I have a friend who answers that question with "I'm doing magnificent". He really means it. Thats why I love him. He can always see the blessings which the Lord is giving him daily. In his association I am forced to think positively.
I need association with like minded peers or at least with young people! AHHHHHH! I'm not a cave dweller. I like my personal time but I also need my people time and project time. I need action, movement. I am just counting the days until school starts again and the other boys come back home surcharged from their India trip. When I have too much time alone I can't seem to get anything done.
I feel like running, swimming, riding my bike, walking around, hugging cows, watching the sun reflect off the snow. (Snowboarding by myself is out of the question). It is just so cold my room seems like such a safe place that promotes such rejuvenating activities like bundling up and sleeping. Sometimes if I am on the transcendental tip there is reading and chanting.
Yesterday many people wrote me or called asking if I was ok. I guess my last couple of posts led others to believe that I was depressed etc. Their right. I am thankful that they care.
I wrote one friend and said that when I am at New Vrindaban I feel like I am in a hospital and my particular diagnosis is poison in the blood. (It's easy to see when you are around so many pure souls). For that there is only one old fashion solution of bloodletting. Blood letting is great because it quickly allows you to get rid of all of your old blood and forces you to create new blood. So New Vrindaban is the safe place(my home) where I can be frustrated, tired, faithless etc to the extent of not offending the devotees. I can go through the whole range of emotions and feel them out and take shelter. Then I can head back to work and serve fresh and rejuvenated with new energy and realization.
These are certain points on the body good for blood letting.
The following pictures are where I take shelter each day in New Vrindaban.
1. Prayer at Sri Sri Radha Vrindabancandra's lotus feet
2. Japa in the Brahmacari Ashram's renegade Tulasi garden
3. Cleaning my heart in service to Srimati Radharani's pots
4. Friendship with Gopal our new calf
1 comment:
Boaz, I feel you've hit upon a wonderful metaphor with New Vrindaban as your hospital. There will always be steps above us we have not yet reached, and people further up those stairs who progress at different rates. They are to be our inspiration, our teachers, and our guides, and yet it seems a paradox that in their presence we should feel most unworthy, the most in need, the furthest behind. You are right to look to ..."In the beginning there may be some failures. That is quite natural. Just as a child is trying to stand, he may fall down. But that does not mean he should give up the idea..."as you indicated in an earlier post. Just as you struggle with your place and complacency, so do those around you whom you call teacher, all on their own levels and in their own ways. And, what I wish to call attention to, so do all those I've seen you serve at Vegan Cookings or Workshops, all drawn to the events with different motives, all themselves at various levels of understanding. Your presence at those events is simultaneously calming and inspiring, and may even draw reactions of rejection by some, displacing their own dissatisfaction with their place, that inherent dissatisfaction (with the world we seem to be given, that one most easily seen) in human existence which causes us to first seek, and then hopefully, as you mentioned as well in an earlier post, cease the seeking and merely appreciate. Even to those who reject the examples they see around them at the workshops are undergoing a part of the process of understanding, and it is something that requires having the image of someone at a different place on the path, either for direct aspiration, or indirectly as a contrast to a life they now lead. As you find yourself faced with doubts and frustrations in New Vrindaban, so do those perhaps not used to ever approaching issues of consciousness, questions of life, or even sharing of food at the workshops I've remembered. However, slowly they return to whatever life they are more comfortable in, and have benefited from the experience, having met new people and approached new ideas. You cleanse where you are so that you are purer as you serve others; they bask in, benefit, and carry with them some of this light, and spread it where they are more used to treading. These roles are always in flux and require renewal and refreshment.
I write because I wanted to say hello, and specifically to this post because I think it is a beautiful and crucial thing to think our weakest and hardest moments those which prepare us most fully for making the brightest out of future endeavors. There is a Chinese word 進 (jin - pronounced like gin and tonic's "gin") which is used in reference to entering, such as a room. It's origins are in "moving forward", and it's implications (as reflected on a greeting card received from a Taiwanese friend of mine) are that "in your life journey, you should learn to appreciate your own speed and distance". We are all moving, but have all started at different points and will move at different speeds. All of these different starting points! All of these different paces! All of these myriad potential endings! All of this bouncing off of others set on their own trajectories, realigning ours until the next collision! And at the base of it all? Appreciation. You did not choose where you start. It is seeming chaos try and predict an end. Nothing for it but to appreciate as we move now.
-Dale (Shelby's Friend; Long-Haired-At-the-Time-Vegan-Cooking-Attendee; Living in Taiwan and Wishing you the Best)
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