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Petting the Temple Cows
After a day of teaching and more discussion and emails regarding the upheaval, I had a memory of petting one of the temple cows at Chidambaram. I was jetlagged and in sensory overload, and then I petted a most wonderful cow. I dropped into a space where I was perfectly at peace and unaware of the time and all the things going on around me. This space is always there for us, even in the absence of a sacred cow, and we practice so that we can find it more and more consistently, especially when we are being challenged.
I did not photograph the Chidambaram temple cow, although a nice Indian lady asked me if her husband could photograph the two of us with the cow, so she has a photograph of herself with the strange American lady in a sari who was petting the cow. I stopped to pet many cows after that. In one town, a man told me, as I was scritching a cow between ears and horns, that the cow would enjoy a banana.
In the Garden
I spent a delightful couple of hours in the garden with the birds this morning before heading up to teach at Willow Street. I weeded and dead-headed and watered. The birds and I both ate grapes right off the vine. Every year since this vine started to fruit, birds that are not here the rest of the year have appeared for the few weeks the grapes are ripening. I imagine that there is a bird listserve where some bird posts that Goodman’s grapes are ready. Come and get them. Neither my presence nor the cats on the screened porch deters them. The grapes are too delicious for them to allow their natural caution to interfere with immediate access.
Me, I know that I am a spoiled, middle-class urban gardener. If my survival depended on getting the whole harvest (as opposed to a large handful of grapes daily for three or four weeks), I would be fending off the birds instead of enjoying their presence. The squirrels and the tomatoes–that’s another matter altogether.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.




