Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - Cleveland, Ohio
On the flight back to Cleveland I enjoyed reading articles from “Back to Godhead” magazine. It is a unique bi-monthly journal and features articles on Vedic philosophy, places of pilgrimage, people’s personal spiritual testimonies and more. One of the publication’s purposes reads, “to help discern reality from illusion, spirit from matter, the eternal from the temporary.” For a journal in today’s world it is indeed rare.
As we descended through clouds and the Continental 737’s windows revealed frost-white blotches on the landscape below to contrast Florida’s greenness and in the moments when I thought back on what I just left behind a vision of another new aquaitance came to mind. During the chanting session at South Beach one of the participants was a true pilgrim whom I had read about in a previous “Back to Godhead”.
The pilgrim is Chadrabhagad. She and her husband Avadhuta hold to their credit a distasnce of 10 000 miles when in 2003 they lived from a horse driven cart from Pennsylvania to Ecuador. It was an honour to meet a comrade that I shared a common Karma with. The tragedy as she explained about the project is that in a mountain region two vehicles on a foggy day clashed and startled the horse toppling the cart and injuring the driver, Avadhuta, who became paralyzed. Bless him! They are my heroes.
The scene of the accident was at Cuenca, Ecuador and has halted the project whose goal was to encourage the simple life.
An evening program was held at Cleveland’s west-end gathering center at the home of Dayal Nitai former heavy metal musician. In the evenings message I emphasized the need to always remain connected to spiritually evolved people.
As I was about to leave for a two hour ride to Columbus I received a call from Remuna my assistant from Toronto; ”Your dad passed away five minutes ago.”