Red Rock Rishis Song and Video

by Nistha Bhakti Devi

The Red Rock Rishis have put together another music video, using their song “Of Seasons I Am Spring”, off their album, The Beginning Is Near. It is meant to embody the verse from the Bhagavad-gita, wherein Lord Krishna says, “Of seasons, I am flower bearing spring”. Pictures of colorful manifolds of flowers and beautiful paintings of Sri Krishna performing His divine lilas, make this video a spiritually soothing and blossoming blissful experience. Watch it now! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZiivxmZRqw.

To see more chanting videos of the Rishis, or to learn more about them, you can go to htttp://redrockrishis.com. They are also doing a concert tour of Hawaii in February, in Kona and Maui. The tour is also highlighted on their website.

 

Soothing Bubbles

Every few days I make a big batch of oatmeal and then put most of it in the refrigerator to take out later and heat up.

I cook it with double the recommended water plus extra for what steams off. I also cook it for much longer, typically for about twenty minutes — until the “cream” starts coming out.  I used to cook it for an hour with even more water until the individual oats would lose their identity but lack the patience anymore that is when it is best but even getting to the cream stage gets  most of the flavor gain.

I add a lot of freshly grated ginger. I don’t use a regular grater because it gets caught in it and is hard to clean.  When I mentioned to my sister-in-law how much I like and use fresh ginger she gave me my mother’s (long passed away) ginger shredder. It is a solid piece of ceramic with rows of little teeth.  The shredded ginger is easily wiped from it and it cleans easily with a simple rinse.

Amazon sells a similar one. My mothers has a nice design on the off side so when it is hanging up it is pleasant to look at.

She used to use it for making the best ginger cookies ever.  I have bought every ginger cookie on the market since then and never found one that was as good.

I add the ginger with about 5 minutes remaining.  With a couple of minutes left I add cinnamon. I also make an exception to our no cooking with salt general rule.  We use Bragg’s Liquid Aminoes to get the salt taste usually but that doesn’t work with oatmeal and my sodium level is low enough I can splurge for oatmeal so I add a bit sea salt.

I put a couple tablespoons of active culture yogurt and a tablespoon of freshly ground flax seed along with a teaspoon or so of maple syrup or honey in a bowl and have it warm up on the stove so it keeps  the  oatmeal hotter longer. If you were using a gas or electric stove you could have it touch the cooking pot. We have a wood cook stove so I put it on a trivet.

I add cooking apples that soften in a couple of minutes, a banana, frozen strawberries from our garden or dried fruit to it as I reheat the individual batches later. I eat an orange or raw apple or  something when I do the main batch.

Today I tried something different– rolled barley which turned out to be excellent.  The thing was that it ended up taking longer to do, about 40 minutes. Normally I stir the oats then wander off and do something else but I have had a cold lately and been exhausted so after 20 minutes had passed not knowing how much longer it was going to take I just sat on a stool next to the stove.

I was about half nodding off so meditating on nothing but the sounds of the pot was easy. It was this bubbling sound hundreds of bubbles at once but not in a frenzy, more calm and methodical and for some reason I found it extremely soothing.

Not that I intellectualized about it at the moment, but what a basic human experience that crosses all demographics and historical eras — the sound of a pot simmering. I could have been anywhere anytime.

 

Interesting Thing To Waste Time looking At

Blue Ball Machine

I guess I could say it is an indictment of the over mechanization of industrial society and its dissipation of positive energies. But that would just be BSing to cover my interest in it.

 

Gosh Gets Studded

As my wife has a craft business she works at home. While she routinely goes down to the Four Seasons swimming pool in Moundsville to swim her 1.5 miles (2.5 K) that is discretionary and when the roads are bad she doesn’t need to go.

In the past I also had no need to go anywhere if the roads were snowy and icy but that paradigm has shifted with the dialysis.  Now I HAVE to go 3 days a week regardless.

I went out shopping for tire chains but was surprised to find them unavailable in any local retail store. This meant when we had a rain that turned to ice followed by 6 inches (15 cm) of snow I was ill prepared.

