Day 9: Giriraja Dandavat Parikrama Musings

• Today a dear friend has come to join us being inspired by our dandvat parikram adventures that we’ve been sharing
• Incidentally, one of our team, although having caught up to us, started much later than we and he wasn’t sure how far he should go. When he decided to stop he happened to see the mark I leave in the sand after paying obeisances. In my head it’s looks like a peacock feather, he called it the symbol of namah.
• Either way, he reported to me how seeing the imprint in the sand, one after another after another, invoked in his mind the meaning of parampara (one after another) and how by following parampara one not only gains confidence in trajectory, but can take heart again (after a period of bewilderment and/or dispirited-ness) knowing there were great souls before you who courageously treaded a path and left it behind as an inheritance shining bright like a (Polaris) diamond: “O Lord, who resemble the shining sun, You are always ready to fulfill the desire of Your devotee, and therefore You are known as a desire tree [vāñchā-kalpataru]. When ācāryas completely take shelter under Your lotus feet in order to cross the fierce ocean of nescience, they leave behind on earth the method by which they cross, and because You are very merciful to Your other devotees, You accept this method to help them.” [SB 10.2.31]
• His reflection immediately invoke my remembrance of part of a poem (a prayer really) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called A Psalm of Life from which (I heard) Śrī Bhaktivinoda Thakura took inspiration when writing his Saragrahi-Vaisnava poem:

Lives of great men all remind us
  We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
  Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
  Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
  Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
  With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
  Learn to labor and to wait.

• we may not consider or my in fact know without doubt that we are not great. Still, a genuine endeavor in the direction of Beatitude has much power to uphold and upbuild the spirit.

• May we continue to inspire one another by genuine endeavors for Beatitude with as close to a 100% of our finitude that we can.