Flower Ghosts
Dallas, Texas
I had been at the carousel to wait for luggage at the airport. A young couple sat nearby when the woman noticed my robes. She was compelled to ask which group I belong to.
“Excuse me, but who are you with?”
“Hare Krishna!” I responded.
“I thought so. My father told me just the other day that he had lived as one of your monks in the late sixties. He is from Italy but now lives in the Honduras. Do you guys sell flowers?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My father told me that he had to sell flowers in the airports and he didn’t like it, so he left.”
“That’s too bad,” I said and explained that in its infancy, the movement was trying out various means with which to sustain and grow. “We have now built up congregations and are functioning quite differently. And it’s not that we have anything against flowers. In fact, we use them all the time in our ceremonies. Please give your dad my greetings.”
“I will” she said.
After I had the dialogue with her I felt good having met a young person with some background in Krishna. I also pondered this, “Our guru, Srila Prabhupada, attracted quite a following from the flower children days in the sixties.” That lifestyle of “love and peace” had practically wound down by the eighties if not earlier, but if you go to one of our Krishna temples today, you may discover that the flower power genre of some sort still exists in Hare Krishna communities. Haight Ashbury in San Francisco have its flower ghosts, but Krishna Consciousness moves on.
5 Km
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