Illuman SoCal MROP 2025 Recap
Camp DeBenneville Pines, at 6,800 ft. above sea level in the San Bernardino Forest, under the towering 11,503 ft. Mt. Gorgonio, was the perfect space for the sacred to happen at the Illuman SoCal MROP 2025. Twenty-eight initiates and six initiators were accompanied by the SoCal team with Weavers Jim Clarke and Giovanni Perez, Ritual elder Karim Aziz, and MROP coordinator Joe Filipi. The teaching elders who reached deep into their lives to share were Bill Mahoney, Steven Gutierrez-Kovner, and Stephen Caudana. There was a wonderful team of veterans and newer initiated men to carry out this task of love for the participants.
We especially call out the logistics team of Jim Cadiz, Samuel Perez, Ramon Rocha, and Rick Higgins. The ritual team was formed by a combination of brothers, beginning with Steven Carsten and Mark Infusino. Bob Juarez did the secretarial duties with Dan Harbuck, our treasurer; Bob also helped prepare the teaching elders. The transportation team consisted of Sergio Lopez, Kyle Mendoza, and Jose Luis Elias (one of the initiates). And four brothers formed the Returning Initiated Men cohort. What a team!!!
After the MROP, Swami Padmanabha (Diego) had the blessing of spending time with Fr. Richard Rohr at his hermitage in New Mexico. Here is a recording the meeting: The Eternal Becoming of God, Soul, and Matter | The Free Radical Podcast #50—Fr. Richard Rohr, 7/16.
The song from the closing ritual, can be found in a memorial to our brother Joel Blunk, may he rest in God, who composed this for the brothers of Illuman:
https://www.illumansocal.org/events/memorial-drumming-circle-for-illuman-weaver-joel-blunk
I Will Not Die an Unlived Life
by Dawna Markova
I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.