I barely remember the ten days I spent in Hawaii, which is strange because it had always been near the top of my bucket list. But the truth is, I didn’t want to go.

I had been sick for most of the year. By then, there were days I could barely breathe, barely stand, or make it through the simplest things. I was exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t touch. I told my partner to go without me. After all, it was really his trip. He already had plans to meet friends there. I was simply tagging along on a journey that happened to take me somewhere I had always dreamed of going.

But by the time that dream was actually in front of me, I was too sick. Too tired. Whatever version of me had once dreamed about Hawaii didn’t feel like the person living inside my body anymore.

Then something strange happened. One day, I picked up a clean shirt, and a quarter simply fell out of it. I still don’t know how it got there, and it wasn’t just any quarter. It was the Edith Kanakaʻole quarter from Hawaii, and written across it were the words:

E hō mai ka ‘ike.

Let wisdom come.

It is a Hawaiian invocation asking for knowledge, understanding, insight, and the ability to see what perhaps we cannot yet see. I hadn’t even known the phrase before. Yet there it was, falling from a clean shirt and landing in front of me at the exact time I was trying to convince myself not to go.

It felt less like finding a quarter and more like receiving a message. So I tried. I tried so hard to want to go despite how terrible I felt, because suddenly, inexplicably, I had this overwhelming feeling that maybe I was supposed to be there.

And so I went.

Somehow, the trip made me sicker in a way I still can’t explain, and in a way I don’t think anyone who wasn’t inside my body could ever fully understand. There are ten days of my life in one of the most extraordinary places on Earth that exist for me mostly in photographs. I know I was there because I took them. I can see what I saw through the lens of my camera, but I can barely find it in my own memory. Even now, I don’t quite know what to make of that.

But there is one moment I remember. I was lying on the ground beneath a waxing crescent moon, staring into a Hawaiian sky in a place I had dreamed of seeing for so long. I remember thinking, “This is it.”

I fully believed that place was somehow going to heal me, if only I believed enough, if only my faith was strong enough. Because I had found healing before. I had found God in the woods at home, in the quiet places where no one else was around. I had learned that if I listened quietly enough, if I could quiet myself, quiet the noise of the world, and simply be, I could feel something greater than me there. Nature had become the place where I felt closest to God and where I had found pieces of myself I thought I had lost.

So imagine what I believed Hawaii might hold. It was a place I had read about as sacred, powerful, and alive with mana. A place of renewal and transformation, surrounded by ocean, mountains, rain, volcanic earth, and life unlike anything I had ever known. I thought if I could just get quiet enough there, if I could be alone with the land and with God, surely there would be something magical waiting for me.

Maybe I romanticized it. Maybe I simply needed so desperately to believe there was something bigger than what was happening to me. But lying there on the ground beneath that waxing crescent moon, sick and exhausted, thousands of miles from home, I gave myself completely to that belief. I believed I had been led there for a reason. I believed Hawaii was somehow going to give me back some part of myself I had lost.

What I didn’t understand yet was that healing and feeling better might not always be the same thing.

I came home, and instead of feeling healed, life seemed to turn me completely inside out. The months that followed brought more than I could have imagined. Health scares. Hospitals. A broken ankle that literally forced me to stop. Blood pressure swinging from dangerously low to frighteningly high. Even a detox, but that’s another story for another time.

Somewhere inside all of it, I lost something that frightened me more than any of those things. I stopped feeling connected to myself, to the world, and to almost everything that once made me feel like me.

For months, I couldn’t understand it. How could I have felt so strongly that I was supposed to go somewhere I believed could heal me, only to come home and seemingly fall apart?

Then, somewhere in all the confusion, another thought came to me. Maybe I misunderstood what healing was supposed to look like. Maybe Hawaii wasn’t the healing. Maybe it was the beginning. Maybe sometimes we don’t return from sacred places restored. Maybe we return undone.

Maybe I needed to be turned inside out before I could see what I had been carrying. Old beliefs, old routines, old habits, ways of surviving, and even pieces of myself that had once served a purpose but could no longer come with me.

That made me remember something nature taught me a long time ago. When I was younger, I loved only her warm seasons. I loved flowers, green leaves, and sunshine. I loved the seasons when life was obvious. Eventually, I learned to love all of them because nature taught me that there is still life in death, and there is new life after it.

Winter isn’t proof that everything has died. Sometimes winter is preparation. The trees don’t panic when their leaves fall. They don’t desperately hold on to what has already died because they’re afraid nothing will grow in its place. They let go. They become bare. They stand still. Somehow, without being able to see a single sign of it, they trust that spring is coming.

Maybe we have winters, too. Seasons when everything becomes still and unfamiliar. Seasons when nothing seems to be growing. Seasons when we are forced to stop long enough to truly look at ourselves and shed the dead things that are slowly choking the pieces still trying to live.

Maybe that is where I have been. Not lost. Not finished. Just somewhere between what had to die and what hasn’t grown yet.

Now I keep thinking about that quarter.

E hō mai ka ‘ike.

Let wisdom come.

Maybe I wasn’t being promised that Hawaii would make me feel better. Maybe I was being asked to see. Perhaps wisdom doesn’t always arrive gently. Maybe that place didn’t fail to heal me. Maybe it showed me what still needed healing. Maybe the quarter came first because the lesson had already begun before I ever knew I was going.

Then, only recently, I noticed something else about that quarter. The other side.

There was a tree on it. A mangrove standing in the water, its roots exposed, twisting and weaving above and below the surface. Somehow, through all the meaning I had attached to the words on the other side, I had never really looked at the tree.

When I finally did, I almost laughed, because in Hawaii, I found a tree that stopped me in my tracks. I took countless photographs of it. I walked around it, studying its enormous roots, amazed by the way they twisted over one another, disappeared into the earth, and then emerged somewhere else. I couldn’t stop looking at them.

At the time, I simply thought the tree was beautiful. Now I wonder why that was what I felt so drawn to.

Roots have always meant something to me. They are the parts of a tree we usually don’t see. They grow in darkness. They twist around obstacles. They reach deeper when they need strength. Sometimes they are buried. Sometimes they are exposed. Sometimes they are scarred. But somehow, they continue searching for whatever will keep the tree alive.

Maybe that is what this season has been asking of me. Not to grow upward yet, but to go deeper. To examine the roots. To follow them into the places I would rather not look. To untangle what belongs to me from what I have carried for far too long.

Maybe I needed to understand that sometimes what looks like standing completely still above the ground can actually be an enormous amount of work happening underneath it. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to bloom yet. Maybe I was supposed to tend to my roots.

I find it almost impossible to ignore that the quarter I thought was speaking to me only through its words had been carrying another message on its other side all along.

A tree. Roots.

And somehow, I hadn’t thought to turn it over and really look.