How alive are we? Rethinking failure

From a very early age, we are conditioned to see failure as something to avoid. This week, as I battle with reality and shortcomings, I am seriously interested in re-examining the experience of failure. Ultimately, failure is just a perception--it is like a plastic bottle that we can throw in the garbage where it will have a negative impact on our planet, or we can repurpose it and give it new life.

How does the world around us shape our notion of failure? How might it encourage our fears about failure? And how might we as individuals transcend the experience of failure (since it is a natural part of living) and view it as a pivotal learning point?

Pierrot, Pablo Picasso, 1918

Besides viewing the play by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos (No Exit), what can we do to face the crux of existence? As Sartre believed, existentialism precedes essence--we do not come prepackaged to fit in some essential category. We see his characters each condemn one another over the failure to live up to the image that, now dead and in hell all together, each one still maintains of him or herself. The message: We are not what we think we are, as we can change from day to day. Rather, our existence, i.e. how we live, will determine our essence. Nothing, in reality, is pre-given. We must take full responsibility for our actions. This means A) to not blame another for our situation and B) to care too much about what the "image" is that we have of ourselves. Are we really living our "image"? If the answer is no, there's no sense trying to convince ourselves or others of what we think we are. Yet everyone can think of something who demonstrates bad faith--i.e. one who thinks they are a great person or a connoisseur of this or that, when really they are talking from a place of ego, with very little knowledge and experience to go with.

Muhammed said, Do not theorize

about essence. All speculations

are just more layers of coverings.

Human beings love coverings.

~Rumi, "Body Intelligence"

We need to see try harder to things as they really are. This is cultivating awareness and perception. Then, we can see the question is not if we are living our image, but perhaps: How alive are we?

Turning the light on ourselves in all the deepest recesses and crevices of our heart is deep excavation work, but is the only way to eliminate bad faith and those coverings. This is an opportunity for true individual growth and development, where the audience is only the humble self who can be amazed by the grace that helps us to learn in life. It is possible to discovers the joys of surrender, vulnerability, acceptance, and tolerance even while suffering.

“The nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”

~Bhagavad Gita 2.14

Likewise, we should learn to tolerate success and failure. Thinking beyond this dichotomy, why not just pursue one's passion in life? And so, a thought to help us along is this: Allow failure to help you loosen your attachment to outcomes.

If you have had the chance to become acquainted with works like Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, you may have been amazed by the revolutionary notion that we should not be attached to the fruits of our actions. Yes, do the action that is good, whether for the sake of duty and karma or of devotion. But do not expect a certain result from that action. This helps when thinking about any area of our life where we are hoping for "success." Act like a good x or y, and you will become that through practice and repetition.

We can learn to detach from the notion of failing by focusing on a certain area of our life and simply considering the way we express ourself in that area. After all, a musician who loves music is not a good musician if he does not practice.



They say that our actions are reinforced by a belief we hold. We can change our beliefs in order to align our actions in the right way if we are off the mark. How can I be a good parent, a good business person, a good friend? Reformatting your identity begins in your mind where you view yourself as someone who does something in a spectacular way--and then act accordingly. What does a successful business person do? What does a good parent do? What does a good friend do? Do that. That is good faith. That type of existence may one day lead to bonafide essence, but that is neither here or there. Focus on cultivating the way you live in the now.

Repetition means we are practicing and honing our skills. Sitting around theorizing what perfection is or looks like doesn't get us anywhere. "The only way to get past the failures is to go through the volume of work to begin with," says James Clear in an interview with Srini Rao of The Unmistakable Creative. Volume and repetition may entail lots of failures. But as Clear reminds us: we do not die from failure.

And when we gain comfort in competency after much effort, we should not become complacent with our practice. We can hone our skills further--in fact, for life. Look to the people with a 50-year career span and all the depth and interesting peaks of their work. Picasso was dedicated to art for 80 years and look at the diversity (and impact) of his work! One must do something for ten years before you gain a semblance of excellence. This is something millennials are said to struggle with... They have been so pumped up with the notion that they will make a difference that they get depressed when, in their first job (which they have only had for 8 months), they feel they aren't making an impact. Ask those who have the experience of age: life requires patience and perseverance; life is the true test.

