Homecomings

Twenty years and eighty countries later, everything changed. It was the day I came to California. I came from Nevada, crossing Death Valley, heading for the coast. And there, at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, I realized that every mountain, every tree and every river was talking to me. The feeling got stronger the closer I came to the ocean and when I finally made it to Big Sur, the mountains, the redwoods and the ocean said, "Welcome home!"

It was not the first time California greeted a newcomer. I'm sure that thousands of years ago, when the first people arrived here, they heard the same words. I got interested in their history and in their spirituality. The Native American concept of Mother Earth and Father Sky was the first belief system that ever made sense to me and it allowed me to open up for other concepts too. If someone would ask me today to paint a picture of God, it would be a jigsaw puzzle with pieces coming from all four corners of the world. Over the years, the picture got larger, but until a short time ago it had a big hole in the middle: The Native American cultures I studied talked a lot about the earth and all her children, but they didn't say much about the ocean - to me the holiest part of all of creation.

One weekend in spring, I went to a spiritual gathering in Ventura and the Monday after I took a ship to the Channel Islands. It was on my way to Santa Cruz Island when I first heard about the Chumash people who once upon a time inhabited the islands. One day, Mother Earth created a rainbow bridge to the mainland and asked the Chumash to walk over the bridge. They did as they were told, but some of them fell down from the rainbow and into the ocean. To keep them from drowning, Mother Earth turned them into dolphins. Until this day, the dolphins are the brothers and sisters of the Chumash.

There it was - the missing piece of the puzzle. Brother Ocean. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the mountaintop that was believed to be the starting point of the rainbow bridge. After all these years, I finally found what I was searching for.

Volker Moerbitz, 2005

Click here to see a couple of pictures of that day.

Other Stories:
Full Body Contact (2004)
It Was The End Of The World As They Knew It (2004)
Miracles (2005)