Jai Siva Nataraja on a Snowy Afternoon

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.