Various styles within Pablo Picasso's corpus

"Most of the time we try to prevent failure," James Clear says. We do this by theorizing how we will succeed, coming up with the best plan, and writing down our best goals. Guilty as charged.

What can we do to cultivate our awareness and perception? Sadhguru responds rather socratically: How long did you take to learn how to read and write? Consider that it took a few years to learn to make sentences; you give so much to learn how to use words....

To quickly increase your awareness, there is the remedy of the realization of mortality--the fact is that many people will not live until tomorrow, yet we all think we are invincible. As Sadhguru says, "Only when you are conscious about your mortality will you want to truly know the nature of this life."

I believe this to be very true, from my experience of having a disease: "If you know you are mortal suddenly you will see that you have no time to do any nonsense which doesn't mean anything to you. You will do only what really matters to your life.You have no time to do any rubbish with anybody. You will have time to only to do the best things you want to do, what you truly care to do in your life, and nothing other than that; and that is what you should be doing because it's a very limited amount of time. I want you to know it's a very brief life, that is, if you're a joyful person. If you're miserable then of course it is a very long life." ~Sadhguru

So basically he seems to say: stop doing the nonsense you are doing (because you think you are immortal)! What a good man to remind us of this. 

To be a human being is not easy. Here is a rather pathetic (pathos, related to "suffering") image to inspire us to embrace failure as we blossom, Pierrot, the fool, with "his physical insularity; his poignant lapses into mutism...; his white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the dead; his often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be-vanquished unworldly naïveté—all conspir[ing] to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the commedia dell'arte and into the larger realm of myth: the 'sad clown' of the postmodern era".... [Wikipedia]

Perhaps, to be an artist, to make art,
to be creative, to transcend, or to have a mythic quality,
you must have played the fool and failed.

So how alive do you feel? 

Being half-alive is torture, as Sadhguru says.

Our ability to experience must be enlarged!

"Body Intelligence"

There are guides who can show you the way. Use them.

But they will not satisfy your longing. 

Keep wanting the connection with presence
with all your pulsing energy.

The throbbing vein will take you further than any thinking.

Muhammed said, Do not theorize about essence.
All speculations are just more layers of coverings.

Human beings love coverings.

They think the designs on the curtains are what is being concealed.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Do not claim them. 

Feel the artistry moving through,
and be silent.

~Rumi

Saturday bhakti sunset

Love makes people perfect

Devotion makes people complete

Happiness is momentary

Video credit: Thanks to cousins, Gian Luca and Paolo

It doesn't matter the abandonment

It doesn't matter the grief

It doesn't matter the feeling you don't belong

Selfless love mends

It softens, purifies, cleanses

It opens the eyes to dreams that billow from the belly

It doesn’t matter the smallness

The past sheds its darkness when all that has value is offered

Like a diamond in the rough

A metronome keeps time for ritual

The sound of belonging is a drum from many distances away

Weaknesses crack me open like a worn-out pot

As my father hears me through his questions

And my family bids the rough edges to melt away

And to be even stronger than I have been yet

Grace let the roots of the flower, wilting in grey, take root in beige at the foot of a silver blue

Love connects hearts and slowly turns the world around again, opening the heart the way it needed for so long, to be lifted, expressed, heard

Now creative devotion can come natural, free, with a smile

Shadows fall away from the face as the light of love visits

The heart is so delicate, like the skin

I flick my sins away like a stinky cigarette

I wobble as I dig deep, lifting my energy up to the supreme, my ultimate goal, the source of breath and heart

David Bowie, incarnation of Pierrot

David Bowie, holding a book on Buster Keaton to his face (1975)

Fans of David Bowie know he was a genius in his art and person, with his theatricality, his intelligence, his music and costumes. Fans of David Bowie know he was a genius in his art and person, with his theatricality, his intelligence, his music and costumes. If you like the song "Ashes to Ashes," the video is worth a revisit, and you may enjoy thoughts I share below.

