part two: creative writing exercise
Hare Krsna Gurudev,
Please accept my most humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada. All glories to your Vrindavana Dham pastimes Gurudev. Praying for a dust of Vrindavan dam and that we can have again in this life or the next.
Our computer crashed along with the data a month ago and we apologize for the delayed response. We have recovered the data.
Here is the writing we have been doing. We see it in the genre of prose. There is no ending so far. The last few paragraphs can be expanded and worked on. We are not sure what the next chapters could bring....maybe how we travelled across Canada on sankirtan, ended up in the Columbus Ohio ashram selling cookies and then going to Vrindavan with Arudha Mataji. We just see what has the most feeling/poetic opportunities to expand on and go with that. We would like to speak to an audience that may know nothing about Krsna or the Bhakti path. It could be for devotees too.
We really appreciate Gurudev that we can share this. We are still trying to hold on to some menial service doing Sunday school classes online and in person until the season gets colder. We are traveling with our Nimai Nitia deities each day going back and forth while we chant manga Aarti and our rounds. Trying to offer incense and flower now everyday, wake them, put them to sleep and change outfits every Sunday. We read an offering at Gopal Krsna Swami's reunion event. They fit perfectly in the car dash in a sacred box.
Right now we are also changing our private practice office and will have better facility to run group therapy. Kids are doing well and happy. One group will use the format from Dharma Recovery. It is a Buddhist inspired recovery model, but there are a lot of Vedic principles taught. This group teaches eastern principles such as the importance of sanga, how recovery from substance use or process disorders is renunciation, and how we can get in touch with the Paratmatma within.
The Cult I loved. The love, the stillness I am still in.
This picture represents a time in my life when everything flipped. My sister had heard murmurs from mom that her 18-year-old sister 3 months prior had hopped on a transnational bus. The allure of hearing new words such as “ashram,” and joining the “Hare Krsnas” helped my sister have hope that escape was possible if new eastern words were intermixed. The murmurs that her former raver turned saree-wearing sister was “doing better” after joining the farmland commune in Burnaby , British Columbia Canada.
Reiterations of 4 am wake-ups where fellow monks would partake in five-hour temple darshan sittings overwhelmed her senses. My sister recalled on the phone that I would go on about “Downtown transcendental literature distributions” and “services” where marigolds are endlessly strown for garland stands at the Sunday love feasts. Her new found family was a secret home with a narrow passage. How to enter it seemed as daunting as trying to understand how words in Sanskrit could be recited like songs.
Her sister, now “Bhaktin Kristie” pointed to the short white haired leader who was a former street punk. Another had been Initiated and given the name Dhanishta.
The last girl crouching and pulling weeds in the carrot garden “shaved her dreads when she joined.” The new derelict group shared a damp second-story apartment where sleeping bags were rolled up because “the reality is we don’t need a lot….”
When my sister first arrived with my mom, she was taken by the marigolds vastly growing in yellow and orange rows around the farm. Sitting with her sister overlooking the groves she finally could see that there was coherency in her sister’s thinking despite leaving the family behind 6 month prior. She was trying to figure out how she was still standing.
“I found myself scrubbing this oversized pot. I couldnt do the laundry because I bleached the deity clothes… but scrubbing the kitchari burn spots created this dim reflection of me.
I could feel it finally. Our parents divorce. What I was chasing. In the end I did hug that pot. I rushed off from the evening service to find a few sweet balls hiding behind the altar. Its like my new father and mother had my back. Just in an esoteric way. They will always be around.”
As the farm tour progressed, more sociological observations emerged. Young men in pink dhotis kept themselves at a distance. The women’s uniforms seemed at best second hand mounds of bright synthetics fastened to hanes T-shirts. Their hair was strewn back like a chore instead of an ornamental object. The boy’s strange shaved heads were dismantling their 19 year old ego (in a good way) like they had traded n patriarchy for an unnamed hyperreality.
“We would sing louder than the brahmacaris and they would seem annoyed and ignore us more. They even reported us to the ashram leader and it just made our rowdy girl group want to sing and dance more uproariously during kirtan. The Hare Krsna calling and response becomes a type of hollering if we were leading the prayers. Then we had the realization that it isn’t just about us and our egos. Despite, we still kept up with the unsaid rule that whichever group got to the first morning kirtan prayer at 5 am won.”
As we walked down the hill and with defeated sighs and a head buried in silk cloth, my sister disclosed the hardest part of my day to her.
