Friday, June 14th, 2013

Samaritans

Morden, Manitoba

When journalist Andrew of the Morden Times came to interview me I asked him a curious question, “Does the name of your newspaper have anything to do with a play on letters and not words, as in modern times?”

Enough already.

We got to talking about the walking mission. I explained that life runs on two tracks, the physical and the spiritual, much like a train moves on two parallel rails. If you’re missing one then the train does not go forward. With walking you are obviously having a good workout. When you make it a pilgrimage then it becomes a soul workout in addition to the physical benefit. I am chanting mantras in the course of my walking, so there’s a perfect partnership between matter and spirit.

Andrew, and Derek, also from the newspaper, and I sat cross legged for quite some time with Q and A’s with some discussion to the point where our legs went to sleep. The interview went great.

The area I’m walking in, Winkler and Morden, is not foreign to spiritual topics and piety. This is clearly Mennonite territory if ever there was. For instance, Don Kalippenstein, who’s with sales at the local GM dealership was on his way to a local prayer meeting and saw me and offered a lift to which I had to decline, “I’m walking all the way to the Pacific, so I can’t cheat.”

There was also this nice lady who was eating at McDonalds when she saw me passing by. She asked her husband who was handicapped and moving in an electric wheelchair to find out what I was doing. He came to me and whipped out his cell phone so I could talk to her, and she so kindly said she’d pray for my safe journey. He then whipped out something else, a twenty dollar bill and in mutual exchange I gave him a Krishna Tone CD to listen to.

Other motorists came forward offering rides in the good Samaritan spirit. At one point in today’s walk, I stopped dead on my tracks to see and read a country side billboard which had a message that I’m very much in favour of. It read:

CHASTITY

MEANS SAVE SEX FOR MARRIAGE

The Choice of a new generation

I thought to myself, “Now that’s a good policy.” I shared the message with Doug, my support person. We agreed to drink to that, so we indulged in a pineapple/banana/coconut smoothie, offered it to Krishna and drank to our hearts’ content.

32 KM