New Vrindaban Bloggers

Festival of Inspiration a Success!

by Lilasuka dasi

Every Festival of Inspiration is more ecstatic than the last. The twelfth annual Festival of Inspiration has come and gone, but the excitement still lingers on in the hearts and minds of those who participated.

Many people helped to make the Festival a grand success, under the expert guidance of Mother Malati.  The intricate details of organization, once again, made things go smoothly. Different guests share their variegated experiences.

One newer resident remarked: “I somehow felt very enlivened with the association of so many of the Srila Prabhupada disciples all in one place. Their bright smiles, filled with deep understanding and compassion were very encouraging to me.”

One guest remarked: “The bathrooms were, for the most part, clean and well stocked. That’s important.”

Another visitor declared, “I had wonderful accommodations since a devotee opened their home for me and my family.  The prasadam was healthy and tasty.  Bhaktimarga Swami’s drama about Maharaj Dhruva was my favorite part.  The Saturday night dance was also fascinating.”

Some people were also talking about the talented devotees at the rocking kirtan which was part of the Saturday night entertainment.

It seemed to some that both the temple and the front lawn kirtans transported you out of this world. One  guest related how she is from a small temple, so the wonderful kirtans at the Festival, led by a variety of empowered devotees, young and old, were a very special treat for her.

The workshop presentations were stimulating and well- presented from the “Dealing with Sexual Desire” seminar to the “One Chord Wonder” workshop on harmonium.

The outdoor vendors provided a variety of fun shopping. Many guests also browsed and shopped at the newly opened “BlueHome Artworks”, a shop that boasts the many arts, music, books and crafts talents of devotees and friends.

The association alone was worth coming for, according to one young lady, who declared: “The association at this Festival was very important to me. Cooking in the kitchen with the “2^nd generation” devotees and others was the most uplifting part.  The cooks saw to the minutest details and even put icing and garnishes on gingersnap cookies as if they were cooking for one special guest in a gourmet restaurant, instead of 1,000 cookies for a big Festival! In conclusion, I can say that before the Festival, I just wasn’t feeling connected. But as a result of this Festival of Inspiration, I was reminded that I am part of a dynamic, vibrant movement.”

While at the Festival of Inspiration I spend most of my time talking to devotees.  So many interesting people.  Simply standing in a line for prasadam I struck up a conversation with a guy and turns out he works at a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the St Louis area that has  125 shares.

We had a nice conversation about that project and how it worked as well as other topics about gardening.   While discussing tomato varieties, he was recommending Sungold, a cherry tomato, which I am trying for the first time this year as it turns out. He predicted I would be quite pleased with it.

I also met an artist who was selling his work. Turns out he and another family just bought a farm in Kentucky.  If you are interested in getting in on supporting or being part of a new project on the ground floor, here is your chance.  From their website (which includes a blog):

Filed under: News, Ramblings or Whatever

A baby bull was born to Jamuna in the early morning hours of May 15th. When Jaya Prabhupada came to milk the cows Tuesday morning, he found the bull already standing and sucking milk from his mother. The calf is healthy and tall and has a little tuft of hair on his right ear to distinguish him.

There was a drawing to name the calf and many New Vrindaban brijabasi’s submitted name suggetions. On Wednesday morning, Jaya Prabhupada drew HH Varsana Swami’s name suggestion, and announced the bull’s name… ”Dharma”. Please welcome little Dharma to the world, and come by to visit and make friends with him and his attentive mother, Jamuna.

 

 

 

Filed under: Cows and Environment

Did you hear that lonesome whippoorwill?
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome, I could cry

I’ve never seen a night so long
When time goes crawling by
The moon just went behind a cloud
To hide its face and cry

Did you ever see a robin weep
When leaves begin to die?
That means he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome, I could cry

The silence of a falling star
Light’s up a purple sky
And as I wonder where you are
I’m so lonesome, I could cry

This has sometimes been called the saddest song ever written. Though Monday night when I was at a kirtan with Radhanath Swami he announced that a plane had crashed in Nepal, and 8 devotees had left their bodies, including 7 known to him from his home temple in Chowpatty, one of them a child.

He dedicated the kirtan to them and the start of that kirtan was pretty sad.

Naturally Hank Williams sings this song best.

It is a country standard, so you can hear any number of versions, including this one by Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Even rockers take it on occasionally. Here is a version by Volbeat.

