In 2025 I took my first sabbatical since arriving at Church of the Holy Cross UCC in April 2016 – which was, shall we say, overdue. Several friends and colleagues have been either asking me about my plans or, shall we say, nudging me to make them. I won’t go into the reasons why I delayed it. Some of them are obvious given the world of 2020 to 2023. Some of them are, shall we say, entirely my own fault.

I took it in time.

The last time I took a sabbatical was from my position with the historic Connecticut Conference. I’d delayed that one, too, for reasons that seemed good at the time. It meant that when I did take it, I basically collapsed for quite a long time. I didn’t have enough energy to learn many new things or to do things that refreshed me. This time, I was able to make the journeys that nourished my soul.

I produced a video as part of my sabbatical report.

I traveled a lot during 2025, eventually becoming grateful for the times I wasn’t traveling. I made trips to O’ahu, Kaua’i, and the northeast during my sabbatical. For the first time since 2016, I celebrated Easter with family, attending church with my daughter Rebekah in Northampton, Massachusetts. We drove to Watertown, New York, to see my stepmother and her grandmother Shirley, and I also visited my son Brendan in Burlington, Vermont, and aunt and uncle in New Hampshire. The trips around the Hawaiian islands were related to one of my sabbatical projects, which was to visit all the islands – which almost happened. I didn’t make it to Maui (though I’d been there before) or Molokai, so that still needs to happen.

In June I was back on Kaua’i for the Hawai’i Conference’s ‘Aha Pae’aina, or annual meeting. I took the opportunity to visit two birding sites and was rewarded with lots of new birds and amazing images. I also headed for the rear tables in the meeting itself to leave room for the new Conference Council Chair to do her work as moderator, which she did very well.

A week later I was back in New England for a cousin’s wedding, which I never attended as I came down with Covid and had to keep separate from everyone. It was a pretty bitter disappointment.

Two weeks later and recovered I was off again, this time to the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, held in Kansas City this year. I had a brand new set of responsibilities: as a member of the Board of Directors of the UCC Media Justice Ministry, I was one of the leaders of a workshop led by the Ministry and helped staff our exhibit hall booth. I’ve attended quite a number of Synods as a reporter/photographer, and a couple as a delegate. This was a much more relaxed schedule, but it still kept me busy.

Back from Synod, I was able to turn my attention to a gap in our church staff. Our choir director, Doug Albertson, retired at the end of 2024. With me absent we’d put off the search for a new director. In the fall we brought on Bob Grove, a wonderfully talented and tender person who brought our choir to a lovely debut on Christmas Eve. With the choir working up, I continued to sing a solo one Sunday a month during the anthem time.

I took something of a musical break during my sabbatical. I wrote no songs at all during those three months, which suggests to me that composition had lost some of its creative release for me. Over the course of the year, however, I did write seven songs, which are collected in 2025: The Songs. In the fall I rejoined the Big Island Singers (I didn’t sing with them in the spring) and even took their portraits for the electronic program. As the year ended, illness took its toll on some of our planned performances. Bob Grove gathered a men’s trio for a Sunday, and one of it members couldn’t sing and we had to cancel. On Christmas Eve Bekah and I planned to sing together, and illness brought her low.

August brought a terrible shock: the death of my stepmother, Shirley Anderson. She had been my stepmother, in fact, longer than I’d had my mother. Shirley was one of the world’s great souls, bringing love and cheer and compassion with a quiet determination that I’ve never seen match. As her son Ken said, she was one of the best of us. We all miss her terribly. In October I made yet another trip to New England – the third of the year – to lay her to rest.

During and after my sabbatical, photography provided my creative anchor and outlet. A lot of those photos featured birds. I added thirty-two species to my official “life list,” but that’s partially because I only started keeping one a couple years ago. A species I grew up with, the Northern Cardinal, I “officially” recorded for the first time in 2025. Still. I saw several birds I’d simply never seen before and got photos of nearly all of them. I got really satisfying images of i’iwi, ‘akiapola’au, ‘apapane, kolea, ‘akekeke, kioea, and more. At year’s end, I produced a self-published children’s story book of “The ‘Apapane’s Christmas Pageant.” I took most of the photos for it this year. There’s some excitement about it within the church and we hope to make it more widely available in the coming year. You can read the story here.

It wasn’t just birds. I still like to take pictures of flowers, and I took quite a few. Over and over again, the Kilauea volcano drew me to the summit. There have been 39 eruptive events since last December, and I have seen around half of them. The result is hundreds of photos and videos.

The year ended with a deep delight: my son Brendan and daughter Rebekah visited from just before Christmas until New Year’s Eve. As I hinted above, Bekah promptly fell ill and left Brendan and I to do some exploratory hikes while she recovered. Regrettably, they missed a fountain event the night after they arrived, but the timing was really poor to drive up to see it, and the next morning Bekah reported she was sick.

My tenth anniversary as pastor of Church of the Holy Cross UCC comes up this April, a solid decade of life and work and music and photography in this precious place, a literal thin spot of the Earth. May it bring life, work, music, and wonders.