I was planning to go to New York City this weekend but a major storm ended that plan. We will try again next weekend.
Instead I am watching the birds and checking out the witchazel. We had a couple of record setting warm days the first week of February so it came into bloom, and has been blooming ever since, even though the temperature has been below freezing most of the time.
Yes, the white stuff is snow.
Instead of going to NYC, I had to settle for a memory, something I wrote back in the day:
In Vrindaban
(Brijabasi Spirit Vol. 4, NO. 1&2, dated January/February 1977.)
New York stunned me. Bumper to bumper traffic spewing garbage into the air; people looking at you like you were the source of all their miseries; chaotic noises; a constant bombardment of propaganda for sex, intoxication, gambling and consumption of flesh; a whirlwind of activity aimlessly progressing nowhere at best, to even more hellish conditions most likely.
The towering monuments dedicated to eating, sleeping, mating and defending seemed too absurd to be actually there even in the illusory energy, yet each day there they were again. It seemed amazing to me that people could actually exist in what was merely an intensification of the society I was raised in; I couldn’t imagine how it must have seemed to Prabhupada, who came from Vrndavana, India, where the cows roam freely and gentle people glorify the Lord, living simply and happily.
The only thing that made it tolerable was the shelter of Sri Sri Radha Govinda and His ecstatic devotees, who somehow manage to be Krsna Conscious amongst all the turmoil and barrages of the Big Apple.
The return to New Vrindaban was a fresh breath of air; those devotees who stay in the cities to distribute Prabhupada’s books are certainly empowered by Lord Caitanya. I can see that this movement is un-stoppable.
After a couple days I was off again, this time to North Dakota to pick up a load of wheat donated by my brothers, crossing some of the most productive farmland in the world in the process–Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota. The most striking feature is that in all that land, how few people there are. Memories of a concrete jungle that is really so unnecessary were a real contrast.
The high points of the trip were the visits to the Radha Krsna temples along the way: the newly opened center in Columbus with a handful of devotees, Chicago with Their Lordships Sri Sri Kisor Kisore, and Minneapolis, because I had spent a lot of time there as a karmi, wasting so much priceless time in the pursuit of nescience. Now a beacon is shining bright there, a hope for the innocents suffering in the darkness of ignorance — another outlet of Prabhupada’s unlimited mercy.
Back to New Vrindaban, then off again, this time with Daivata to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the Mid-Atlantic No Tillage conference, a big meeting where the latest techniques in agriculture are discussed. It was snowing and a jack-knifed tractor trailer had traffic stopped for an hour on the turnpike, so we arrived a little late, and in my haste to get inside I left the headlights on.
When we went to leave, the battery was too dejuiced to turn the starter over, so Daivata started asking people if they had any jumper cables, and sure enough a man had a set, drove his car next to us and got us going. I grabbed a Bhagavad-gita and offered it to him for helping us, but he just smiled and said he’d already gotten one at the airport, read it, and liked it very much. That blissed me out. I could see Krsna was arranging things, as this man had some attraction to Krsna and now he had been given the opportunity to render some service.
Now I’m sitting here writing this next to the fire while outside the snow lies deep and the thermometer reads about zero, grateful that I’ve been somehow able to receive the causeless mercy of the Lord and stay here in New Vrindaban as part of ISKCON, hoping that I’ll be able to help out in some small way.