“They want me to chant. I really had no idea how to do that….the older one Dhanishta sat with me and tried to show me. One day though everything became a lucid dream.
In the space between the marigold farm and the temple I watched myself sit in lotus. The nettle bushes that enclosed the garden became a wall that felt like a closing in that only observing mind could create. The solitary beads in a bag became something to knead, now held like glistening halos. One breath in and one breath out with the nettle slowly made the residual muck wade away the everyday tasks that are hard to shake.
The atmosphere started to glimmer for my sister too. She put together that the archetypes mother and father was just a few corridors down. A hill foreshadowed an apartment complex of what she described as “the fairy godmothers who made themself avail to us. Four elderly Indian women cooking, cleaning, sewing, appearing as if we had just knocked on their entrance a moment ago, their heads nodding with delight. “
After a long tour, we did sit down for evening service in the temple wherein what seemed like the leader of the young saffron and saree wearing pact bowed down and sat adjacent. A boisterous, heavy French accent came through the loud “Hari bol!!” in a beautiful rage above multiple mrdanga loud bangs, clouded glasses heavy with transcendental sighs and new hands to bandage up again after the altar curtains closed.
“He always would stand up for us, because believe me….not everyone in the community wanted our derelict monk group to stay.He didn’t want his temple donations I guess to support a group he couldn’t understand."
Was the reiteration to our ghetto punk-turned-Indian attire offensive to some? Even if we did sincerely wear sarees like a tattered uniforms, the assimilation was sometimes not understood. We wanted to be a part of a different time, not in present Kali Yuga times but possibly a different Yuga, a before tech age of peace and anti establishment that the Vedic ethereal world could open up. We could feel on a subtle level and the daily sadhana practice, that this world existed beyond this one, but it was still understandably uncertain to the jollier and wealthier donors. Our seva of digging out carrots with the utmost love or dancing through China town scared those who really felt jolted by strange street cymbals did look strange. We had wounds from what we can now call “the material world.” Giving our all with intensive inquiry during Sanskrit briefings infuriated the established gentleman who wanted a normal Hindu temple to call his own.
Vedaveyas reassured the mixed group that turning us away was never an option. “If I did, where would you have all gone?”
Even when the ashram dismantled due to an older trainee falling “in love” with our bhakta leader, we remembered the omen from a popular African American formally Princeton-educated guru who danced in the temple with temple-only sneakers.
“Maya (the goddess of illusion) won’t like this. Its just too good what you have going on here.”
There was a knowing that my sister had never seen in my eyes before. “I have unanimous agreeance: illusory powers will always be our bait to mortal reprise or waking up to a strange job in an unhandpicked time of our life that will feel drudged, uncertain and stuck. But this slow demise will wake us up.
Even the other senior twenty something goth girl who wore black sweaters over draped paisley prints was looking for our clear eye glance. With every sleeping bag roll up and when we chose to be thoughtful and say “Let me do that” even when we were in our own dark demise from maybe 4 lives ago that thing we did that kept wrestling with austere sock line clips is now.
The focus on the Bhakti latha creeper stages that seemed so far away from our past snagged us like jolted waves. Sometimes Dhanista was having a seizure and we held her while another swung, cleaning up the ashram and giving hugs before bed.
One upper level apartment so normal from the street view there was a series of living room sacred altars with multiple Govardhan shelas. The black shiny sacred rocks had painted lotus eyes that gently greeted everyone who reverentially entered. Once I met them they started to come in dreams like Mexican worry dolls and said goodnight to all of us before bed.
The Shelas represented a new world. Natural forms that were non different from a living breathing force. I was told by the guardian of these sacred Gange river found representatives of the divine that Shelas are non different than Krsna. I could see them in my mind’s eye as land marks on a gem filled walk to the real Mazatlan that actually had an end that wasn’t melting ice cream. I could talk to the shelas that were alive because God also walked that trail and became the mountain that shaded us. The mountain journey to the wise man in the cave was finally outside of Casablanca and peyote dream scribes.
I welcomed feeling spaced out and happy with being in the shelas home as much as the owner of the apartment’s. On various plush platforms she had something beyond children. I was scared, enamoured, and captured by a vibration that enveloped me. I would walk out to the street to breathe again. Sitting with God wasn’t something described to me before I entered.
HpS/ASA - It is super great 👌. We got to your leader falling in love with the Bhakta Leader and have to go to temple program.
Really great!
Try and block it into maybe three chapters???
Great
Refreshing
🌴🌴🦧🌴🌴🌴
