In many Native American traditions, the Thunder Beings (Wakinyan in Lakota) are considered powerful living entities and messengers of Krishna who carry out His bidding. Saturday night they visited the 24 Hour Kirtan and showered their blessings. Besides the life giving rain and a lightning show, they caused the electricity to go out for 15 hours. Yoga Dave was visiting and confirmed that this was a benediction.
It happened in the darkening evening but the amazing thing was the kirtan never broke stride continuing with full potency throughout the night and into the morning. This proved that the Holy Name is transcendental to technology.
One interesting aspect of the power outage was that it happened minutes after Sivarama Swami stepped into the rotation as kirtan leader. I had been at a presentation of his earlier in the day when he was describing life at the farm in Hungary. There have no electricity there. SS is a strong advocate of simple agrarian living which is, IMHO, completely consistent with Srila Prabhupada’s long term development plan for ISKCON. I personally took the power outage as an affirmation from Krishna that SS is on the right path.
It was also a warning for those devotees who despite $4 gas and food riots in Haiti still blithely serve their Walmart ( or Neiman Marcus, whatever) master and maintain full faith that the goods will continue to flow unabated so they can remained personally unconnected to the Earth, wallowing in consumerism and not supporting ISKCON, or any other, farming communities.
I think the 24 hour kirtan clearly demonstrated that there is a possibility of having some joy even without the benefits of an industrialized society.
Did I get some joy from it? Well, let’s just say that I had floor burns on the bottom of my feet when it was over. Which is to say there was a lot of dancing, lots more than there was last year at the inaugural 24 Hour Kirtan festival.
I heard talk that this will become an annual event, regularly scheduled to be the weekend following the New York Ratha Yatra, which would make a nice ten day trip for someone coming to the East Coast for a visit.
For pictures of the event, go to http://www.brijabasispirit.com/ and look at entries from June 21st and 22nd 2008.
