THE COLLEGE OF WATER & FIRE
The world is changing.
As of 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population lives with water shortages. Just one percent of global water is fresh and liquid, and rivers and aquifers are drying up quickly. This time on Earth requires us to learn how to live in balance, from and with a place, centering Indigenous experience of particular watersheds, and remembering how to connect to Earth, spirit, and one another.
Jubilee College is at the very center of this remembering. We are in a uniquely important place, and we are hosting the people who are fulfilling this crucially important role.
The Bullyum Puyuuk (Mount Shasta) headwaters feed into one of Earth’s fifteen largest aquifer systems, the source of 25% of North America’s fruits and vegetables – the Central Valley of California. Just east of Mount Shasta, the underground Sáttítla (Medicine Lake Highlands) aquifer is larger than all the above-ground reservoirs in the State of California combined.
These source waters require those of us here to become water protectors.
To learn how to live in a good way…
To protect the salmon who clean the rivers, to learn from Indigenous science developed over thousands of years…
To creatively work with, and become, people who grow food, build homes & infrastructure, sanitation and energy systems, while protecting water…
To become those who tend to the biodiversity of forests and habitat while returning back, to everyone, the human rights and responsibilities of access to these gifts…
To become those who teach children, instill wisdom in our communities, heal the sick, care for refugees and the vulnerable, and who welcome visitors with hospitality and art that reminds them, and us, how to be here in a good way…
To commit to fundamentally re-imagining money such that people are supported to live while protecting the water, rather than destroying it…
To take on the work of building relationships with our neighbors, exchanging ideas and practices, building trust, and learning to forgive, in the spiritual work of “no enemy” even while protecting life…
These creative waters were named traditionally as “the seed of creation,” and named by those who study the memory held in water, as “crystalline inspiration.” They flow from the volcanic Mount Shasta, down the Sacramento (Sacrament) River, and out into the San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley, to the Pacific Ocean.
These waters also allow life to flourish in the global center of where the spark of human ingenuity is being used to create exponential technologies (e.g., generative AI, synthetic biology…), that many say will change everything about our lives. Thus, we are asked to work respectfully with fire, too.
Over the next 15 years, some say half of all jobs will disappear. Some say we will turn on one another; some say we will move beyond struggling for material needs. We see that today many of the gifts of creativity that are flowing downstream from Mount Shasta’s headwaters (metaphorically and literally) are being used for individual gains, rather than being offered back in gratitude “upstream” or in humble service to life.
This may be the result of the centrality of money. Because money is created by banks making loans with interest, there is never enough money to pay it all back. Therefore, more than anything else, money has contributed to a consciousness of scarcity and separation that is then reinforced every day.
A hardened lens of separation limits possibilities. A consciousness that misses these possibilities is more likely to create powerful, “life-changing technologies” that even more powerfully reinforce that consciousness. Remembering how to connect to Earth, spirit and one another, more directly guides us toward harnessing the power of money and technology for the good of all beings.
These times, this place, both require us to learn how to work with the fire of inspiration – while also being water protectors, learning to recontextualize human creativity within the web of life.