Walking along Spadina, to my right I observed a lovely Presbyterian church with a message out front: “The world is both beautiful and terrible.“
Minutes later, a cyclist with longish hair pulled over. “Didn’t the Buddha say, “The world is a place of pain?”
“My response was: “Krishna states, ‘The world is a place of suffering, and that it’s temporary.’“
Then on Augusta Avenue, I met one of the musicians who would venture our way at the local park to join us in Kirtan. Still around, I thought. Over the winter, he hadn’t forgotten us.
Keeping his distance (that’s what all people are trained to do in these weeks of the virus), he used the current common expression: “Hey! Stay safe!”
At the park, Bellevue Square, I saw another familiar face. He is still delivering food orders. He threw a rubber ball at me (a friendly gesture) but I missed it and it struck my shoulder. It fell and got caught in my dhoti, my lower robe. It was just a greeting from a distance.
And then there was another acquaintance, from last year, who addressed me with a “Namaste!“ He, being a radical, offered to say, “Yeah, they’re going to control us. We’ll all be just a number before long.“ He is an Ojibway native and very outspoken about his views on the world, “Namaste!“
“Yes, Hare Krishna!“
The most important aspect of today was that after my walk I went into the ashram and we celebrated the seventieth birthday of Hara Kumar, our local conspiracy theorist. He said nothing about the world and was quiet until I dropped a sizeable piece of birthday cake into his mouth.
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