Last year’s wild cherries meet this year’s blossoms. How cool is that!

Let’s remember that a fascination with death and rebirth is often a cultural inheritance from our celtic ancestors and that of their related peoples in the cauldron of Asia, and less often an expression of North American space. It’s beautiful, though, but not exactly universal. The same image is also an expression of birth, and then birth, with no death between. In act, the knife of the mind that separates one birth off into death, was not originally intended to kill, but to express states of presence in belief systems about the eternal soul. Well, this is what it looks like. Similarly, the dandelion that becomes seed waiting for the wind to carry it, is not new-plant-in-the-making, except in that old Asian conception (which is beautiful enough, don’t get me wrong) but one plant carrying on, with no genetic break between it and the beginning of life.

It is the same with people. There is no break between the image of Daly Mountain below and the day in 1986 I stepped up to the edge of its cliff (to the left of the main head of the mountain) and met a golden eagle, rising on an updraft, face-to-face, two metres in front of me, and no break between that and the Apaches who came up here before 1877 to catch eagles for ceremonial dances to return the land, their mother, to health by healing themselves, no break between them and Father Pandosy who told that story to “Tony” Cassorso in 1877, while guiding him to his mission site to the north, and no break between them and the apples trees I grew and grafted, and which spent their lives on the old Hudson’s Bay Company horse ranch below the cliffs to the left, and no break between that ranch and the syilx it was stolen from, and no break between them and the first hunters who came up here from California 12,500 years ago, and no break between them and the ice that parted to let them in.

We are all here. The separation, the life and death, is a tool. It’s the same tool that Alexander the Great used when he went to Gordion and cut the knot of the priestesses, the knot that could not be unravelled, with his sword, and gained supremacy over the divine city. It’s a trick. It’s the same trick that colonial administrators used to license water under this mountain: the Canadian government promised the syilx water; the British Columbia provincial government erased all water rights in order to make a logical system, but did not allow indigenous people to apply, as they were property of the Canadian government, over which the laws of British Columbia did not apply. It was nonsense, but that’s the game, that’s the separation, even though the great coming-together continues.

Bee, Butterfly, Human and Lupine Hanging Out

Because our use of the flower does not conflict, we can all be present seamlessly at the same time.

Saying “we are still here” is not precisely correct. It’s more like “Are you here yet?” We’re waiting.