Transitioning Palace of Gold Rose Garden at New Vrindaban to Sustainability
→ New Vrindaban Brijabasi Spirit

Paul Zimmerman, an expert rosarian who has been hired by the ECOV Board of New Vrindaban to help switch the Prabhupada’s Palace Rose Garden to an organic, sustainable garden, is keeping a blog on this project.  We published an initial article on the topic on the New Vrindaban website in June of 2014, entitled “Prabhupada’s Palace Rose Garden at New Vrindaban Making the Switch to Sustainability”.

This is an exciting task, and we really appreciate Paul’s guidance on this.
He is working with Gopalasyapriya dasi, who is heading up the project.

The article is copied below and here is the link.

http://www.finegardening.com/transitioning-public-rose-garden-sustainability

Transitioning a Public Rose Garden To Sustainability

by Paul Zimmerman

It’s one thing to talk about growing roses sustainably in our own personal gardens. There, we only have our own expectations to meet. Most of us who grow roses without chemicals have learned to live with some damage from insects and the occasional smudge of blackspot. We’ve realized roses were held to a standard higher than other plants and by simply viewing our roses the same way we do all our other plants a little damage is no big deal.

But what if it’s a garden open to the public? A well known garden receiving thousands of visitors each season who, because is what they’ve mistakingly been taught, expect perfection from roses. People who will likely spy blackspot from across the garden despite the sea of blooms and mutter “tsk, tsk, they should really take better care of this garden”.

The answer to can you transition a public garden to sustainability is yes, indeed you can. However, it can’t be done in the way I usually tell folks to do it with their home garden, which is to do it cold turkey.

As I’ve always said during the first year of taking a garden off chemicals it will look worse before it looks better. In our own gardens that’s no big deal because we can explain to visitors what’s going on. Plus, if anyone even utters a “tsk, tsk” we can throw them off the property!

Not so with a public garden. It’s under pressure to look good during the transition, there is no way to fully explain what’s going on and throwing people off the property is not good for building up the visitor count! With all that pressure how do you do it?

New Vrindaban Prabhupada Palace of Gold rose trellis

Enter the Palace of Gold Rose Garden located in the New Vrindaban community located in Moundsville, West Virginia. Founded in 1968 by Krishna devotees, the Palace itself was started and built by those same devotees starting in 1972. Remarkably they had little to no training in the skills it takes to build something like this. The results are striking and a testament to perseverance.

The Rose Garden is part of the original design and over the years became an AARS garden. That is All American Rose Selections, which was a testing/marketing program the rose industry used for decades. At present the garden is collection of mostly AARS winners planted in groups of 3 or more.

Over the years the garden was taken care of using traditional chemical rose care methods. Recently, however, those in charge of the garden wish to transition the rose garden to sustainable care – something they feel is more in line with their beliefs. Also, the garden needed a bit of upgrading including adding some new plants, moving around some of what is there and other normal garden chores for a garden every now and then.

Earlier this year they hired me to oversee this work and help the great group of folks who work in the garden daily. It will take several years because it must be done slowly, methodically and with sensitivity towards the gardens purpose, which is to be a beautiful public display garden.

I’ll be blogging about this project from time to time in this space. I hope as you embark on this journey with me and see it can be done, it will give you confidence to do the same in your own garden!

Happy Roseing
Paul

New Vrindaban ISKCON Prabhupada Palace rose garden

Palace roses

The Hare krishna Festival in Poland applies successfully the antidote for Kali yuga! (Album 89 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

Indradyumna Swami: Today's newspapers reported a terrible plane crash, crimes, scandals, murders and ongoing fighting in wars around the world. We live in troubled times. The only hope is Krsna consciousness, which quickly brings relief from the miseries of material life. That antidote is delivered in the form of blissful chanting and dancing to the holy names of the Lord. Our humble contribution to that effort is our daily harinams and festivals along the northern beaches of Poland. May Krsna grant us the strength to continue this program for many years to come! Read more ›

Radha Gopinath Baha
→ Ramai Swami

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It’s always a pleasure visiting Radha Gopinatha Mandir at Baha, Bali. I remember just 12 years ago there was only land and a small hut here. In the rainy season it would flood and the property was inaccessible.

The devotees worked hard, built up a high access road and constructed a magnificent temple. Now, there is also a goshala with 3 cows and a nice vegetable and flower area.
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Real Constitutional Position
→ Japa Group

"The devotee always prays to the Lord and His internal energy (consort) so that he may engage in Their transcendental loving service. When the conditioned soul attains his real spiritual energy and fully surrenders unto the Lord's lotus feet, he tries to engage in the Lord's service. This is the real constitutional position of the living entity."