I find David Bowie to be an easy hero because, as Fox writes in David Bowie as art school, he "shared his finds with anyone who would listen. It’s the closet teacher in me, he once said. I love introducing people to new things."

His artistry and literariness are admirable. He was experimental, thoughtful, and sublime; these qualities seeped into his words that how he lived his life on earth.

Bowie on set of The Man Who Fell to Earth

Today I woke up and something inside of me wanted to connect with David Bowie, the dearly departed. On my drive this morning, these lyrics from 1980 popped in my head, Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom's a junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low. If you know Bowie's 1969 "Space Oddity," you'll catch the reappearance of Major Tom two decades later in Bowie's 1990 "Ashes to Ashes," though he seems to have had a bit of a bad go since we last heard of him.

Bowie reveals that self-referentiality in any body of work is always a place to contemplate the making of meaning. David Robert Jones, aka David Bowie, was an avid reader. In interviews, he would refer to Roland Barthes, the literary theorist par excellence. (The French lit PhD in me couldn't help but love David Bowie.) Then, he was alluding to French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean Genet with his song title "The Jean Genie" (both these literary stars, Barthes and Genet, were considered the most holy and cutting-edge in the French department at Emory University. Like I said, Bowie is my easy hero).

In terms of this mise en abyme--or self-referentiality--the Wikipedia entry on "Ashes to Ashes" does a fantastic job of describing what's going on in the song, as there are so (too) many layers in each line of this song:

"Instead of a hippie astronaut who casually slips the bonds of a crass and material world to journey beyond the stars, the song describes Major Tom as a 'junkie, strung out in heaven's high, hitting an all-time low.' This lyric was interpreted as a play on the title of Bowie's 1977 album Low, which charted his withdrawal inwards following his drug excesses in America a short time before, another reversal of Major Tom's original withdrawal 'outwards' or towards space.

The final lines, 'My mother said, to get things done, you'd better not mess with Major Tom,' have been compared to the verse from a nursery rhyme: 'My mother said / That I never should / Play with the gypsies in the wood.

Bowie himself said in an interview with NME shortly after the single's release, 'It really is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's about space men becoming junkies (laughs).'"

The theatricality of Bowie made his career so wildly experimental and prolific; each phase can be likened to one of Picasso's. Here in the official video of "Ashes to Ashes," the Englishman beautifully, fantastically, incarnates Pierrot, the stock character from the Commedia dell'Arte of the 1500s who was appropriated and reappropriated in the French theatrical tradition--to the point that the mime is known (even by Italians) by the French version of the original Italian name, Pedrolino.

"I've never done good things

I've never done bad things

I've never done anything out of the blue"

With this lyric, one hears the back-up vocals, the "dead-pan and chanted background voices," of "whoa-oh" that follows and echoes the lead in a striking contrast that, to me, is almost ironic.

And now, for our listening & viewing pleasure:

"My mama said to get things done you better not mess with Major Tom."

I am just speculating but it seems that Major Tom, who turned junkie, could be taken as a reminder to not get involved in drugs. Although, when it comes to advising against doing drugs, I personally can't help chuckling thinking of one of my favorite lines from the British film, Love Actually, where Billy, the rock star-wannabe character who just had a break with a number one hit, gives the following advice to the camera and audiences at home. Brief pause for a comical interlude:

In all seriousness, and in self-reflection, Bowie captures the problem with drugs in "Ashes to Ashes"--a suggestive title no matter which theme you hear in the song lyrics: "Time and time again I tell myself, I'll stay clean tonight."

 

There is much one could say about the video of "Ashes to Ashes," the most expensive music video production at the time due to the solarized light and multiple locations. The threads that tie the fragments of identity one to the other, theatrical to real self (which is which?) are interesting. The unmasked Bowie is seen in a padded room of psychological interrogation, disturbance, and isolation, where he alternately sits in a solitary chair or curled up, huddling in the corner. Or how about the chair in the kitchen. Out and about with other characters, he is in costume, like most of us. The references to being a junkie are reflected in an alienistic connection through the video's images of him tied via tubes to a machine, which has taken the place of---or stands in for---one's connection to a womb, to drugs, to the guitar... basically, the connection to whatever one attaches to--life even--which could BREAK any second. Major Tom is the falsity of any of our attachments that help us to somehow "function" in life--but which are ultimately a horrifically artificial construction.

