Sharing Music and Nature and Bliss

We’ve been blessed by several visitors from other Ananda colonies recently. First, Nayaswamis Raghu and Sabari came down from Sacramento for a weekend. They led Sunday service, taught a class on moving from Happiness to Bliss, and — first but not least — Raghu led the Friday evening kirtan. It was a delightful time to indulge in a few extra Indian bhajans, as well as to enjoy a chanting reunion with Raghu, who used to lead many kirtans here before moving to Sacramento. Not only do we have a few photos of the evening, but there are even recordings of many of the chants that you can download.

This past week we’ve had Nayaswamis Durga and Vidura with us from Ananda Village. On Saturday, Vidura and Dambara organized a hike at Rancho San Antonio, which included a number of Bharat’s famous Sharing Nature games at the top of a hill with a beautiful view. (Photos from that day are here.) Durga and Vidura gave a satsang at Chela Bhavan last night, filling us in on various happenings up at the Village and elsewhere, including the plans for the new temple. They also gave Sunday service last weekend, and will again this coming weekend, so if you haven’t gotten to meet them yet, there’s still time!

This Is What Babaji Had in Mind

[Guest post courtesy of Manisha, with photos from several contributors.]

When Babaji sent Master to the United States all those years ago, he sent him to help us remember the ember of joy that we all have nestled quietly in our hearts. He sent him so we could remember how to live our lives in joy, how to bring joy into our everyday lives. How to garden with joy, how to cook with joy, how to sit in front of a computer with joy, how to sit in traffic with joy.

Swamiji founded Ananda in order to give us a place where we could live amongst friends, like-minded souls, and practice our spirituality on a day-to-day basis. He’s encouraged us to be practical in our spirituality, given us examples of how to live a perfectly normal Western life, but one infused with joy, which makes it extraordinary. This is what Babaji had in mind when he sent Master to the West.

At Ananda Palo Alto, we’ve created a beautiful mandir, a beautiful courtyard there, beautiful gardens here, beautiful edible gardens, and we’ve brought beauty and practicality into our homes. We’ve surrounded ourselves with beauty and simplicity, and that has brightened those soft embers of joy.

Master’s Kitchen is the heart of our community. It’s one of the main places where we come to be together, simply, joyfully. All day Saturday and Sunday in the midst of all the cooking and decorating, people wandered in and chatted. Some stayed for a while and then left and went about their busy days. Amy came and snipped mint leaves and coaxed pomegranate seeds out of their leathery cases. Chidambar and Dambara came and whittled away at Amara’s Cinderella pumpkin, then Joey came and someone handed him a knife, and together they turned Cinderella’s coach into 3 cm cubes, chatting and laughing together, this joyful blending of generations. Marilyn came and helped shave tiny flowerets off a sprawling landscape of cauliflower. Camella took our brimming bowls and transformed each morsel into delectable magic, every mouthful infused with our joy, with Joey’s and Chidambar’s and Amy’s. Uma Devi and D’Arcy threaded their way in and out, washing towels, emptying garbage cans, draping saris, decorating tables, creating this exotic haven. Everything was bubbling with quiet joy. Zana dropped by and we asked, “Hey! Do you want to be a server?” and she said, “YES!” Rosalva said, “That sounds like fun.” We turned to Joey, and he nodded and said, “Okay.” And there he was Sunday night serving alongside everyone else, his heart so full of beauty that it makes one weep. This is what Babaji had in mind.

On Sunday we boiled dried peas in an ancient tradition, added spices and roots, ladled it into bowls, drizzled it with walnut oil, sprinkling it with cilantro. We painted tofu with rich pomegranate molasses, thick with cinnamon and garlic, then baked it and perched it atop a dazzling winter tabbouleh. We roasted the pumpkin in garlic and allspice, tossed it with chickpeas and red onions, added a splash of tahini and sent it out to the waiting crowd. We simmered Medjool dates in espresso and cinnamon, nestled them against a scoop of thick yogurt. Next to the dates we spread orange slices sprinkled with dried rose petals and pomegranate seeds. Not to be outshone, a wedge of pistachio and almond tart, sprinkled with orange zest and crunched pistachio, completed the dessert plates. . .  everything, everything, infused with our joy. This is what Babaji had in mind.

The “House Husbands” buddied up to entertain us, sharing their homemaking tips, fueled by power tools galore. D’Arcy danced an ancient spiritual dance, which was received with cheers and riotous applause.