Cc. Madhya 22.16 purport

Utilizing the Time of our Lives for the Best Purpose: Appreciating the Value of Prema Part 2
→ Karnamrita.das's blog

Author: 
Karnamrita Das

(this blog is recorded on the full page: quick time player is needed; works best with Firefox or Explorer; if you are using Google Chrome it will automatically play, so if you don't want to listen, mute your speakers.)
The Writer's Muse by Jose Maria photo 12406215_1_l_zps85bb5cfe.jpg
[for information about the above painting please visit: http://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/12406215_jose-maria-romero-the-writers-muse]

My Muse, Sara: Hey, Karnamrita. Haribol! Thanks for publishing part 1. I found it very clear and concise, but I see that you’re having problems finishing this series.

Karnamrita: You would know, as by the grace of my gurus and the Lord of my heart, along with prompting from you, I have generally been inspired to write my blogs over the last seven years. However, these days my writing is going slower than usual. I know there must be some reason for this, and so I have been praying for guidance to understand my next step. I have learned that in making spiritual progress we have to practice both elimination of the old, and acceptance of the new, in order that we may grow into our full potential, and not remain stuck in old habits. In this vein, I have a number of possible book ideas that I haven’t spent time on. While this is an untried venue for me, it may have a wider audience. What do you think? I am wondering if I should focus more on writing books.

Sara: That is an area to be explored, and I am sure you will gradually know what to do—but for now, why don’t you complete part two. I have a few questions which might help you finish. Human life without some type of connection to God through religion or spirituality is similar to animal life in meeting survival needs.

Karnamrita: Your questions would surely help, but should I say anything about you, or not?

Sara: Why not, as the readers may just consider this a writing ploy, or think that it is interesting that you have a muse you can converse with. Anyone who has had to write will at least appreciate the idea and possibility.

Karnamrita: Well, you're usually not that easy to speak with, and mainly give inspiration, but I like the idea of having talks with you, and adding that to my posts. Thank you for helping! In any case, go ahead and ask.

Sara: What is it that causes an ordinary person to take up some type of practice centered around God?

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The contrast between war and nature and the power of the Mahamantra
→ simple thoughts

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On Tuesday I got the opportunity to spend the day on Steep Holm Island in the middle of the Bristol Channel which was used in the defence of the UK during world war 2 and is now a nature reserve.

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It is nice to get away from the hussle and bussle no work and noise and even better no mobile phone so no e-mails or texts and no distractions which is perfect on so many levels. Seeing the contrast between the distructional forces of war and nature reclaiming land that man destroyed.

Watching the animals being driven by material nature acting on instinct after all most had young to look after so the Seagulls especially weren’t happy to see us, it also gave me an opportunity to some quiet japa and to ponder how to progress more in spiritual life after all I do not want to take birth again.

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Given how peaceful and being surrounded by natural beauty some of the small group did what for many comes naturally taking refuge in alcohol, sat in one of the world war 2 look out post’s I got talking to one such individual. The alcohol was to cope with the pain of material life solice not in the holy names of Krishna which gives real relieve but temporary relief which doesn’t solve the problems.
It was nice to speak and have such an open exchange I gave him a small book I had and a small japa beads which was in my rucksack (I normally use it to carry some equipment for schools and had by Krishna’s mercy left both in). He smiled put the next can he was about to drink away and wondered off doing his own little japa walk; catching up later he had a smile and said he comes every year but this was simply the best.

It was a perfect day to a peaceful trip away from the normal hussle and craziness of modern living.
And another captivated spirit soul started on the path of liberation and freedom of material suffering.

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Heat takes toll on peacocks in the Braj region
→ Dandavats.com

A vet at the Soor Sarovar bird sanctuary, who did not wish to be named, said the birds may be affected by the long spell of heat. Many birds were brought to vets with eyes and head swollen in the past fortnight, he said, adding that this was a symptom of a viral infection. The vet also said the birds appeared to be suffering from a severe deficiency of vitamins and minerals, which affects the nervous system. He said that the infected peacocks start to feel dizzy and whirl to their deaths. The vet advised villagers to feed the birds water-soluble vitamin tablets and antibiotics. Read more ›

Creating A Livelihood For Devotees
→ Dandavats.com

Here at Gopal Soft Toys, we are trying to live a simple life according to Srila Prabhupada's teaching. Besides creating a livelihood for the devotees who work with us, the proceeds of the sales of our Products are also supporting our small cow protection project. We are maintaining 7 cows and bulls: Dadu Balaram, his nephew Krishna, Mother Nandini, Mother Surabhi, Mother Kamadhenu, Heifer Sachimata and small Gaurangi. Srila Prabhupada on simple living: "... live simple life, keeping cows, village life as it is exhibited by Krsna, Vrndavana. Krsna, if He liked, He could have lived in cities. How they were happy, the inhabitants of Vrndavana with Krsna and living and cows. That I want to introduce. At any cost do it and... Don't bother about big, big buildings." In the Past 15 years our dolls have traveled far and wide, from India to Europe, North America to South America, from New Zealand and Australia to all the way to Siberia and all around Asia, just to brighten up the faces and hearts of children and Adults as well. Read more ›