And as for this BREAK in connection, we go back to Space Oddity: "Planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do"

Ground Control to Major Tom

Your circuit's dead

There's something wrong

Can ya hear me Major Tom

Can ya hear me Major Tom

Can ya hear me Major Tom

Can you... hear/here am I floating on my tin can

Far above the moon

Planet earth is blue

and there's nothing I can do

Again, the work of artists who involve self-referentiality is so rich as their own oeuvre suggests a network of meaning and offers insight to one's own limitations (and hopes for transcendence). "That's the terror of knowing what this world about, watching some good friend scream 'Let me out!'" as he sings with Freddie Mercury (Queen) in "Under Pressure" (1982).

Jumping forward to the new millennium now. Though I am no connoisseur of this album, and probably will never be, for various reasons, I find this review of David Bowie's The Next Day super thoughtful, purely as a fan and someone who is wearing an earring of Ziggy Stardust's face today. The Next Day was his 24th and penultimate album, released in March 2013. The first single of the album, "Where Are We Now?", had been released on itunes on January 8th, 2013, his 66th birthday. David Bowie had been silent for over a decade (with some rumors of ill health). As Upcut writes so perfectly in this review: "January 8 was a Tuesday. We awoke to headlines that made us rub our sleepy eyes in disbelief. Bowie had stolen in like a thief in the night, uploading a new single on his 66th birthday (“Where Are We Now?”) and announcing the March release of an album (The Next Day) that had been recorded in conditions of Freemason-esque secrecy."

The key terms used in the aforementioned article, whether by Bowie, Visconti (long-time producer of Bowie's work), or Upcut are worth isolating, suggesting a grander meaning and matrix to these themes, and at this moment of his life:


misdirection         vulnerability         "blistering rock"        melancholia       old haunts       faded memories       mortality              honesty       disclosure


"Bowie has a way of composing lyrics in non-linear fragments, but with manifest emotion within those fragments, so that the finished song seems to apply both to him and to mankind as a whole. He’s anxious. It’s an anxious world. He feels alone. The world is a lonely place."

Where are we without artists like Bowie? If you listen to lyrics on this 2013 album you'll hear Bowie critique the ersatz celebrity of reality TV. As Uncut writes of his perspective in this review, "This is Stepford Wives territory: celebrities with no lights on inside, menacing, robotic, inhuman. Bowie, losing patience with them, portrays them as a shamed, scared tribe huddling together in tight packs, bonded by paranoia, with radiant smiles but vacant eyes, and with – get this – 'child wives' in tow. 'We will never be rid of these stars, but I hope they live forever,' he concludes with derision."

Poetic lives and brushes

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then...

As you may know, poet Mary Oliver recently passed away, and while I did not know her work while she was alive, I am grateful to have read her verses as they have popped up in the media and on NPR. One is easily inspired to read more of her poetry, as her refreshing love for words and her in-tuneness with nature is refreshing and delightful, as sensed in poems like this:

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

And then, the next poem, her four-poem series on her brush with death/cancer, strikes a nerve with me as I recently was at the Cancer Center and was told that they cannot tell me if I will have cancer or not--something I knew but only know the more I read. There has been a lot going on with the discovery of certain things that other FAP patients have had happen, things shared on our forum, and the growing concern over the polyps I actually have is... deafening at times. But then I read this poem, and I understand the overtones of grief AND hopefulness. 

But still... cancer has taken many great people, one of which was my aunt, for a sole example. Mary Oliver beat lung cancer: "It feels like death has left its calling card" and though she survived she was "all the same, kind of shocked." Having had a similar experience in beating cancer, in a way, I appreciate her words. It's hard to speak of, and that is perhaps why it is so important that cancer patients share their story if they wish--first because it is therapeutic. 

