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This is one of the saddest miracles I have witnessed, nevertheless it is another miracle performed by Lord Jagannatha for his dear devotee and should be narrated. Not all miracles have externally happy endings.
Here is one of our favorite bulls we were trying our best to save for many months. Because of his extreme skinny condition when he first arrived we called him “Boney Cow” when talking amongst ourselves, and the name stuck. It was not the best name, but it was the easiest way to understand who we were talking about visually. If I asked someone “Have you seen boney cow,” everyone knew who I was talking about even if they didn’t pay attention to all the cows and bulls who come through each day.
The word gotra literally means “that which protects cows”, and in general refers to a stable that protects a herd of cows from the weather and from wild animals. Likewise the family lineages of rishis and forefathers are also metaphorically called as “gotras”, as they are “protective stables” that guide and watch over humanity, which is likened to a herd of cows.
Kapila Muni is a young golden coloured bull calf who has been coming to our ashram for around 7 months now. When very young Kapila Muni’s mother died from a snake bite and he was abandoned on the street all alone. Somehow he found our ashram and has been sleeping here every day since. From the first day he came we have made sure to feed him extra so that he could become healthy and strong.
Here are three of the smaller street bulls we have been locking up for the last week so they don’t end up being sacrificed during the Eid festival. Today we finally let them free to be back on the street. They did not like being locked up in the day, but it was for their own good.
This is the last photo I took of Dayalu Baba, 14 days before he departed. Seeing it makes me sad because it foreshadows what was to come, with him walking away as he leaves us.
Yesterday (June 6th), another of our friends, Chandan prabhu, a long time devotee at Dayalu Baba’s ashram, passed away, just 10 days after baba had left. He was a professional mridanga player, and would always be there to help in the ashram and perform kirtan. I had known him for around 15 years, and his father was the one who sold us the farm land which we gave to Dayalu Baba for him to grow rice and sustain his ashram.
Yesterday (May 28th) at 10 am one of the great hidden sadhus of Odisha left his body and was placed in samadhi at his ashram in Mayurbhanj district of Odisha. Dayalu Baba had spent many decades roaming the forests around the sacred Ratna Giri mountain in the Salandi Reserve Forest and performing severe sadhana. He was a disciple of a great local saint named Rama Baba, who’s samadhi is now located in Jharkhand.
Recently we heard that one of the senior sadhus of this area who stays at the ashram in Chakratirtha had fell and hit his head, so we went to see how he was. He is now between 102 and 103 years old and due to his age has difficulty walking down steps.
Over the years I have heard countless stories in ISKCON about how Srila Prabhupada loved Charlie Chaplin. ISKCON guru Satsvarupa Das Goswami once even went so far as to call Charlie Chaplin as a representation of Lord Krishna: “In the Tenth Chapter of the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna shows how anything great comes from Him, so of humorists, Krishna is Charlie Chaplin.”
