People ask me all the time...what in the world do you do there?! To be quite honest, sometimes I don't have enough time in the day to do what I want! Radha Charan and I get up around 4:30-5:00 am to chant Japa, which is chanting a mantra that consists of names of God on beads. We do this for aproximately for one hour, and then we get ready to go to the Gosalla (cow shelter) which is a 2 minute bicycle ride down the street. At the Gosalla we feed the two baby deer, Radhika and Janardan, milk by bottle. After this we continue to chant, but with some interruptions from different four legged friends who want to be petted, brushed, fed etc. I return home around 7:30 am, while Radha Charan makes some deliveries (by bicycle) of milk to some of the Gosalla donors who live in the neighborhood. After this I clean the house, and then do puja (worship) of our deities at home. This takes around an hour. Part of the morning worship is making a food offering, so including cooking, this can take up to 2 hours (depending on what I cook of course!) After this we do "mantra smaranam", which consists of silently chanting some mantras given by the Guru at the time of initiation. This takes approximately 40 minutes. On average we manage to eat our breakfast between 10-11am, and finish (after some talking) around noon. After this, Radha Charan works on the computer for a few hours. I clean up after breakfast and puja, read, chant, or do whatever else I need to (other fine wifely chores like laundry etc!) around 4 pm twice a week I have a bengali lady who comes to give me a massage. It is very helpful for my cervical spondylosis that causes pain in my neck. She's such a super skinny lady who is so damn strong it's amazing...and a bit of a nut too. She charges 50 rupees ($1.25) for an hour and a half massage...so I can somehow afford to get twice a week! At 5 pm we return to the Gosalla to feed the deer their evening milk, and sit for more chanting. We leave approximately around 6-6:30, make evening milk deliveries, and eat dinner. On some evenings we go into town to visit some of the old temples. If we have some friends visiting, we will go earlier into town to show them around, and then eat later after we return. Our evening worship of our deities is done between 9-10pm, and then we "put them to rest" for the evening. We manage ourselves to go to sleep around 10:30 pm.... That's our average day.

I suppose for some it's not so terribly exciting, but the majority of our activities are based more on internal meditation...rather than external activity...so I suppose you can't really understand the full intensity of our day without understanding the mental focus that we strive for each moment.

Radha Charan is going to China tomorrow morning, and I will be making a trip to the Nepal border...to get stamped out of India (I will spend the night in Nepal, and then return the next day), so I won't write for a week or so. Wish me luck!

Nityananda-trayodasi

Today is the Birthday of Nityananda Prabhu. Five hundred years ago, Caitanya Mahaprahu, a direct incarnation of Krishna was born in West Bengal. His brother Nityananda (literally means "eternal bliss"), is an incarnation of Krishna's brother Balaram....and today is his birthday. What? God has a brother? Actually Nityananda, or Balaram is an expansion of the Lord (which means that he is also God.) There is much philosophical reasoning as to why the Lord would expand himself into two...but to make it easy I will just say that he does it for fun.

How fun is it to create a really groovy looking place, with all kinds of creatures and interesting places, and have to enjoy it alone? Lord Caitanya had many normal "human" associates, but none understood him in the same way that Nityananda did.

To celebrate Nityananda's birthday today I cooked a big feast for him. Here is a picture of our altar with the feast being offered. I am only sorry that Radha Charan cut off some of the preparations on the photo so you can't see them all!

I made 9 subjis (vegetable preperations): peas,eggplant, milk curd in tomato sauce; Dudh lau (Indian squash cooked in milk); aloo postho (potatoes with a white poppy seed sauce); Palak paneer (spinach with milk curd); Cauliflower, potato, pumpkin, tomatoes and milk curd; barbari postho (beans in white poppy seed sauce); palak bora (spinach with fried mung bean fritters); chana tamatar (chickpea and tomatoes with ginger); methi aloo (fenugreek leaves with potato)
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pea kachoris (indian savory pastry) and dhaniya (fresh coriander) chutney
Rice
Buckwheat
Kheer (sweet rice pudding)
Gur Sandesh (a sweet made from milk curds and date sugar)
Chocolate cake (what's a birthday party without a cake?)

Today we fasted until noon (which wasn't a problem for me since I was busy in the kitchen untill 1pm!). Today we will not eat any grains (in honor of the holiday), and will consume the feast tomorrow.

It took five hours of cooking to produce this feast...wish you were here to try some of it!

Some old friends from Poland are in town, and in the evening we went together to Nityananda Vat, an old temple near the Yamuna river to have darshan (which literally means to "see with respect") the deities of Gaura Nitai (Lord Caitanya and Lord Nityananda) there. This is the place where Nityananda sat under a banyan tree when he visited Vrindavan around 500 years ago. There was a group of bengali Vaisnavas singing beautiful bengali songs about Lord Nityananda, and we were invited for a big Harinam (singing party) that will go through the old town of Vrindavan tomorrow, and then return to the temple for a feast. I love those big Harinams with Bengalis...it is always so wonderful to see so many Vaisnavas together who, using singing as their medium, dive so deeply into the worship of God with such love and emotion.