Throughout the evening diners chatted and laughed, receiving all that joy, making it their own, taking it home and tucking it under their pillows while they slept, sharing it with everyone they meet, the next day and the next day, and the next.

This is what Babaji had in mind. This community, that room, that meal, that moment, and the next and the next and the next.

We transform the rooms around us to reflect the joy that we feel in our hearts as we go about our day-to-day lives. We transformed the school, and the mandir, the courtyard, our temple here, Chela Bhavan, the gardens, and now we come to Master’s Kitchen. Our stoves have been loyally hanging on by a thread, heating their little hearts out, waiting until that moment, when we come together, share our joy, and create the energy to transform Master’s Kitchen into the visibly beautiful heart of our community, reflecting what it already is in spirit.

We have started moving that spirit of joy into visible beauty and efficiency. We didn’t do it all Sunday night, but we have started, taking the first step, and taking it with joy, because that is what Babaji had in mind.

Happy New Year!

Our New Year’s Eve service this (well, last) year started with a meditation and two sets of initiations. We welcomed Arthur, Amy, Debórah, and Ken as Pilgrims, and Biraj and Lahari as Nayaswamis. The Nayaswami initiation includes a fire ceremony, symbolically offering the ego up to God, and also making a nice prelude to the latter part of the service.

Some of you may remember our service a year ago, which turned out to be rather more exciting than expected due to a fire ceremony that developed into a blazing pool of wax. You will be relieved (or, in Asha’s case, disappointed) to hear that we have since developed what Master might coyly call “certain yogic techniques” to avoid conflagration, including fewer candles, and extra metal bowls to catch the burning paper. And so we were all able safely to offer our New Year’s resolutions and prayers into the fire of Divine Light.

New Year’s Eve service wraps up relatively early around here (after all, to paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita, what is 9pm to the worldly man is midnight to the yogi), but it’s not the end of our New Year festivities. On January 5th we celebrated Yogananda’s birthday, and by extension, the spiritual birthday of each one of us. In honor of the day we each had a chance to affirm or renew our commitment to the spiritual path, at whatever stage we’ve reached. The renewals even included a few new initiations: Judy as a Sadhaka, and Liz and D’Arcy as Sevakas.

We didn’t manage any photos of the evening, or of the lovely altar, but here’s one from last year, and Master hardly seems to have aged a day since then.

The Christmas Collection

This past week was a veritable marathon of Christmas joy. We started on Saturday with our annual all-day meditation, and it seemed especially sweet to have it land so close to Christmas Day itself this year. Those eight hours are a beautiful chance to become more deeply aware of the feeling of Christmastime, and trace it inward and upward back to Jesus and to God.

The Christmas Eve service is always particularly special as well. There’s a feeling of an alternate reality to it: coming to church at night instead of the morning, and having many of the usual elements of a service rearranged with new music — not to mention being visited by angels, wise men, and baby Jesus himself with his family. The feeling of being in a completely different space brings everyone’s attention to a clearer, more present focus, and intensifies the whole experience. (I will take an aside here to put on my East West hat and mention that if you’ve never spent 7 hours in retail on Dec 24th and then gone straight to Christmas Eve service, then you haven’t truly experienced the nature of duality. But even so, the evening’s vibrations were so powerful that I hardly noticed falling off that particular cliff.)

Christmas Day featured an expanded dramatization of the Christmas story, complete with dual-sized kings and angels, and narrated by Rabbi Asha in full storytelling mode. The blessings at the end of the story/service came in two varieties as well: the touch of light and the touch of glitter, administered by the taller and shorter angels, respectively.

The Christmas banquet entertainment managed to fill a glaring hole in the previous week’s caroling. I refer, of course, to The Twelve Days of Christmas, which were dutifully and enthusiastically enacted by assigned tables of piping pipers, golden rings, and apparently a whole family of partridges in a pear tree.

Our Temple of All Religions also got to spend a few minutes being a temple of all (or at least more) languages. We sang Silent Night with four extra renditions — German, Italian, French, and Spanish — with anyone who was willing to take a shot at it welcomed up to join the performers on the language of their choice. (Anybody want to translate this into a few more languages for next year? Sanskrit, perhaps?)

Enjoy the rest of the photos, and may you carry the Christmas bliss with you into the new year!

