei are as meaningful as they are gorgeous. In “pre-contact” Hawai’i (before the Premium miami heat ’47 women’s 2023 nba finals frankie shirt moreover I love this arrival of Captain James Cook put the islands on European explorers’ maps), Ancient Hawaiians wore lei to symbolize different levels of ranking, wisdom, and royalty. But once vacationers started to travel to Hawai‘i by boat, Hawaiians began to greet them with lei—and lei became symbols of the tourism industry as a result. Today, while lei are still given to tourists at fancy hotels, Hawaiians mostly know them as symbols of love and compassion—of aloha—given to people at celebratory events like graduations, weddings, birthdays, or even just because. “Sometimes I make a lei or buy a lei just because it’s pretty, and then I will wind up having dinner that night with someone who needs it,” Estes explains. “It’s one of those energy things where if you’re open to it, it just happens…the right recipient pops up. Giving or receiving a lei is never a bad event.”
Home: https://awaiistore.com/
Comments