Prabhupada Letters :: Anthology 2014-07-18 12:21:00 →

1970 July 18: "I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter informing me you have lost your original set of beads and requesting me to chant upon the new set sent by you. Now you are in very responsible position as president of our branch, so you should be more careful. Anyway, I have chanted duly the beads and they are herewith returned to you."
Prabhupada Letters :: 1970

Dear to the Alachua devotees, Govinda the Bull Passes Away
→ Dandavats.com

Govinda had taken a turn for the worse and was refusing to eat or drink. The vet diagnosed him as having a heart condition for which there is no cure available for cows. He did prescribe some additional medicine to help alleviate some of they symptoms, but it became apparent that Govinda would soon be departing. A shade tent was erected since the weather was turning sunny and a sound system was set up to play Srila Prabupada chanting bhajans. Then on Tuesday morning (Ekadasi), with his caretakers and a number of devotees present, Govinda breathed his last. Govinda, like all of Krishna and Balarama’s cows and oxen who live and die in the holy dhama of New Raman Reti, was no ordinary animal. He had the good fortune of rendering service, honoring Krishna prasad, and hearing the Holy Name. And like many of his predecessors, he gave up his bovine body on an auspicious day. He will be missed by his herd mates and caretakers, but has surely gone on to greener pastures. Read more ›

Joining up the dots – of anti-semitism
→ The Vaishnava Voice

La-chasse-aux-Juifs-est-ouverte (1)

The violence against the Jews of France, which has escalated as feelings have boiled over against the war in Gaza, is shocking and terrifying.

A mob of mainly Muslim demonstrators in Paris, reportedly armed with knives, axes and iron bars and chanting “Death to the Jews,” tried on Sunday to storm the Don Isaac Abarvanel Synagogue within which nearly 200 congregants were praying for the safety of Israel.

The attackers were kept at bay by members of Jewish defense organizations. A French Jewish journalist said: “Thank God they were there, because the protesters had murder on their minds and it took awhile before police reinforcements arrived.”

The previous day, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a synagogue at Aulnay-sous-Bois, a Parisian suburb. At Asnieres, another suburb, the police said a Muslim mob of 300 gathered in front of the synagogue and shouted anti-Israel slogans. A firebomb was hurled at a synagogue in Belleville. A Middle Eastern man shot pepper spray at the face of a 17-year-old Jewish girl on a Paris street shouting: “Dirty Jewess, inshallah you will die.”

Muslim attacks on French Jews long predate the current hostilities in Gaza. Earlier this year, a 59-year-old Jew was beaten up on a Paris street by three North African men who screamed “Dirty Jew’ and scrawled a swastika on his chest.

In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jew, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered. In 2012, a radicalized Muslim murdered a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

Muslim attacks on Jews are spiraling across Europe. In May, four Jews were killed in an attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels; the suspect, another radicalized French Muslim, was said by the Belgian state prosecutor to have confessed to the attack “against Jews.” In Sweden, Jews have been driven out of the city of Malmo by Muslim attacks, harassment and intimidation.

All this goes virtually unreported by mainstream Western media. Street protests are routinely described as “anti-Israel.”

Everyone is therefore missing the big story: the tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred rolling across Europe. In Paris and elsewhere, the always paper-thin “anti-Zionist but not anti-Jew” excuse has been stripped away.

“Death to the Jews” is the cry that resounds through the Middle East. Nazi images demonizing Jews pour out of the Arab and Muslim world. The Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which alleged that the Jews formed a conspiracy to take over the world, is widely published and believed as historical fact. Iran’s leadership claims the Jews are trying to destroy Islam. Islamist ideologues from Syed Qutb to Osama bin Laden, Hamas and beyond have taught millions of Muslims that the Jews are behind all the ills of the world.

Palestinian society is suffused by this lunacy.

Palestinian Media Watch reports that the “moderate” Palestinian Authority presents Jews as inherently treacherous, corrupt, deceitful and unfaithful. Forgeries and fiction masquerading as history are used to document and support the libel that Judaism is in essence racist and evil. Jews are said to be planning and executing heinous crimes, including burning Palestinians in ovens, murder, using prisoners for Nazi-like experiments and more.

