Yoga Gems Daycare is full of bright, loving children exploring and engaging with nature within and around them, practicing loving responses to problems and negativity. They take care to feed and brush bunnies, throw chicken scratch and look for hidden eggs in the brush and tomato patch. Our activities center on both Montessori principles and creative play, including an enjoyable morning circle of Japji, celestial communication, children’s yoga, alphabet games and Wee Sing songs.
Simple joys are balanced by several parents who struggle to pay tuition. Despite trusted contracts, checks occasionally bounce like popcorn, but I know all is in God’s Vast Hands. Money has its ups and downs. Rather than rankling folks about money, I pray for them, giving families a chance to overcome their difficulties.
As Yogi ji would say, “When money is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something is lost. When values are lost, everything is lost.”
My home is also a sanctuary offering hope to the hopeless and shelter to the shelter-less, as the homeless, jobless single mother and her child who were about to live in a borrowed van. They shared my guest room until they could buy a car and rent their own home, the mother helping with daycare in exchange for tuition, giving me precious hours to work on the book. And for two months my ex-husband’s daughter stayed in this room, between jobs and a home of her own.
I began to write this book while sitting in my office overlooking a peaceful garden, a golden meadow and a row of graceful trees reaching to the sky. Even now my hens perch in front of my window with noisy greetings. These sensitive, curious critters rest on my arm to have their feathers fluffed. Gentle satin angora bunnies are scampering amongst low and towering weeds playing tag, hide and seek and follow the leader, making me wonder if there is a buck loose! Garden herbs and vegetables are obscured by masses of weeds, allowed to grow as protection from an invasion of grasshoppers. It worked—the garden is flourishing and the weeds all blossomed into flowers.
Yogiji commanded the book to be written in life and after death in his spirit body, where my impetus to begin writing rushed through with full force on the day of his birth, creating a flow of memories. It was completed the following day, I thought. But then, whenever sadhana chants play, or as I lay in-between sleep and the Amrit Vela, or even meditatively go about my way, help to write this book comes from the Source—multi-dimensional insights from God and compassionate Hukums from Gurus, Bhagats, Yogis and Saints, creating ever more life experiences and awakenings to include and insert somehow, as though the book will never end.
Perceptions and understandings of life become untangled in simple ways, such as when untangling a blind cord, and made clear as I scrub crud from under the refrigerator. I sense how everything is connected; how the microcosm is the macrocosm, how what happens in personal relationships and in our relationship to things is the same dynamic as in relations between people and society, nations with other nations, and human beings with God. It has taken all life’s tragedies to wake me up. And time alone to realize I am awake and never alone.
Chanting to Guru Ram Das, preparing a pot of kitchery soup while mulling over the book, by accident, my elbow bumped a bag of groceries near the stove and suddenly—Plop! a new carton of cottage cheese spilled onto the floor. I called my dog, Cookie, over to lap it up. When she did not finish this yummy treat, I noticed that her snout had
pushed some of the cottage cheese out of reach beneath the cupboard
door. I immediately saw the lesson, and laughed: “Serve it, don’t make a mess!” and served my little dog. Guru’s lesson? –Take care and gracefully serve the truth as I write, rather than thoughtlessly spilling it out.
Year 2004 Excerpt from Memoirs of a Yogini by S.S.Guru Prem Kaur Khalsa
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