E komo mai! Welcome, as they say in Hawaiian. My name is Owen Shieh, and this is my blog. I am currently working toward my Ph.D. in Meteorology on the main campus of the University of Hawai’i, located in the lush Mānoa Valley on the beautiful island of O’ahu.
How did I end up on an island in the middle of the tropical Pacific you ask? Well, I was actually born and raised in the quaint city of Melbourne, Florida. After years of schooling, I decided to go out of state for college to learn about life in a totally different part of the country. And, there was no place more different from central Florida than upstate New York! First of all, it was cold…and there was snow…lots of it. Then, there was the totally different culture, people, political ideologies, and things to be learned. I was presented with challenges and situations that I probably would not have had to deal with if I stayed closer to home. But in hindsight, I gained some great experiences, made some wonderful friends, and learned some extremely valuable life lessons in the process!
After graduating from Cornell University in 2007 with a B.S. in Atmospheric Science, I decided to continue school in the form of getting my graduate degrees in meteorology. The weather has been a primary passion of mine since I was a kid. Ever since Tropical Storm Gordon ripped through my neighborhood in 1994, I have been fascinated with extreme weather – particularly hurricanes and tornadoes. So naturally, I decided to move to Norman, Oklahoma for three years to pursue my dreams of studying and observing tornadoes and supercell thunderstorms first-hand. And boy did I get my fill of the most life-threatening storms I have ever witnessed!
Just prior to obtaining my M.S. in Meteorology in the spring of 2010, all the conditions came together for me to move on to greener and more tropical pastures. And so, I packed up and moved to Honolulu that summer after a brief two-month stop in Boulder, Colorado for a summer job at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory. Now, I am pursuing my Ph.D. in Meteorology and will be attempting to advance the science of understanding the dynamics of what causes tropical storms to rapidly intensify into typhoons in the western North Pacific. The research will involve a collaboration with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder as well as forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Pearl Harbor.
For those who know me well, I have many interests that seem to have nothing in common. I am a meteorologist and scientist by trade and a philosopher at heart. I am a student, a teacher, a musician, a businessman, a naturalist, a Zen practitioner, a storm chaser, an author, a backpacker, a classical pianist, a photographer, an outdoorsman, a Freemason, a poet, a mathematician, a trumpeter, a sailor …an explorer. And yet, I realize the futility of all of these adjectives, these words, these concepts, in describing any individual. As the clock ticks by, all these words become superficial, as all things must change in the winds of time.
Rather than playing with adjectives, life transcends concepts and is ever changing. So, I prefer to think of myself as a traveler – a traveler on a journey that leads to meaningful discoveries of the world around me, of myself, and of my fellow travelers. And so, this blog will attempt to capture moments in the theme of life that I have often expressed:
Life is a perpetual dream, a fragile bubble in the sky, an ephemeral ripple on the sea, a speck of dust in the universe. Yet life is an adventure, waiting to be discovered down every path, under every boulder, across every river, atop every mountain. I live to be challenged. I challenge myself to live. The world is my trail. My mind, my treasure map.
I’m going to be reading the book you and Nikki wrote collaboratively this weekend, because I must move fast if there’s any chance at all of adding it late to this year’s Celebrate Reading list. So I’ve some quick questions. How could people who read our list and want to read We the Peoples get their hands on the book? How much does it cost? Thank you very much indeed for providing the UHM book club with copies, and its director with some reading copies to share with my team of teachers committed to the reading program. I’m sorry that I cannot respond as yet to the book itself; all I have read are the authors’ notes so far! But I want to congratulate you on having achieved such a publication, and to assure you that if it works as a peace book it stands a real chance of being added to the list, despite the late date. I hope you write to me and that we can speak this weekend. Aloha, Lorna