Water and Sand
The Beaches, Toronto
Jonathon from Florida, Madhavendra who's local and I took to the boardwalk, a slightly over 2 km trail along Lake Ontario, there and back. I'm always impressed with the folks you meet there. They're friendly. The air is relatively good. It's peaceful. Waves gently lap against the shore.
What I admire of these people is their determination towards fitness. A daily yoga team was in action, weight-lifters at Balmy Beach club were strutting their stuff, dog walkers were at their duty, finally joggers whizzed by us. I guess we fit into the category of being "japers", meaning our threesome were engaged in chanting japa, (chanting on beads). This we did while walking. We were getting fit in two ways. The walking explains itself. And secondly, there's the chanting. This is where it gets interesting.
We hear that chanting purifies. What Madhavendra relayed to us was that once a psychologist had done a brain-scan of him while chanting japa and took note on the monitor that the squiggles on the graph were very unique. Apparently a part of the brain was activated that he had never seen before. I guess that unique segment of the brain was doing some exercise.
It might be daring to say but we were exercising a body component that others on the boardwalk were not.
One thing that others did not do was to take a dip in lake Ontario. I did a solo on that. The water's chills explains the reason for the solitary endeavour. This was done not as a way to show off but reenacting a childhood pastime. It was invigorating as much as it was to chant on a wooden trail where our guru, Srila Prabhupada had walked 36 years ago. Swimming in the waters of the Great Lakes and lying on her sands have always been the places where I would wonder, "Where is God?" and "How does He appear?"
10 Km
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