Spring
Dear Friends,It's Spring here in DC-still cold, but the cherries are flowering in pink; white flowering pears are columns of dignity lining the roads and hills; cheery yellow forsythia; my favorite, the star magnolia, our American lotus; and the wispy redbuds are all blooming in chorus.
Last weekend we had our twenty-first annual Vaisnava Christian Dialogue, held for the first time at our temple in Potomac. Last year it was held at St. Anselm's, a Benedictine Monastery in Northeast DC, where two of our dialogue partners live, Abbot James Wiseman and Father Philip Simo.Each year we choose a topic to discuss and a participant from each tradition agrees to present a paper on the topic the following year. This year the topic was a comparison of monasticism in each of our traditions. Brahmacari Vrajvihari Sharan, who is the Director of Hindu Life at Georgetown University, and Abbot James each presented papers about their monastic traditions.Each tradition's developments and challenges throughout history were fascinating. The tension each community faces in different phases of time; what becomes assimilated, and what rejected, what it means to live in solitude within community was quite a lesson and a journey.
A new member of our dialogue, Patrick Beldio, is a scholar and a sculptor. His Reunion Studios is located in the Franciscan Monastery, also in Northeast DC. He shared with me a link to his magnificent piece that's housed in the New Sanctuary and Center for Sufism Reoriented in Walnut Creek, California. Please view it at:www.reunionstudios.com/work#/thenewbeing/Graham Hetrick, who traveled with Gaura Vani and I this past January on our India Kirtan Adventure, attended the dialogue for the first time. Graham is a profoundly practicing Christian and the county coroner for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He also has an internationally syndicated reality television show on Discovery, called, The Coroner: I Speak for the Dead (grahamhetrick.com).At one point during the dialogue, Graham leaned over to me and said, "Did you know that we are all made of stardust?" I was amazed. I've learned that we're all sacred sparks of spirit, eternal sparks of Krsna's divine energy, but stardust?Graham told me that a new study surveyed 150,000 stars and claims that humans and our galaxies have about 97% of the same kind of atoms within us.So long ago, Joni Mitchell wrote it; Crosby, Stills and Nash sang it:
Well, I came upon a child of God...We are stardust, we are golden,We are billion year old carbon,And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
And one last poem called,
SpringOn the edge of flightWaiting for You,The ocean withinWith the treesI moveThrough every seasonAncient pillars of patience:Witnesses of Your every wishRooted in your energies,I gain the skies, at lastFreeI fly to what is meIn the fresh spring breeze,Awake to the calling withinYour seeds ofLoveGently sprouting in all that be.
by Gauri Gopika Devi Dasi, Originally published in Bhakti Blossoms: A Collection of Contemporary Vaishnavi Poetry (Golden Dragonfly Press, 2017)I wish you a joyous Spring!All the best,Rukmini Walker
Photos of Rukmini by Krishna Kanta. Flower tree photo by TOMOKO UJI.