THE HARVEST
What an eventful month April has been! It’s so overwhelming to hear that my monthly reflection has helped some of you count your own blessings and celebrate how fortunate we all are. Thank you! I feel the reason why we share this emotion can be captured beautifully in one word – UBUNTU – I am because you are!
For us at KnowYourStar, April started with Volunesia; we held three circles and participants grew three fold- without any promotions or marketing. Even the story behind how we came up with the name for the event was full of serendipity. It was a simple typo that led to us stumbling upon this beautiful word- Volunesia, which means that moment when you forget you’re volunteering to help change lives, because it is changing yours! Volunesia has gifted insightful moments, not just to me and my team, but to everyone who attended the circle to become kinder and more compassionate towards nature, towards environment, towards discarded materials, towards their time, towards their ignored creativity and towards their own happiness.
Anshu Sir inspired us to start and interestingly inspiration too grew three folds in three weeks, when we saw how everyone got together to handcraft beautiful gifts, which will be given away to winners of Mentor India games and activities during our classes in rural and underprivileged schools. Thank you so much! It’s amazing to see how with no budget, no rented place, no bought raw materials, no extrinsic motivations and no agenda, people spend time connecting heart to heart and connecting with themselves and us. We are a big family now! 🙂
In the process we as a team learnt to be more patient, more organised, more thankful and more cheerful- thank you for motivating us to be on this journey! As I shared at the end of one of the Volunesia circles- the real Volunesia did not end at the end of 3 hours, but only began then. The love showered by all the Volunesians while doing their heart-work is going to ripple exponentially, we have no doubts about it. From someone (lovingly- virtual volunesian) making beautiful postcards all the way from Hyderabad to my friend’s sister making dosas for me at 6 am so that I could speak non-stop till lunch- there are many who are impacting us (everyone including me!) in unimaginable ways. More ripples are waiting to emerge in May and we are getting more excited by the day!
Before I write about 2 emails that touched me this month, I wanted to show you a glimpse of my Mumbai trip. I had the fortune of being at Sachi’s Awakin circle and Ketan Bhai’s Vipassana circle. I will reserve my account on Ketan Bhai and his firm to my future blog, but just one thing- I have never come across an organisation that is super “values driven” and I was honoured to meet its Gandhian founder, Ketan Bhai’s father, who showered such generous blessing on me. I enjoyed meeting my friends- Smita from Drishti with whom I share a great camaraderie, Sabry- my friend from Sandakhpu Trek, and Supraj- my ex-housemate, classmate, benchmate and early supporter of KnowYourStar! Mumbai was as beautiful as always and journey from Udupi to Mumbai on Konkan Railway was even more amazing. 🙂
Now it’s email time. The first one we received was sent to us from Ghatam Suresh Vaidyanathan, who we had featured on our site. He forwarded an email to us from Sylvester, a gentleman from South Africa, who had across Ghatam Suresh’s story on our site. Though he was already an admirer of Suresh-ji’s work, he hadn’t been aware of the obstacles Suresh-ji’s had faced until then. He went on to say that Suresh-ji has inspired him by overcoming those obstacles and spreading so much joy and knowledge to disciples like him.
It was a great feeling to read this email, which kind of validated the efforts we are putting in weaving these stories with exactly the same intention of passing on the inspiration to people on the lookout for it consciously or unconsciously. Knowing that a brother is reading our stories in a foreign land, our eyes twinkled with joy and has motivated us to keep amplifying such great stories of role models!
The second email, came from a dear reader who showed unwavering love and compassion at a time of loss to his family. He had emailed us in response to a Thursday Email (all responses to our Thursday Emails are super encouraging!) and shared the news of his wife having passed away, just 3 days back. I have this policy of responding to my emails within 24 hours, but for this, I couldn’t keep up… my heart took little more time (2 hours of meditation for 4 days) to articulate the right response in my head so I could get my hands to type it. I wrote that email with all humility, love and respect for his family and his community, which was holding him strong. 🙂
But what is family, I started in my response, and continued- All of us are one big family! I narrated a story about meeting Dada Vaswani, the 99-year old Sufi saint in Pune. When someone from my group asked Vaswani Ji how many people worked at his mission (I guess it’s close to 15000 people)- He responded ONE– because it’s that one heart from the almighty that we all have and share. I requested my email brother to always feel the same oneness with us == with the almighty == with everyone; we just need to acknowledge the innernet. I prayed that he get the constant power to keep his innernet running!
He was inspired by my #MarchToEmptiness and I narrated to him how I was inspired by a Gandhian, Jayesh Bhai, who I met in Ahmedabad. Jayesh Bhai had shared so many stories that moved me and my team. Ever since, every action we have taken, has gotten more meaningful and more sacred. One of the stories he shared was of his Dad, Ishwar Kaka’s death (The story is here, thanks to my mentor Nipun). I concluded my response by sharing my wondering whether it’s just the physical body that leaves and how I felt presence of the late Ishwar Kaka during my stay in Ahmedabad without ever having seen him. 🙂
Pranita and I met him after a week at his wife’s 11th-Day ceremony and it rippled out to something unthinkable- which we will share soon. Let’s keep creating heaven wherever and however we are- living the Smiling Spirit and Fortitude. Keep sending your love and blessings. Thank you because, UBUNTU! 🙂
Enjoyed reading about this? Then you might like to read Jaideep 2.0: Heartpreneur Does A #MarchToEmptiness.
If there’s a story that needs to be told, we are ready to tell it. Write to us at contact@knowyourstar.com with your story lead, or contact us on Facebook or Twitter.