Food and Singing, and Vice Versa

David and Asha hosted several Christmas parties this weekend at Chela Bhavan, their home in the residential community. (As an aside, their celestially blue Christmas tree was apparently imported directly from the astral world this season.) The Friday and Saturday parties are “duplicates” so as to be available for as many people’s schedules as possible, though a great many of us just go to both. ’Tis the season, after all, and I do mean for eating. The “sweets and savories” potluck leaned heavily yet delightfully towards the sweet end of the scale, with plenty to stuff all the assembled multitudes.

’Tis also the season for singing, and potluck goodies make excellent fuel for Christmas carols. We spent the remainder of each evening joyfully sharing both traditional carols and favorite selections from Swami Kriyananda’s Christmas music. (More pictures of both parties are here, though sadly, no recordings. Had to be there!)

Left: Two santa-musicians trying to figure out a tricky bit of music.

Right: Singers doing just fine, regardless.

So that was Friday and Saturday. The party on Sunday was completely and utterly different. That night we sang first, and then ate. And actually, we sang all around the neighborhood, so that bit was different, too. It was a surprisingly warm night, perfect for caroling and bringing a little extra music and joy to all our neighbors. Highlights included launching carols at kids in an upstairs window while their parents were busy watching the football game, being joined in “Good King Wenceslas” by a residential trumpet player, and a final song at Master’s shrine that left everybody spellbound in silence afterwards. 

May your holy season be full of tasty treats and sublime sounds!

Christmas Concert

Our Christmas Concert last weekend was deliciously prefaced by our traditional Christmas Concert Lunch of vegetarian chili and cornbread, which is a great way to warm up on a winter afternoon.

And after the food to warm our bodies came the music to warm our souls. One of the fun things about our Christmas concerts is that we get to dip into the vast troves of beautiful spiritual music that has been written for this season over the centuries. Some of the new treasures this year included a men’s ensemble performing a couple of medieval and renaissance pieces: a hauntingly beautiful Hayl, Mary, ful of grace, and the lively Spanish carol Riu Riu Chiu. (Yep, those are video links. Enjoy!)

Music, whether you’re singing or listening, is such a powerful tool for uplifting and directing our hearts’ feelings. This concert really felt like it set the stage for the whole Christmas season. Rani put it well in a comment afterwards: “I remembered how it felt last year... having spent December with all the Ananda events, at the end of the season I felt peaceful, hopeful, renewed emotionally and spiritually. Today, as I listened and watched, I knew it was happening again. It was everything I longed for and needed, and though of course many more wonderful events are coming, this one was... perfect. Thank you for all the effort and thought you put into our music. Never doubt that it makes a difference.”

And on that note, we’ll leave you with a bunch of photos, and a few more highlight videos:

I Wonder as I Wander (by John Niles)
God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen (traditional)
Boston (William Billings)
Thy Light Within Us Shining (Swamiji, of course)
Hallelujah Chorus (Handel)

And if you want to relive the entire concert (or experience it for the first time, if you missed it) you can download the entire thing as an mp3 (59MB).

Happy December!

A December Miscellany

Your news this week comes to you in several bite-sized tidbits. Think of these as appetizers preceding the multi-course gourmet meal of events (and Family News posts) that is a standard Ananda December.

Our beloved Ramani has just recently left Palo Alto to serve in Ananda L.A. Ramani was a huge force behind the gardens and the CSA program here, started a weekly healing prayer group, and has been a very dear friend to many of us. Before she left, we held a lovely “Go With Love” blessing ceremony for her, showering her with rose petals and good wishes for the next adventure.

If you were at Sunday Service this past weekend, you probably noticed a few conspicuous visitors. The movie being made about Ananda (working title: Cities of Light) wanted some shots from the Palo Alto community, and so they spent the day with us, both at church and at the community afterwards (when the sun miraculously came out just before we had to cancel most of the outside plans).

Left: The film crew sneaks up on Asha during her sermon.

Right: They appear to be filming a bush, but someone’s about to walk out from stage left, honestly. 

Sunday was also the date of our annual Ananda Crafts Fair. We had over a dozen artists offering a wide variety of beautiful handmade items ranging from wood worked altar items, elegant hand blown egg ornaments, music, artwork, devotional greeting cards, jewelry, herbal healing products, environmental friendly produce bags, mushroom kits, specialty preserved items, lovely scarfs, and more. Apparently no photographers, though, since I haven’t been able to get a hold of any photos.

And last but not least, advance notice for all you plan-ahead types: Nirmoha and Rosalva’s wedding will be the morning of June 8, 2013 at the Ananda Temple in Palo Alto. All Ananda people are welcome, so save the date! Following the ceremony there will be a potluck wedding reception at the community around noon.