The first night I came home I got to about Sherrard on Rt 88 and suddenly felt the car slip sideways. It was before the snow and there was black ice, one of those conditions where the road looked clear but was covered with a sheet of ice.

Our Kia Soul has an elapsed time meter built in so I have calibrated the landmarks on my trip. It usually takes 8 minutes from the Halcyon Hills cemetery on Rt 88 to my home but even taking 20 minutes to make that portion of the trip I was still occasionally sensing a sideways slip.

The next trip in I went Rt 250 all the way to Moundsville and then Rt 2 to Wheeling. This added 6 minutes to the trip but our experience has shown us that those roads are usually cleaner and snow plowed more often than Rt 88.

I did order some tire chains from the internet but they haven’t arrived yet so I went ahead and got a new set of snow tires and had them studded.   These are little metal studs they pneumatically impaled into the tire itself that will give some grip on ice.

While I was there someone asked about getting studs on all four tires but the guy advised not to. He said, and it had happened to his sister, that if you had studs all around and went to hit your brakes suddenly on dry pavement, you could end up skidding so best just to put them on your drive wheels.

Speaking of our Kia Soul, here is how we decorated it for Christmas.

Years ago I used to go up to Washington, DC after the growing season was done and drive delivery truck from Thanksgiving through Christmas.  There it is  a local custom to put wreaths on the grill of your vehicle and I liked it so have done it ever since.

We put it on before Christmas then leave it on through Christmas. While for consumers Christmas ends once they get through the preholiday coveting and they get their stuff, the 12 Days of Christmas  run until Epiphany, Jan. 6th so I leave the wreath on until then.

Speaking of decorating, here is a family of gourd snowmen scarecrows Vidya put out.

This is a new product for her for next year. While she has a lot of different scarecrows already, the snowmen are new.

 

Bizarre Icicles

We had the strangest icicles today.

We had had rain that turned to ice followed by several inches of  snow. It looks like the snow started to slide off our white metal roof which usually when it does it all comes at once but it must have been the ice underneath it  stopped it.  So you can see the lower part of the sheet of snow dangling off the eaves.

This set the stage for these curved icicles which I had never seen before.  Here are two views.

 

Geminid Meter Shower

Last week there was the Geminid meter shower.  It was an uncloudy night in New Vrindaban which, though not rare, can be welcomed when there is an astronomical event so I went outside to watch for a while.

Fortunately I live where there are no street lights so I didn’t have light pollution to deal with and didn’t have to travel to get to a dark space to watch it from. While it was below freezing, I bundled up warmly and wrapped myself in a fleece blanket so there was no physical discomfort.

I watched for about 20 minutes, very much of a meditation.When you can at will move from a dark place into a lit place like a mall, tavern, or other gathering place, and when ever you walk into a room you can instantly “Let there be light” by flicking a switch it is easy to fall into the illusion that you are the controller.

Sitting in the dark waiting for meteors when no matter what you do or think the next meteor falls when it falls, it is very much of a “Be still and know that I am God”  experience.

I remembered when my youngest boys were still kids sitting out with them and watching a meteor shower. I also remembered as a  kid in North Dakota being out for any number of reasons and seeing meteors. It wasn’t that uncommon to see them.

While the meteor showers mean practically a sure shot at seeing some meteors, and I saw 10 or more in about 20 minutes,  they do occur at any time of year.  Mostly they are unseen because they are merely a quick flash in usually light polluted skies hence unseen.

With all the airborne particulate that exists in modern industrial skies, even if you happened to be where it is dark you may not see them because they are obscured by particulates.

When I was a youth I used to spend a lot of time outdoors at night. Now I am weak and mostly evenings are indoors, so getting out to see the meteor shower was a treat though it is something that that is available for any one any time if you simply spend the time and lift your eyes to the heavens.

 

Grieving

Grieving manifests differently. Yesterday evening, after absorbing the horrific news that 20 children my youngest granddaughter’s age had been slaughtered it took the form of listening to country western music while I was working at my computer.

