A Daily Chronicle of Kauai's Hindu Monastery

Satguru Siva Yogaswami Jaffna, Sri Lanka		Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami Kauai's Hindu Monastery, USA
	December 1, 1999 - Pushya

Gurudeva in a pensive mood this morning. Our three-times-a-year monks' retreat, called Sadhu Paksha (Paksha means fortnight, or two week period) began today. During the morning, Gurudeva worked with the members of the Pillaiyar Kulam (that's the groups that handles all our publications sales, purchasing, and business matters). They are moving their offices today, bringing their team into closer proximity for the winter. New! Satguru Speaks Again! Today's TAKA talk: Today's Cybertalk: Gurudeva concludes his talk on Darshan from last week by discussing his views on conversion to Hinduism and the Hindu revival which is taking place today. MP3 Streaming: Use the QuickTime controller above to listen to Gurudeva's upadesha in MP3 streaming mode. You must have the QuickTime plug-in installed in your browser. (Click here to get QuickTime.) Click here for Real Audio For those unable to play streaming MP3 or RealAudio: Option-click here to download MP3 file to your computer. Option-click here to download WAV file to your computer. 80 Australian Tree Ferns arrived at the monastery from a collector. They are just 12 inches high now, but grow to 30 feet. Very tropical looking creatures. Something very special is happening this week. Twenty of our most collectible ti plants are all flowering at exactly the same time. This has never happened in all these decades, so we are planning something special. We are putting brown paper bags over the flowering plants, to keep the honeybees away. We don't want them pollinating the flowers. Why is that? Well, we will go out each morning for the next couple of weeks and take the bags off and collect our own pollen with a small paint brush. Then we will go to one of the great specimens (this is a miniature ti plant called Camaroon, from Africa!) and paint the pollen from one on the other, and replace the bag so the bees don't disturb our choices. This is Tricolor, from Puerto Rico, notice the beginning of the flowers, the purple stalks in the upper left of this photo. If the crosses are good, we will end up with distinctive species, like this graceful and wavy dwarf. And these will become trading gifts. We have developed most of our amazing plant collection by trading with other collectors around the world. In March a Big Time collector from Florida is visiting, so we are getting ready for him. Our Song of India which is growing over by the Umbrella Ganesha is looking good this morning. We want acknowledge the generous gifts of a local lady who comes to the temple to pray for her family's health and well-being. She is from Thailand originally, settled on Kauai. She brings big baskets of food and flowers, and she makes lovely garlands with her own hands for the Srystal Lingam. Here is one, up close. So lovely. Mahalo nui loa--thatÍs our Hawaiian "thank you." As lunch approaches we visit Vel Mahalingum on the left with Diksha Kandar. Diksha just bought a new iBook and it arrived. He plans to go back to his home and take some special courses and learn some scanning and OCR skills so he can help the magazine team with some projects next year. Thanks, Diksha, for thinking ahead like that. We need 100 more just like you to help Hinduism Today. Year 2000 March Caribbean Innersearch Taking Reservations Now Don't Delay as the group is limited in size Gurudeva says, "Come with me to the Caribbean next March, on the Year 2000 Innersearch. Besides our wonderful study together, we are planning a gala gathering of Hindus in Trinidad for one day." We will depart from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on March 25th and return to Fort Lauderdale on April 4th and be traveling on Holland America's spectacular, brand new cruise ship, the MS/Volendam. For information contact our wonderful tour agent who will be conducting the Innersearch: Kailash and Indra Dhaksinamurthi of Search Beyond Adventures, Inc. ASAP at search11@mail.idt.net Very Important!: Be sure to include your mailing address and phone number in the body of your message! Kailash will be mailing you information, but if you don't send an address there is nothing he can do.
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