April 2006

April marks the first of my three yearly visits to Sri Chinmoy in New York. Each of the three visits has its own unique flavour; the April visit is generally for around one and a half to two weeks either side of April 13th - the anniversary of when Sri Chinmoy first came to the West to be of service to aspiring spiritual seekers.

I did a similar account of my November trip to see Sri Chinmoy, but I was only inspired to do a repeat performance for my April visit a few days into it - even by then, so much had happened, and I was trying to remember what happened when; I'm very grateful to Gabriel Pelletier for putting his daily journal at the service of helping to jog my memory. I'm not much of a camera person myself, so far I've used photos by Ambarish, Colm and Niriha for illustration.

So here we go....

Arrival - April 7th

It was fairly late when I arrived and got to my accommodation. Where we are staying happens to be on the site of a soon-to-be-opened creche (or nursery as I believe they call them Stateside - in Ireland nurseries are where you buy trees!), and we enter to be greeted by pastel pink and blue colour schemes and miniature toilets and washbasins. There might still be time to catch the end of the meditation function so we hurry on down to the meditation ground. Unfortunately we've just missed them; oh well, back to get some sleep, tomorrow's going to be a busy day.

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