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!