4/7ths Retired- A Glimpse at Our Life

I just asked my wife Uttama when she sent out the last GVT news letter. “March… or maybe May?” she said with a quizzical look as she headed out the door to our daughter’s house to work on an outfit for our household Gaura Nitai for an upcoming festival where all the community Deities will come together. She promised to be back for dinner before heading out again to a baby shower for Ananda Dasi, wife of Kapila, whose wedding I preformed last year.

Time has flown since the last news letter. As we gear down toward retirement, our lives are going into overdrive. We are both working three days a week for employers who tolerate and even appreciate that on short notice we might take off on GVT business.

In May we left for over a month, first to Toronto where we facilitated the Strengthening the Bonds that Free Us course, then to New Vrndavana for the Festival of Inspiration where the GVT held two seminars, including the 2nd Marriage and Family Fest in which long term successful marriages were honoured. Another highlight was our “powerless point” presentation. The power failed so we lit a few gas lamps, had everyone move in close and raised our voices. It was like family life, sometimes you have to wing it and make it work. Next we attended the two day Annual General Meeting of the Grihastha Vision Team. When our son in-law heard we were going to a meeting, he thought it was a shame to attend a meeting after an enlivening festival. Some of the meetings he attends are like root canals. We explained that the GVT was an amazing group to work with. No one has ulterior motives, no control issues, no false egos, just a very sincere group of mature, balanced creative individuals with a strong desire to collaboratively make a contribution for the betterment of Srila Prabhupada’s mission. We brainstorm creative ways to use our experiences in working with couples and to find means to reach more devotees in ways that will be relevant and enlivening to them. A lot of the meeting was spent fine tuning the GVT’s upcoming book, Heart to Heart Connections; A Vaisnava Guide to Love, Service and Marriage. Personally I would compare an 8 hour GVT board meeting to..... well, maybe being able to sit down and eat ice cream (we’re talking homemade ice cream here) for 8 hours straight with no ill effects. In other words, I find it a very joyful, spiritual and uplifting experience, like nectar.

From there it was off to our second tour of duty in Guyana and Trinidad offering courses. This May, Berbiece Guyana must have set the world record for the most mosquitoes per square inch. And boy was it hot! During the hot humid nights, I curled my six foot three frame inside a narrow five foot ten bed being conscious, even in my sleep, that if I touched the mosquito net, innumerable stingers would pierce my flesh. Despite the austerities, I was thankful that Lord Krsna had put us in a position where we could render Srila Prabhupada some meaningful service. Truly service to Krsna and Guru shrinks the ocean of material miseries to the amount of water in the hoof print of a calf.

In Guyana and Trinidad, we piloted a follow up seminar to our main course that we had done the year before. It was a more personal experience for the couples attending. Some of the most popular sessions were the ones on prayer and on managing core hurts. After Crane, Guyana and Longdenville, Trinidad it was back to Saranagati to catch up at work and plant our garden.

Then 3 weeks later, we were off to Orlando Florida for the Smart Marriages Conference for 6 days of intensive seminars and training. This conference for therapists, counsellors and mentors has over 1400 attendees. We came away with inspiration, tools and ideas on how to increase our effectiveness in the GVT. One of the key note addresses mentioned a 1930s researcher, Joseph Unwin PhD. who for seven years studied 80 different civilizations with the intent of proving that marriage was irrelevant and even harmful to society. In the process of his work he had a 180 degree paradigm shift. He found that the strength and creativity of a society was depended the well being of the marriage institution and discovered that the demise of civilizations was preceded by a decline in the values of marriage. Further research on his work prompted me to write an article, Marriage in the Post 911 World, which appeared in ISKCON World News and is now on our web site. It also increased my conviction of the importance and urgency of the GVT’s work.

Home for a couple weeks of catching up, then it was off to catch a flight to Hillsborough North Carolina that should have been 8 hours in transit but turned into 19 hours. Like I always say…. “Marriage is a journey of adventure, not a resort destination.” There, with the assistance of my wife I performed the wedding ceremony of Rasacarya and Saci. It was a wonderful event and a potent opportunity to stress the significance of marriage and family in today’s world. I was touched when a friend of my wife’s forwarded her a class given in Alachua by the groom’s mother, in which she quoted many of the points I had presented at the wedding.

All this was interspersed with 4 trips to Vancouver for festivals, our son’s graduation, drawing cartoons for the GVT’s upcoming book, mentoring four couples, hosting weekly youth Bhagavad-Gita classes and chasing bears out of our garden. We can hardly wait for the other 3/7 ths of retirement to come so that we can completely immerse ourselves in assisting Srila Prabhupada ‘s families.