And who could sing any song more sadly than the Cowboy Junkies.

The bagpipes by themselves tend to sadness. Here is a version by Me First and the Gimmes with bagpipes.

Here Electric Black does a version with animation that “focuses on the sentiment of modern alienation captured by the song.”

Filed under: Poetry

Pleasure is a relative thing. When you eat seasonally,  absence of a favorite food from your diet can heighten the anticipation of when it arrives in season.

Although we had surplus strawberries last year and did freeze a bunch that we have been eating throughout the year, it still doesn’t compare with fresh.  Those available in the supermarkets are simply imitators –  disguised as strawberries in appearance and maybe even texture, they are devoid of flavor and unappealing.

While strawberries in the garden do take some effort, the reward in flavor makes it so worthwhile. Thus to catch that first glimpse of a pink strawberry, indicating a ripe one is only days away, can be a cause of great anticipatory joy.

This does incite a need for action on my part however.  While we enjoy fresh strawberries, so do the night critters –  possums and racoons.  Even if I wasn’t adverse to sharing with them, they aren’t very good dinner guests.

Strawberries form a canopy of leaves. When picking, you move aside the canopy and all the ripe red strawberries are easy to see in the greenery.  The unwanted guests for some reason find it necessary to swirl the plants around and twist them into bunches. This makes the berries hard to see and necessitates having to unwind the plants to pick them, a tedious process.

The canopy serves another purpose — it creates a shade mulch.  It keeps the sun from hitting the ground and prevents weeds from growing.  When the plants get messed up, weeds start to grow.

To keep the critters from climbing my deer fence I  use electrified wire.  While unpleasant enough to deter touching it, it doesn’t hurt them other than a momentary unpleasantness. At the bottom of the deer fence there is a rabbit fence skirting. They  climb that to get through the deer fence.  So I have an electric wire at the top of the narrow openings in the rabbit fence.

This is fairly close to the ground so vegetation can grow up and short out the electric wire, rendering it ineffective, so it behooves me to keep vegetation off the wire.  This time of year  grasses are heading out and reach it.

The easy solution would be to spray herbicide  but I am an organic grower so that isn’t an option.  The alternative is  a weed whacker and cut them down where the lawn mower can’t reach them,

Last year my son Tulasi was with us and he handled that task but this year it falls on me.  I need to get it done in the next couple of days before the strawberries ripen and the critters discover them. Once they have a taste and a notion that something good is in there, they can become relentless and extremely clever at penetrating any defense. If I have the fence (turned off for winter snows) functioning before the strawberries ripen, they won’t know what they are missing and be less motivated.

When I first installed the electric wire, they were still getting in. I eventually figured out that they were grabbing the bottom of my gate and flexing it out enough to be able to slip in. So a second part of this is I  have to start leaning  a concrete block against its bottom.

While pink can be exciting, so can yellow, as in the first tomato blossom that opened up yesterday.

That is on the early 45 day  variety of tomato I put out in the garden weeks ago under the protection of a cloche. I will be watching that with keen interest.

Filed under: Cows and Environment

 Click here for the latest from our friends at The International Society For Cow Protection (ISCOWP)

From Elephant Journal

Genius is a multifaceted jewel. It has many rough edges, and it doesn’t care for any mundane norms or compromises.

The package that genius is wrapped in doesn’t necessarily belie what is within but it is the duty of time to reveal that this genius— in whatever forms it takes—speaks to our body, mind and soul in many profound and challenging ways.

I think Steve Jobs was a genius. Of course the nature of Jobs’s character and his integrity as a person are quite complicated. History will see him as the “poster boy” for the troubled, difficult persona of the genius. History will also reveal that, as he expressed it to his biographer Walter Isaacson, his feeling that he follows in a line of innovators that includes Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, was not mere hyperbole. His influence on our cultural expressions, on our connectivity and communication, and in the ways we define ourselves as biological beings in an increasingly technological world is already immense and will only grow more so.

Being a spiritual seeker, my obligation is to see the glass more than half-full when I examine the nature of such a complex and powerful personality.  The Bhagavad Gita tells us that the truly wise person sees everyone on a spiritual level, beyond the body-mind construct which is the general source of all our foibles and follies. While being very clear and honest about the dark side of Steve Jobs, still I can’t help but appreciate the honest sincerity of his ambition, his own spiritual leanings and his desire to create a legacy of ideas and products that speaks to the best of human creativity at the intersection of technology and aesthetics.

