Kokopeli:The Dancing Flute Player

Hitting the road today. I’ll swing by Wheeling to for my blood work, then off to Friendship Village in Ohio. They are doing Sun Ceremony. Vamsa, a gurukuli who grew up in New Vrindavan, will be dancing. This is an elaborate, structured ritual; the dancers prepare for a year to participate. It is colorful but austere, an offering so the People can live. The dance lasts 4 days.

We go as her supporters. It starts today, and ends Monday. Anyone wishing to support her, let me know. I only have the juice to go one day. Last day is the best in a lot of ways(not least of which is a feast), but too much hugging goes on when the dancers come out. Being immunosuppressed, it becomes uncomfortable begging off and having to explain my condition. Everyone will be busy the first day so easier to slip in. The dancers stay isolated during the ceremony, so it will only be the supporters. Since the weekend won’t have started, lots of them won’t have arrived yet. Those already there will be busy covering logistics, security, cooking, etc.

Material support is welcomed, but support can comes via prayers. Anyone knowing Vamsa who wants to support her -- pray away. Hare Krishna mantras are always appropriate, if you don’t know specific prayers. Support her if you don’t know her, for that matter. Keep praying until Monday.

“Life consists in learning to live on one’s own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one’s own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

“The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions … is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.“

Thomas Merton. “Learning to Live” in Love and Living.