A few days ago, Yahya Rabah of the Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza was but the latest Arab to recycle the medieval blood libel when he wrote in the official PA daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida that the “Jewish God” demands Jews offer sacrifices during Passover in the form of matza “made from the blood of our children.”

Last year, a PA TV show for children taught them that the devil and the Jews were on the same side. Earlier his month, Al-Hayat al-Jadida wrote that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “confirms the Talmud’s teachings, [according to which] killing others – the insects (gentiles) – is a good thing.”

It is astounding that neither the media nor any Western leader has sounded the alarm over this epidemic anti-Jewish madness in the Islamic world. But neither political nor cultural leaders want to join up the dots.

Partly this is due to the cultural confusion over “Islamophobia” and third world-ism. But mainly it is because anti-Semitism is now the prejudice that dare not speak its name. It’s the big one, the crime of crimes, the knockout blow. If the Muslim world is driven by anti-Semitism, all the excuses being used by Western leaders to appease that world and limit the push-back against it are invalidated.

It would mean it is being fueled by something which is utterly immune to reason or negotiation. So it would mean there could be no half-measures against it. It would have to be identified as a source of evil in the world and utterly defeated.

But of course, that hardly sits with the dominant Western narrative that says the Palestinians are entitled to a state and that Israel is to blame for the conflict. So the Jew-hatred pouring out of the Islamic world is simply ignored.

Worse, all those in the West who trumpet their progressive support for the “oppressed” Palestinians are thus tacitly supporting this frenzied anti-Semitism.

The Palestinian strategy is to efface Jewish history altogether: denying or destroying the historic evidence of the biblical Jewish Kingdom of Judea, obscuring the Jews’ unique right to settle what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza enshrined in treaty obligation in the 1920s by the international community, and inverting the Holocaust to claim that Israel is committing genocide. When London demonstrators and British intellectuals declare that Israelis are the new Nazis, colonizing land to which they have no historic connection and which they have stolen from the Palestinians, they make themselves accessories to an infernal creed which is inciting violence and murder against Jews.

Anti-Jewish hatred is not just directed against Israel and the Jews of Europe. It is fueling the Islamic war against the West. It is often said that the Jews are the “canary in the mine.”

Those who turn against the Jews in their own societies invariably deal a death blow to those societies themselves.

Written by Melanie Phillips


Profiles of Srila Prabhupada Disciples: Dhruva Maharaja das
→ Dandavats.com

Shortly after Srila Prabhupada’s departure in 1977, Dhruva Maharaja prabhu became temple commander of the Krsna-Balarama Mandir in Vrindavan. In 1981, he resided at Srila Prabhupada’s rooms at Radha-Damodara Temple. During that time he met several local Vaisnavas and developed an interest to learn more about Vraja Mandala and parikrama. A few years later he participated in Lord Caitanya’s 500th Anniversary Padayatra around India, beginning in Dvaraka and walking to Cochin in South India. After participating in and leading many padayatras during those years, in 1985 Dhruva Maharaja prabhu met and married his wife, Samapriya devi dasi. The couple returned to the U.S. and continued to distribute Srila Prabhupada’s books and gradually phased into other seasonal businesses as well. They have spent the last 29 years traveling back and forth between the U.S. and India: Vrindavana (1985-89), Mayapur (1990-94), and Jagannatha Puri, where they built a home in 1994 and continue to visit up to the present. During this time, he also wrote and published two books on the holy dhamas: “Vrindavana Dhama Ki Jaya!” and “Jaya Jagannatha!” Read more ›

Ratha Yatra Panama 2014 (Album 111 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

“Chanting is the greatest act of piety and the supreme refuge. Even the words of the Vedas do not possess sufficient power to its magnitude. Chanting is the highest path to liberation, peace and eternal life. It is the pinnacle of devotion, the heart's joyous proclivity and attraction and the best form of remembrance of the Supreme Lord. The holy name has appeared solely for the benefit of the living entities as their Lord and master, their supreme worshipable object and their spiritual guide and mentor. Read more ›

New Vrindaban’s Jagannatha Ratha Yatra Coming!
→ New Vrindaban Brijabasi Spirit

This Sat. July 19, starting at 11:00 AM in front of Rupanuga and Vani’s house, the New Vrindaban Country Ratha Yatra Parade will begin!

Bring your offerings of sweets for Their Lordships by 10:30 AM, to be offered  right at the cart along the route.

And, as They do every year as a special added feature, for those of you fortunate enough to live along the parade route, bring a love offering from your house, and Their Lordships will stop at your door to accept your offering!

Jaya Jagannatha!  Jaya Baladeva!  Jaya Subhadra!

New Vrindaban Jagannatha      New Vrindaban Subhadra

 

New Vrindaban Balarama    New Vrindaban ratha yatra 2012