Gosh’s Big Adventure Day 2 — Kirtanananda Swami

Ranaka and I arrived at the Sanctuary on 1st Avenue in Manhattan near Houston Street around mid morning Saturday. We stood in the street deciding which buzzer to push but someone came to the door and let us in on his way out.

We walked up to the second floor and knocked on Kirtanananda Swami’s door. There was no answer so we went into the temple room. There one devotee advised us that he had seen him leaving earlier in his electric wheelchair. Apparently he goes out by himself and does his own shopping. I wished I could have seen him, tooling around the Lower East Side by himself in his chair, dressed in a dhoti. It must be quite a sight.

I asked him later how far he would go in it, and he said he goes all over. He takes it to the hospital for his appointments on 27th street, so that is a 55 block round trip. 20 blocks in that part of Manhattan equals a mile, so that is a 2.75 mile (4.4 km) round trip.

While we were waiting for him to return, we looked for parking as we were on a meter in front of the building. We drove back and forth on the side streets until we finally found a place to park, luckily just around the corner. While looking, we drove by 6th St and Avenue B. There is a community garden there where in 1986 I had a plot I grew flowers in for the Deities so it was fun to see that the garden hadn’t been overtaken by developers.

KS was home when we came back so we hung out with him for a while. When he went into guru mode and asked how my sadhana was I told him it was terrible. He said that we need to be serious in this life because there is no guarantee we will get a human birth in the next one and I assured that that it is probably a guarantee that I will get an animal body.

Once he realized I was there only for a social visit, and he had done his preaching duty, we had a nice visit, catching up on who was where and whatever happened to that person, like that. We talked a lot about the gardens in New Vrindaban as myself and my wife used to work closely with him on those projects so we had a common interest in how they developed over the years and what the current state is.

I hadn’t spoken to or seen him in about 14 years. As he is moving to India permanently in a few days, and I have zero plans or interest in going there myself, this was the last chance to see him. Considering his age, 70, and health (although I was surprised to see how good he did look) and my own health issues, I suspect one or the other of us will be dead before he ever returns to the US.

Regardless of how it is politically correct to view him these days, I did live in community with him for 15-20 years, and he was a father figure to me. The estranged son getting some closure with his father before his death is the plot theme that has launched a 100 movies, and that is how I saw this meeting.

RVC came by and heated up some veg that KS had made while KS himself whipped up a salad on a tray that fits on his wheelchair.

He had that same intent focus making that salad as he had had most of the time I knew him.

One thing I said to him had Ranaka rolling his eyes. I said don’t take this the wrong way but the best thing that could have happened to you would have been if you had died when you were in the coma in 1985 after having been brutally attacked and suffering massive brain trauma.

On the one hand, the mistakes that occurred after that would never have happened, and (rabid dog KS haters get ready to start howling when you read the following) most of the other stuff people like to dig around for that occurred before that would have been forgotten.

KS would have been one of the heroes and saints of early ISKCON, like Visnujana Swami and Jayananda are now. I enumerated what I was talking about — the first devotee to move in with Srila Prabhupada (when he was on the verge of returning to India), the first to shave up, called Kitchenananda by SP because he learned to cook so well, the first to open a temple in a foreign country (okay, only Canada, but that IS a foreign country), the first to start a farm community, the first swami, the first devotee SP took to India.

After I finished, KS said, “Well, I don’t like hearing it, but it’s true.”

After that visit, I had a meeting with Premavatar, a Radhanath disciple who lives in New Jersey and who is fired up for cow protection. This meeting was, from a productive perspective, the main reason for the trip. I wanted him to meet Ranaka who is the key person in GEETA, which protects 100 cows.

We talked about the current situation and the broader, long term vision for cow protection. One thing in the long term vision, I mentioned it would be nice to have a place close to NYC to take people out to on retreats for Krishna Conscious activities where there would be cows to associate with. New Vrindaban is an 8 hour drive away and too far for regular weekend retreats.

After that meeting, I sat back and evaluated our options. We had been planning to stay with the brahmacaries in the ashram, and leave Sunday. I was looking forward to that, getting to hang out with 21st century urban brahmacaries and do a morning program, to get the feel of how things were going. I know that SP’s vision is that city temples should have a relationship with rural communities so it was a chance to meet some city devotees. Plus I hadn’t been kidding that my sadhana was terrible.

However, I was getting tired and, thinking what to do the rest of the day, I said to Ranaka, why don’t we leave right now. I could think of many things to do in NYC, but we had accomplished our main objectives and anything we did would be more touristy rather than productive, so heading back home started to be appealing.

After a bit of discussion, we decided to pursue that course. We went back to KS’s to say good bye, and while there we met Dr. Chatterjee. When it came up that we were into cow protection, he said there was someone we should meet. He was a retired Indian gentleman who had gotten a calling to care for cows, and was protecting 13 of them.

He called him up and I got on the phone for a while with him. He invited us to spend the night with him, and lived only 2 hours from the George Washington Bridge. Since I had been talking about a place close to the city to see protected cows within the last hour, I could hardly decline the invitation.

Thus around 5 PM we pulled away from the Sanctuary headed to the GW on our way to see a fellow cow protector, following the sinking sun across New Jersey as we headed west on the first leg of our journey home.