I would contend that the arts, literature, music--not to mention chanting hare krishna hare krishna--are the best for any patient, as it helps us look beyond the material, the terminal, the fatalism, the fear, and to hear something else. One can reflect on the end of life with writers and poets. With artists and musicians and good huggers. 

You can also listen to an interview with Mary Oliver as she talks about her cancer episode and reads the following poems aloud:

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac

by Mary Oliver

1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest

without a sound.

The hunter, strapped to his rifle,

the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.

2.

The question is,

what will it be like

after the last day?

Will I float

into the sky

or will I fray

within the earth or a river—

remembering nothing?

How desperate I would be

if I couldn’t remember

the sun rising, if I couldn’t

remember trees, rivers; if I couldn’t

even remember, beloved,

your beloved name.

3.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

4.

Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat,

all the fragile blue flowers in bloom

in the shrubs in the yard next door had

tumbled from the shrubs and lay

wrinkled and fading in the grass. But

this morning the shrubs were full of

the blue flowers again. There wasn’t

a single one on the grass. How, I

wondered, did they roll back up to

the branches, that fiercely wanting,

as we all do, just a little more of 

life?

The dash between the opening and closing dates of her life is a deeply poetic one. She seems to have gracefully lived up to her goal in life, a beautiful sentiment that she phrased so wonderfully: "When it's over, I want to say all my life/ I was a bride married to amazement." This quote is an invigorating source of inspiration, if recalled daily--and the world needs more of this perspective.

And to my dear aunt Robin, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your arm around my shoulder the other night. I thank you for the example of strength and the model of a courageous mother that you continue to be to me.

Thank you for your shining love, a bright star listening in on it all.

January is David Bowie month

There is a lot I could say about David Bowie, and particularly on connecting with his song Space Oddity before a scary eight-hour operation. (This was at a time when it was hard to connect to anything in the real world.) David Bowie was a unique outlet for many people. Imagine how much for his widow, Iman. I was recently touched in this month of his birthday (the 8th) and death (the 10th) to read here some of her beautiful sentiments about her late husband. They were a fantastic couple, and hearing either one talk about the other, the few times I have, was enough to be so glad that their stars aligned. It's moments like that make the world seem right, with all the quirky people and mess in it.

And if you're not Iman, you can still love the man who fell to earth. Not as much, and not loving him for the man he actually was as she did, but as a fan for his mind and the clever moves, lyrical words, and surreal aspects he brought to us when he strutted into the music world. What a unique splash in the world of rock-n-roll.

He was a brilliant individual talking about duality and duplicity and fragmentation, and if you don't believe me listen to him predict what the internet would be and do ("nihilistic" being just one of the terms he uses)--and see how the journalist is just boggled by the insights Bowie shares in the following, profound interview from 1999 where he says: "I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we are actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying." Brilliant. "It's an alien life form," he said, twenty years ago.

And now, this musical interlude....

If you have the chance, go see the David Bowie Is exhibit if it comes near you.
I saw it at the Brooklyn museum, and it blew my mind to see just how prolific and creative he was.

Srila Prabhupada

A. C. Bhakti Vedanta Swami Prabhupada

"We don't learn in 5 minutes, 10 minutes. It requires time."

Q: And can we really undo the karma of all our past lives in this one life? 

A: "It takes one minute"

"What Krishna says to do?" ...quoting the Gita...

Full surrender; then you come to me without any doubt.
Everything is there. Krishna has given everything fully.
If we accept it, it is very simple. There is no difficulty."

"A diseased man if he doesn't care for medicine, he dies, he suffers, that's all."

Lyrics: "When I see his love I know
I have a long, long way to go
When will I taste the love he is feeling inside?"

