Nature’s Cradle: The Kumu * By: Malcolm Cogbill, R.L. Stevenson Middle School, Life Science Teacher

Reaching to the sky with its powerful girthy trunk and branches, the Kumu greets everyone as they slowly enter the cavernous welcome center. This sustainer of life, provider of basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing stands majestically over an ever-growing population of inquisitive explorers. As the sun shines brightly and the explorers ready themselves with great anticipation the Kumu continues to bath them with oxygen and at almost the same instant absorbs all the excited explorers’ overabundance of carbon dioxide. This invisible ebb and flow rhythmically continues day after day through the process of photosynthesis. Later in the day the hungry explores will ingest copious amounts of sugars from one of the Kumu’s close relatives leading to cellular respiration. As the anxious explorers continue their journey down the winding path at the base of the multi layered rock lined volcanic crater in the same shape of the branches that first cradled them early in their days journey excitement builds. The journey back to the waters edge is as if they are taking a journey back to where we all came from, the salty ocean of our mothers womb filled with amniotic fluid. Once at the point where sand meets water the explorers return to their beginning is complete. The inquisitive explorers have possibly subconsciously returned to the sea, in order to fulfill a journey to their ancestral home, where all life began. What better life form to greet you and sustain you as you make your journey at Hanauma Bay than one of several species of angiosperms that is, as homo-sapiens are, relatively new on the evolutionary tree of life.

* (refers to a tree or teacher in the Hawaiian Language)