You know what they say about the things that crawl out from under rocks …

The news that owners of a venerable Honolulu store were stopped taking 16 buckets of rocks from a Maui beach brought a tangle of issues to light: questions about ecology, culture, tradition, protocol, territorialism and how all those things are bruised and dirtied by commercialism.

It has brought out discussion of the fractured state of hula in our modern world: on the one end, preserved and perpetuated in the most authentic and reverent ways, and in the other extreme, offensively mimicked and grotesquely caricatured. And then, and this is the hardest part to sort out, all the variations of hula that fall somewhere between the pure and the defiled; the hula that is sincere but requires convenience; the hula that is as reverent as practicality allows. City rec center hula. Hotel hula. Elementary school May Day hula. Church hula that combines sign language and modern dance. Pageant hula. It is a long, rangy list.

Is it OK to buy your 'uli'uli if you make your own ipu? Is it still pono to carefully select your rocks from a store, going through dozens before you find the ones that sit just right in your hands? Can you buy the flowers but haku your own lei? Buy the fabric but print your own kapa-like designs? Would it be better to send legions of foreign hula enthusiasts to Maui to gather their own 'ili'ili?

Depends what your kumu says. And kumu come in many different and sometimes conflicting opinions. And yes, some kumu make stuff up.

Still, the idea of buying rocks seems to be uniquely of our time. There isn't much precedent. A generation or two ago, the thought of buying a rock would be ludicrous, as absurd as buying bottled water.

The thing about 'ili'ili is for the most part, dancers only need their one set of four. These are probably sold to beginning dancers. It's not like you outgrow the rocks or they break or wear down with use. The same four stones will last a lifetime of dance classes and ho'ike, and can be passed down to kids and grandkids. There should be enough rocks on O'ahu to take care of O'ahu dancers and visiting students of hula.

So why Maui? Well, Kaua'i's geology is more conducive to red dirt than hard rocks. Big Island? Nobody wants to chance the threat of a curse. But Maui has those nice substantial rocks, rounded and pleasing for hula implements, porous and hardy for imu, and perhaps the perception that no one is going to bust you for harvesting a river bed. But that has changed with the times, too.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.