Along the southeast coast of the big island of Hawaii sits the mouth of Kīlauea: the most active of the five volcanoes that have formed this chain of islands over millions of years.

You park your car just under a mile away from the site in a parking lot surrounded by the thick forest that covers of the island. As you walk down the paved path toward the crater, you notice that the trees around you are becoming ever thinner, shorter, younger, and eventually even the small shrubs seem to vanish below the surface of volcanic stone. The paved road melts into a dark gravel. Lava rocks blanket the path, broken into small pebbles and dust. The rhythm of your breath accompanies the shimmering of your footsteps on hollow sand. The air is clear and slow. A silence unlike death, rather like a young landscape on the long journey toward new life. A midway point in the cycle of rebirth. Silence. Breath. Hollow sand beneath footsteps. A gentle breeze. And then, at the end of the path, a view of the Kīlauea Caldera. A unfathomably vast expanse underneath a gray sky. A charred void. A chasm numb with electricity. The beating heart of the island.

When I visited the mouth of Kilauea, the lava wasn’t flowing that day, and so there were very few other tourists besides my family and I. On days when flowing lava is visible and clouds of steam rise from the cracks in the earth, the path would be full of people rather than that precious quiet. Even so, the sacrality of the lookout point over the crater was occasionally broken by the chatter of tourists and the clicks of cameras. My mind wandered between the desolate texture of the lava field and the distractions surrounding it. I so desperately wanted silence. Calm in this place of such natural power.

Silence. Breath. Hollow sand beneath footsteps. A gentle breeze. And voices. And laughter. And camera shutters.

And your wandering mind…

Links: Score

Recorded Performers: Nadia Sirota