WHEN I was younger I thought that coconut trees were like giant birds, their fronds gently flapping in the wind. I would sit in our wraparound veranda or in my bedroom looking out at the tall bird-trees with their curved trunks. I would just sit and watch them, waiting for a great whoosh as the wings would begin to flap and the tree would take off and go wherever it was that birds that size would go.
“Everything that happens in the universe has an impact on who I am, how I live, and what I write: thought, word, deed. Everything I think, I write, I speak has an impact on the world; like the...