What particularly strikes me about him was his attitude towards design.  An early slogan of Apple was that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This mirrors a saying from my own Hindu tradition, echoed by such great teachers as Mahatma Gandhi and bhakti-yoga pioneer A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, of “simple living and high thinking.” The idea is that only when we simplify, when we clear away the dust that only complicates the obvious truth, will we be able to discover the presence of enlightenment within ourselves and all around us.

In Walter Isaacson’s excellent Jobs biography, Jonny Ive—Jobs’s confidante and core designer during Apple’s incredible renaissance of the last decade— shares his take on this philosophy of simplicity:

Why do we assume simple is good?….Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple you have to go really deep.

We now reap the benefits of this philosophy in so many interesting ways in our lives.  Our personal computers, tablets, phones and our whole conscious existence are full of these little apps that connect us and push us and inform us in ways that deftly ride along the balance of aesthetic and technology that so inspired Jobs’s overall vision.

What exactly is an app? To put it roughly, it is a little program which shapes our daily life in a particular way.  We can just see it for what it apparently is, a bit of cutting-edge technology. But I want to go a little bit further, into the depth of complexity, to shine a different light of definition on this whole idea of the app.

Disclaimer: Reading the bio of Jobs and also being the recent purchaser of a wonderful, sturdy, fast and sleek Macbook Pro, I have the inklings of  having become an Apple cultist.  Some of the feelings are not entirely dissimilar to my spiritual practice, for both give one the sense of a particular worldview.  That is why, as I was walking through New York City recently, meditating on my prayer beads, I was struck by the idea that the mantra I was chanting was also like an app and how it was the best app I had in my life.

My spiritual practice revolves around the chanting of the maha-mantra, which is part of the Bhakti (devotional) path of Hinduism. The mantra features three names of the Divine, of God, as known in the Bhakti tradition: Krishna (the masculine aspect of the Divine), Hare (the feminine aspect of the Divine), and Rama (the pleasure reservoir of the Divine).  The whole mantra goes like this:


The maha-mantra is, in one sense, a tool in the toolbox of apps that is part of my daily existence as a spirit in the material world. But in the ultimate sense it is so much more. By chanting this mantra, we are taken through the depth of complexity of our own being, allowing us to see and transcend all the illusions that we carry in our consciousness. We come to the simple core of our being, as eternal souls in a loving relationship with God.

While my Weather Channel app can give me a grasp of my environment, and my IBooks Author app can help let loose a real dose of my productive creativity, my maha-mantra app helps me to understand who I really am, at the deepest level of my being. This is an app whose substance is entirely spiritual and which helps me to understand that the substance of my being is also entirely spiritual.  It is the ultimate app to me because it contains the essence of all divinity.

By chanting the names of God—because these names are non-different from the substance of God—one’s being comes directly in touch with God. By being in contact with the vibration of God the dust of the heart, or all of the chains which keep us stuck in the vagaries of our ego, is removed. It is a very simple practice of meditation on sound vibration, yet what can be more sophisticated and wonderful than the presence of God?

It is the ultimate app because it is available to everyone, for free, at all times and is not at all contingent on one’s skin color, sexuality, political preference, or whether one is even spiritually qualified to practice it.  One doesn’t have to be a Hindu to chant the maha-mantra. It enhances any kind of spiritual search because it is a universal app. It connects one to the source, the powerhouse of reality, and is inclusive of everyone.

It is the ultimate app because it’s fully open-source. It can be transmitted to anyone at any time.  Whatever the technology of your being, of your personality, the maha-mantra fits into the system of your life.

It is the ultimate app because, being of eternal spiritual substance, it never breaks down, and it never needs an upgrade.  It’s always in style, and it’s always available.

There have been calls for a “spiritual Steve Jobs”  to appear, to innovate some of the rusted structures of spirituality.  I can certainly agree with this sentiment in many ways, but it is essential to remember that real change begins within our own heart.  The maha-mantra is a tool, a spiritualized lifestyle app, which allows us to come to the core of the real innovation and creativity of our true being.

In the Bhakti tradition it is said that everyone has the responsibility to become a teacher, a guide, a selfless sharer of the essence they are finding. Understanding the real tools, the real apps, of our spiritual life and seeing their immense value in our daily life can help us to become givers of the Divine, of God’s reality.  It can bring us to the simplicity of our being, and allow us to give the ultimate sophistication.