Having spent time traveling and visiting friends on the Big Island, Helen knew this would be the ideal setting to bring her dream to life. She just needed to find the right place. . . and the day she and her husband first drove up the red cinder road to the house with the big ohia trees, she knew immediately that she´d found it. "It was morning, and a light mist was just lifting from the meadows across the road. Two white horses walked slowly towards us, a few hundred yards away, emerging from the mist. The whole lovely picture of house and trees and pastures and distant slopes all took shape as if appearing by magic ­ I felt like I had stumbled into Brigadoon, that mythical Scottish village that only appears once every hundred years."

Four years, several state permits, and a lot of remodeling later, the dream of Red Cinder has become a reality: a multiple-use facility where visiting artists and peer groups can come to work in an environment that stimulates the flow of creative juice‹and where families can come at other times to enjoy a unique Big Island vacation. Future plans include expanding the facility by adding four living units, connected by a covered walkway to the main house.

Meanwhile, says Helen, "I can´t wait to see what happens when people start coming to work at this amazing place. Since I´ve been living on the Big Island, I know I´ve been powerfully affected by spirit of this land . . . there´s a special energy from witnessing the landscape being created before your eyes, then maturing from fresh lava into soil where plants sprout and grow. The elemental forces of fire, water, earth, and air come together in ways that happen nowhere else. And we´ll try to encourage an awareness of those processes, that spirit, in everyone who visits Red Cinder."