I grew up listening to country like Buck Owns and Patsy Cline but lost interest in it as my musical taste matured and it become mostly derivative and contaminated by rock and roll.

Still last night it resonated with me and I listened to it for a couple of hours.  That may do me for the next decade but it was comforting to hear as a lot of it is about heart break.

What do you get if you play a country song backwards?  You get your girl back, your truck back and your dog back. :-)

After laying down I watched a PBS special which was a live concert in a small club where the Rolling Stones were jamming with Muddy Waters playing his songs in  a small club in 1981. Later, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells and Lefty Dizz also played.

Back before I got religion I used to self medicate listening to the blues. While I preferred the Delta blues singers, I didn’t mind Chicago Blues so this worked for me in a punch.

When I drive into dialysis my music of choice is nonBaroque classical music and I am unlikely to take up listening to the blues and country again but it worked for one night.

If I want more sad music I can always fall back onto my collecti0n of requiem masses, the only music I have actually purchased over the last decade or so.

 

Bhokta das July 2, 1953 – December 2, 2012

A friend of mine just left his body after a courageous struggle with cancer.

I live in an intentional community, having moved here at the end of 1973. Bhokta moved here in 1974 so I have known him for a long time. He was a disciple of Srila Prabhupada.

For the first ten years I lived here it was communal, and retained aspects of that for years after.  All the purchasing was done by a purchasing department. If you needed something, you submitted a requisition and purchasing would get it.

I worked in the purchasing department for a few years and Bhokta was the pickup man. He drove the van or truck to Wheeling, Pittsburgh, New York or wherever to fill the orders so I worked with him on a daily basis. He took more and more responsibility for purchasing over the years and became sharp as a tack in finding the best deals for whatever he was tasked to buy.

If you look at all the buildings in New Vrindaban today, realize that all the materials in those buildings came through the purchasing department.  A large percentage of it was physically  brought into NV by Bhokta. All this while simultaneously doing the logistics for all the  needs of a population that grew from 200 to 600 devotees at its peak.

He was a major player in the building of Prabhupada’s Palace.

As the communal aspects faded and we all had to move on, Bhokta became a contractor, doing a lot of construction projects for the community and individual devotees.  That is what newer devotees will remember him as doing. He also managed the ghee factory.

He had another side, private, most devotees would not know him for. He was a poet. His interest was known through an online poetry writing contest that he was key to running. It was a monthly haiku contest. called a kukai. He was a secretary for it from 2005 until recently when he became medically unable to contribute.

The secretary  selects and emails  a theme for the month to those subscribed to the contest. They compile the entries that are sent in and resend them out to all the subscribers — assigned numbered not with names.  If you contributed an entry you can vote and  the secretaries compile the votes and announce the winners and how many  votes each haiku got.

I have been entering this for years because writing haiku is good practice for writing with brevity.  I think I had been entering it for about a year before I realized that the Robert  who was a secretary was the same Robert that I knew.  This contest has international participation.

Message from Haiku World:

“Dear kukai friends,

“I want to inform you, with heavy heart and deep regret, that our kukai secretary and web-master, Robert, passed away this morning. Please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers.  He will be sorely missed. Thanks very much to all of you for the support and encouragement I’m sure you have given him over the years in the Shiki Kukai.

“I still hope to begin the December kukai tomorrow. I think that is something Robert would have wanted; but I hope to change the free format topic to something he would have liked.

“best wishes and regards,
“George Hawkins”

From the contest email for December:

FREE FORMAT SECTION

The FREE FORMAT SECTION requires a haiku on a particular object, theme, or setting that may occur at any time within a given year. This is a free format haiku, in that the writer can compose a haiku with or without seasonal reference.

With thoughts of Robert,  the free format topic for December is “Departing” – haiku dealing with separation, leaving and goodbyes . For this I would like to reuse his sample haiku from the April 2010 kukai.

Free Format Sample:

palm fronds …
I take a moment
to say goodbye

Robert