Sandra Basudde smiles easily at the picnic table at Waiohinu, on the south end of the Big Island. Her teeth sparkle as light from the sun peeks through an opening in the clouds. An ajoite crystal hangs from one necklace, a tetrahedron from another, and there’s an Ugandan pendant on the lapel of her blue jean jacket. It’s a long road from Africa to the Big Island but for Sandra the journey is never over.
“I came here in response to a spiritual call,” she said, her dreadlocks hanging from beneath a swaddled purple and black head scarf. “I go whenever I am called in the moment. I go where my energy can be of best value. If you stay too long in the wrong place you lose the resonance of your purpose.”
Sandra works at an organic farm called Ailani Orchard in the green strip between Ocean View and Na’a’le’hu. She works most days at the Fruit Stand located on the Belt Road at mile marker 68 where the products of the farm are sold; citrus, six types of avocado, macadamia nuts, coffee, and lamb.
“I tell the lambs, ‘If you over populate, we’ll put you on the plate,’” Sandra said, laughing in the way a vegetarian laughs at a meat joke.
“It’s a beautiful place to meet people from all over the world and makes for an interesting study. One gets to learn diverse perspectives and compassion for various states of mind and often I’m renewed by the potential of humans to transcend limits,” she said.
A nine year old boy visited the stand and according to Sandra, did an amazing thing.
“He called up the wind,” Sandra said. “On a day when there was absolutely not even a breeze, the wind came out of nowhere --and after it shook the branches of the trees, he summoned it away. He told me it was his natural state of communion with the wind.” She paused and looked toward the sea. “Then again we see what we are ready to perceive.”
Sandra dreams of creating retreat centers throughout the world to revive and encourage the human spirit to transcend limits in thought and being-ness.
“My SPIRIT Re-Treat Centers are already manifest, yet they have not precipitated yet from the standpoint of our shared reality,” she said. “Minimal facilitation is the direction I want to go but mentors on the premises would be available. I want spirituality centered on nature. This nature includes humans re-establishing their co-creation with the earth as a living entity of which we are but a small part.”
She takes a breath of the cool Ka’u air and continues, “I want to collaborate with artists to build gigantic Buddha and Jesus slides, Isis wing swings, crystal caves, huge soundproof domes and yurts for energy enhancement and a library that offers many modalities.”
She talks about private property as a limit to the evolution of humanity.
“It’s a cornerstone of capitalism and perhaps human nature, if there is such a thing,” she says. “But I think to overcome the gap between rich and poor and to transcend our problems in corporal reality we must move beyond private property. Yet at the same time I feel the need to set basic boundaries at the retreats, to have a certain look and feel and that in itself is a form of private property.”
She looks out across the manicured grass of the park and adds, “Maybe I’ll have a sign out front that reads, ‘Trespassers Welcome.’”
Children now gather around the picnic table and Sandra pulls from her purse a poem she wrote with rhyming couplets. The children listen. She looks up after finishing and says, “Spirit, Science, God – it’s all the same thing.”
At the farm, workers rotate and occasionally Sandra helps with the packaging of the macadamia and coffee. She also works in the fields where she “listens to the land” and takes breaks “under the trees taking in the elements.”
It’s all there, nature is our true teacher, our tonic. To be spiritually divorced from the land,” she shakes her head then points toward the trees, the ti, the orchids nestled against the green hills. “That is our spirit.”
Sandra spent the first four years of her life in Entebbe, Uganda, as dictator Milton Obote was stepping down to Idi Amin’s genocidal regime. Her family immigrated to Germany where she attended school in Bonn. Later she moved to Kansas City, then Scottsdale, Philadelphia and Ashland, Oregon.
She says that her spirituality “comes from the place of no words.” “Sac-cid-ananda” is another expression she uses to describe the aboriginal genesis of her spiritual beginnings and links it with the Big Island.
“I love the Big Island,” she said. “Its primordial and you can’t hide from it.”
Sandra believes the land can be known through the food that is eaten from it.
“We are what we eat energetically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically and sub-atomically. We are one and holographic in nature. When we bite into a mango we are intersecting with an energetic formation. It is possible to become acquainted with that energy and form a symbiotic relationship.”
“I’m also working to analyze soil, through the taste of food,” she said. “But I’m not that good yet.”
She also believes that one of her purposes in life is to be a cog in spiritual midwifery.
“The highest honor I can receive is to know that I’ve been part of the supporting cast,” Sandra said. “To bring people to a higher awareness of themselves – to have a relationship with themselves, because we are our own experiments and divinity resides in each of us.”
Rain drizzles and we decide to go to a restaurant.
“Good, good, sometimes I forget to eat,” She says as her thin body slips easily through the car door. Her purse catches. Sheet paper with notes reading “21 frequencies – Tuesday: rose, pink, scarlet, Wednesday: blue, violet, magenta” falls from it. Sandra takes it, “Frequencies,” she announces, laughs, and stuffs it back in her purse. Then she looks out the window as we drive down the road, the tires humming against the wet pavement, wipers clicking in the gray air and she says, “Molecules have been everywhere.”