The following text en rose is taken from a blog I stumbled onto called The Door Ajar to Vraja, and is dated February 3, 2018: In the imaginary scene of the poem Krishna is speaking confidentially to a friend sometime after Kurukshetra, in a mixture of reminiscences and emotions, from Dwarka, to the rasa dance, to the meeting in Kurukshetra. In doing so Krishna reveals the secret depths of his love. Krishna never puts his devotees through something which He does not take also upon Himself.

SD 32.21 "Even when I removed Myself from your sight by suddenly disappearing,
I never stopped loving you."

GC 23.39 "O dearest Gopis! The first separation has been most difficult for me."

My solitude nestled
in the recesses of the night,
and like shadows that come forth
with brighter light,
its agony too appeared,
by moonlit memories
of their love for Me.

With the ardent desire
for a tidal wave
of this ocean of their love and my love,
to flood the hearts and the stars,
I disappeared,
causing their lamentation,
and thirstily I drank from the same (1)
chalice of longing emotions
welling up from purest love.

Spying unseen
upon their absorption and tribulation
while they searched for Me,
with breathless glances,
in incessant meditation
unwavering, on Me only,
I also endured separation, (2)
and could wait no more
for their embraces (3)
as the tears of love,
furrowing their faces,
were gushing like ecstatic rivers
of their sweetest love.

And impatient,
covetous of the mellows
flourishing in their hearts,
in that innermost hollow I stood,
a restless spectator of their total love,
incapable of repaying
the wealth of devotion
of my most beloveds.

In the most famous and also infamous (4)
state of Godhood of being self-satisfied,
no one could fathom why I cried,
why my heart sighed,
breathless from feeling separation,
dragged and dependent on
their selfless adoration.

I smiled anew
to soothe their hearts,
and hiding my anguish,
asked for forgiveness.
They offered their fragrant ghee of love, (5)
and the dense honey
of sulkiness,
thus plundering my love,
so that I, delighted, sold myself. (6)

Transcribed below is a salient quote from Prabhupada's lecture in the video just below:

"I, you, everyone of us, we have the trouble at the time of death and at the time of birth, birth and death. We are living entity, we are living soul. Birth and death take place of this body. The body takes birth and the body is vanquished. Death means sleeping for seven months, that’s all. That is death.

The soul is when this body is unfit for living, the soul gives up this body and, by superior arrangement, the soul is put again into the womb of a particular type of mother and the soul develops a particular type of body[.…] So, it is a great science: How the soul, the living soul, is in contact with this material body and how he’s transmigrating from one body to another. The example is given just like: We are just like when the garment or shirt or coat becomes too old, we give it up and we accept another shirt or coat. Similarly, I, you, every one of us, we are spirit-soul. We are given a type of body and shirt and coat by the arrangement of material nature. That particular body is given to us for our particular type of standard of living. Just like you: European, American, Australian… You have got a particular type, and you are given an opportunity, a particular standard of living.... So if an Indian comes [to your city--Melbourne, Australia--in this case], they will be surprised by this standard of living [....] 
'I am suffering! Why you have to accept birth? Why you have to accept death? Why you have to accept disease? Why you have to accept old age?' These are the problems. There are the problems and these problems can be solved in human form of life--not in the life of cats and dogs. They cannot. So our only request is that you make your life successful, come to the real understanding of your existence, and this is possible simply by chanting Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare”

 

This last video may produce an impression, a disclaimer for sensitive viewers. It is of Prabhupada preparing to depart, as devotees chant and give love.

Noel, Noel

Nothing like Christmastime with lots of family--and four generations together--

to make one feel hopeful, grateful, expectant again. . .

Joy, peace and love to all: Life is beautiful!

Feeling "greatful" for my mother, nana, and son

Images of love from around the world to celebrate its unique forms and potential:

Wuluk Bu kissing young cafe, just a few days old.
In the Afghan Kyrgyz community, courtesy of National Geographic

In the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Congo,
Courtesy of African Parks Network 

Zebra love, courtesy of Safaridotcom

Syrian artist Tammam Azzam projects Gustave Klimt's The Kiss.
"I chose it as an icon of love, a way of looking for the stories of love 
behind this wall that was completely obliterated by the machinery of war."
Courtesy of Thingsglobe