January 2017 | Language of the Heart

I am not the kind of person who talks to dead people. I don’t testify. I leave spirits alone. And I tend to be skeptical of those who speak in tongues.Yet every Wednesday evening I throw on a T-shirt and a gathered cotton skirt, rush to an elementary school cafeteria in San Francisco, and proceed to whirl my arms, stamp my feet, and call out to figures like Pele (the goddess of the volcano), ke akua i ka nāhelehele (the god hidden in the mists of the low-hanging blood-red rainbow), an