A day of ministry

My min­istry is going quite well here, although it is a slow start since I still have work to do around home fin­ish­ing up cer­tain projects. I’m not get­ting much writ­ting done yet either. Here’s an exam­ple of a day of min­istry yesterday.

I got up around 5:30, chanted a cou­ple of rounds, had a big break­fast and went to the Pahoa Sun­day mar­ket arriv­ing by eight. This was my fourth week there, so I’m a “reg­u­lar” and have a reserved booth and don’t have to be there at seven any longer. How­ever, I got there to find out that the wind had blown the whole mar­ket down over night. I picked through the rub­ble of my booth orga­niz­ing the alu­minum pipes that the tarps are hung on so they could be put back up again. Called my brother in NY and did some pro­duce shop­ping. By 8:50, I was set­ting up in another booth that had been recon­structed. I did a cou­ple of Osho Zen Tarot read­ings, talked with other ven­dors and left around 12:30 because I was tired of my signs blow­ing down.

Went home, unloaded the truck bathed and headed down to the beach where there was the usual assort­ment of Ras­tas, pot sell­ers, women in biki­nis, men and women not in biki­nis, gays, chil­dren, devo­tees, a great drum cir­cle, dancers, palm trees, surf, etc. I talked to peo­ple and took part in the drum­ming for a cou­ple of hours. Went home, and after din­ner my wife read out loud to me from Satsvarupa’s book Prab­hu­pada as she’s been doing lately as back­ground for my book. I fell asleep on the couch and was up again at 3:00 this morning.

Sat­ur­day, my wife and I went to a Bob Mar­ley birth­day cel­e­bra­tion out in the bush. We saw a group of devo­tees there who looked like they might be approach­able, but I decided to wait. Some of them were at the beach yes­ter­day also. We drummed together but didn’t talk. There are at least three groups of devo­tees here, but I don’t think I’d be wel­comed by any of them, so I stay away. I’m not inter­ested in get­ting caught up in the in-fighting and pol­i­tics, but I’m open to those who are open to me. I’m tak­ing things slow, get­ting to know the scene here. The 60s are alive and well in South Puna. We’re lov­ing it here. Some­times we go watch the lava flow down the moun­tain at night. It’s a few miles away from here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 05:11 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.