Thirty thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean, Leilani Bocaya’s son presses his face against the airplane windows with eyes as wide as the clouds. He turns toward her and repeats a translated line read to him a few times before: “I luna, i luna, i luna!” (Hawaiian translation: “up, up, up!”)
Suspended between the sky and earth, everything Bocaya has worked for has come back full circle. This is why she wrote The Rock Who Looked Up, a children’s story of something small becoming something big without losing who they really are. A story that parallels the life of the author who wrote it.
FROM STUDENT TO STORYTELLER
The book, written for babies and toddlers, is just five sentences long, yet carries a weight far beyond its size. The story is both simple and keen: a rock falls in love with the sky then becomes a mountain.
Bocaya came up with the idea about 10 years ago on a hike in Hawaiʻi, when she looked up and thought to herself, “We’re on earth, but we’re in the sky.” In that moment, a love story between the earth and the sky formed in her mind, first as a poem. “I just remember loving my own poem for years. I just never let go of it.”
Being an author was a dream decades in the making. “It was something I said to myself when I was around five years old because I loved reading,” she recalls. “I told my mom, ‘I’m going to be a writer one day.’”
As a kid, she devoured books, often reading one chapter book a day. One of her favorites, Ella Enchanted, was an often revisited inspiration. The perfect place to get lost in the magic, bravery, and transformation of its words. Imagination wasn’t a phase for Bocaya, it was a way of living.
That imagination carried into her middle school English class for a project that required students to create their own book. She poured everything into it, writing about giants who built mountains to protect villagers from the water gods. In another similar project, she wrote about a boy and father who sold coconuts by a riverbank.
“I remember drawing each page,” she says, recalling her writing and visual world building process. “I just have an imagination. I like telling and hearing stories.”
Today, she has endless notes and Google Docs filled with children’s book ideas, often chipping away at it in quiet spaces between work and long nights. Her debut, The Rock Who Looked Up, was the first to come to life.
WORDS IN THE WILD
Imagination alone didn’t bring the book to fruition. Courage did too. Every year on her birthday, Bocaya has a goal to check something off her bucket list. In 2025, she officially published The Rock Who Looked Up on her 33rd birthday, celebrating a new age and dream accomplished with the ones she loved most.
“It’s so nice to see friends and family that are just as excited as I am,” she says. “[I felt] so accomplished. [I thought], ‘This is what life is about.’ A part of me is there in the world.”
And her world started off small in the middle of the Pacific. Born and raised in Wahiawā, the Leilehua High School grad grew up a Filipino woman immersed in local culture but disconnected from her ancestral languages.
“[I believe] it’s so important to be multilingual, and I just never did, which is one of my greatest failures,” she says. “I’m disappointed that I haven’t put more of a priority on that.”
That regret became fuel when she thought about how she could amplify impact for young readers. Collaborating with translators, she produced two additional versions of her book in Tagalog and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.
Last November, she held her very first reading at Kubo LB, a Filipino-owned bookstore and community space in Long Beach, California. For Bocaya, who has resided in Los Angeles since 2017, reading her own book aloud in a space dedicated to Filipino voices holds similar weight as her son having something tangible for cultural connection and fun learning.
“People are telling me that they love [the book],” she says. “I know that my son loves it. That’s what matters.”
SCALING THE WORLD
Beyond the simplicity of the book lives an idea that translates far past its pages: something small can become something big without losing what it truly is. A rock can become a mountain. A poem can become a book. And a girl from Wahiawā can become a business owner in the City of Angels, without straying from her local values.
After working as a full-time massage therapist, she left her job in February 2025 to fully commit to being her own boss, trusting that whatever was meant for her would cross her path. Thanks to her existing network, today she operates her business, Leilani B Pain and Recovery, with high-profile clients locally and around the world. Something small became something big.
“These opportunities were kind of thrusted on me whether I planned them or not.” Those opportunities, she emphasized, are a result of her upbringing.
“As a Filipino and someone from Hawaiʻi, I’m going to care about you as a person. That’s just how I approach everybody. That’s the point of my massage work. There’s a level of trust and safety, and I give all of my roots credit for that. It’s not about me.”
Bocaya spoke candidly about growing up as a Filipino woman and how easy it can be to be written off or conditioned to think your dreams should stay small.
“A lot of us are taught that we don’t deserve to be big [with our goals],” she says. “But you can be a Filipina who dropped out of college to pursue what you truly love, regardless of what everyone else says. You can be widely successful.”
The more successful her business becomes, the more imperative it is to keep centered. “It’s so important for me to stay rooted even more and be who I am without losing myself,” she says. But no matter how high her passions take her, she says one thing remains true: “You can reach for the clouds and still be who you are.”
WISDOM IN WRITING
The avid reader plans to continue writing more children’s books, especially stories rooted in the environment. “A lot of my inspiration is nature, and that’s from growing up in Hawaiʻi in a beautiful natural world.”
To those looking to write and create their own worlds, Bocaya’s advice is unfiltered and straightforward: “Just fucking do it. Start with one thing and go from there. Take it step by step. Even if it’s less than perfect, just finish it.”
No matter how many books Bocaya finishes, she defines her success in connection with four main buckets: love and family, career, community, and legacy. All of them with one thing in common.
“People matter the most,” she says. “At the end of the day, that value is what’s going to make me feel fulfilled. It isn’t high status, it’s people. And I think it’s beautiful that our local culture embodies that.”
Above the clouds, her son’s voice carries through the cabin, full of light and wonder. Just like the rock in her book, Bocaya’s life has grown – her stories, her work, her dreams – all of it expanding without losing the essence of who she is. In a quick moment, one could be tapped with that subtle, sweet reminder: reaching for the sky doesn’t mean leaving the ground behind. It means carrying it with you wherever you go.
The Rock Who Looked Up can be purchased on Amazon in the ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, and Tagalog versions (English included with both).
