Indigenous Peoples' Celebration of the Great Mystery

Indigenous Peoples' Week at Humboldt State University

Mad River Mouth McKinleyville CA

Today in the United States is Columbus Day. It is an embarrassing holiday that completely ignores those who dwelt here, millennia before Columbus breathed his first breath. We are uninvited guests who have outlived our welcome. Fortunately, even in my lifetime, the celebration has shifted from an extolling of colonial conquest to a recognition of the cultural gifts already present in the "New World". Humboldt State University does indeed celebrate a week of "indigenous" culture. I witnessed an amazing, yet sorrowful, prayer and dance to the four directions, Father Sun, and Mother Earth, at the campus center. A prayerful remembrance of the local cultures; a grievous statement about the continued oppression of the very people upon whose land the university was constructed.

Not far away, the forerunner waves of a Kamchatka storm break wildly near the mouth of the Mad River. A avian duet dance in the bristly wind and a lone, weathered Sitka spruce gazes at their graceful flight. I ponder: How many before me sat on the bluff viewing this ballet in the sky and sea?

We had better learn from those who dwelt here before--we had better learn silence and grace and peaceful encounters. We had better dance the great mysteries before we extinguish all mystery.

Flickering Illusions or a Multitude of Souls?

College Cove Beach Trinidad CA

There is a tension between viewing the world as an illusory projection of an underlying oneness and seeing a vast embodied individuality in each fragment of existence. Both some forms of Mahayana Buddhism and classical Hindu Vedanta philosophy embrace an illusory perspective on concrete experience, while much of Tantric Hinduism, Hindu goddess (Shaktism) worship, animistic religion and Neoplatonism  all see manifold life as ensouled and grounded in an experience of unity. Is life, as we know it, an illusion or a community?

What if both viewpoints are true, in part? In Northern California we have witnessed a rare October heat wave dispelling the fog from the coast for a week. The sun, hovering over the sea, sprinkles luminous glitter on College Cove. The flickering of light on the surface of the ocean both partakes of individuality, like fireflies pulsating light ever so briefly, and then submerges into the boundless, unknowable ocean. Surface and depth; the glimmering and darkening sea.

A magic show or a profound suggestion of unity in variety?