Since childhood Memorial Day has been a special family celebration. Although the holiday was launched to pay respects to those who gave their lives in war, for many it was expanded to give honor and to remember all of our ancestors.
Each year it has been our family’s tradition to take flowers out to all the gravesites in the area that was first settled in the mid to late 1800s. My great grandfather moved onto undeveloped land covered only my rock and sagebrush, built his tent and walked five miles round trip to the river, with a yoke and buckets, to get water for drinking, watering his fruit trees and washing. He knew the irrigation canal would arrive in a couple of years, so he endured; bringing his new wife to his tent home in January, a cold and dismal time of the year. He and many of his progeny are buried in an ancient cemetery that overlooks that same Yakima River he had walked to everyday in those early years.
Now, at a time when there is so much looking forward to what is coming in a rapidly changing world, it is good to take time to look back, and honor those who gave so much for their families and securing a better future. In relative terms, we live in such prosperous times, thanks to those core principles that were in the hearts and minds of so many of the past, and it would be good to emulate many of those now.
“A man is a good as his word,” was taken very seriously where I grew up. Far more importantly than a person’s social status or ethnicity was his integrity. That you were slow to borrow money, and you paid it back as soon as you could was highly valued; and you did not leave a debt unpaid. You worked hard, often from early sun to late in the day, and during harvest time you may go as long light was available; for crops ready to harvest would not wait. Prayer was done quietly, but seriously. The town I grew up in was once in the Guinness World records as having the most churches per population.
These are some of the lessons that were all around me when growing up. I honor those who have gone before, worked hard, was honest in their dealings with their fellow man and in general strove to live good lives. Of course there were plenty of heartbreaks along the way, those who did not live according to those high principles, and plenty of “characters” who added color and liveliness to the landscape.
As in any family there is plenty of pain that has been handed down. We have all been recipients of a pretty rough couple of thousand years in which man’s inhumanity to man has been atrocious. Wars, famines, and cruelty, both institutionally and personally left little room for many to be even aware that there might be a better, higher way to Self-realization. However, there have always been those who have risen above their times.
And this leads to another area in which to honor ancestors, of a different type. Spiritually kindred spirits will many times be as important, and even more so, than blood relationships in our lives. I would not have had physical incarnation was it not for my human mother and father, and I would not have had my spiritual birth if not for Mother Hamilton and our succession of para-param gurus. The second could not be without the first birth, but the second, the spiritual birth, is the more important.
I lay the flowers of devotion upon the “markers” of the gurus spiritually enlightened lives, those markers is the spiritual Light they brought into this world; for this I am so truly grateful. I bow at their feet in love and adoration, now and for all time. And to you, my spiritual family, I join with you in the celebration of the great gift given to us by these luminary giants that make us kindred spirits with the deepest bonds of love and the profound desire to rise up to the Light of lights where all sorrow is resolved in bliss and understanding. Ever in God Christ Gurus, Yogacharya David.
