Hello everyone! Well it is Sunday morning, and I am lingering over a rare treat, COFFEE. :) I have been thinking recently about spirituality, and where I fit into the universe of spiritual callings. I have never thought about in as concrete a way before; I have always just internalized the awareness that I am a spiritual person. However, when you look at spirituality from a more academic lens, and realize that there are major labeled spiritual paths, it becomes an interesting interaction.
For our class, we are now reading about earth "religions", or worship of the earth. Such paths include "Gaia spirituality", and "Gaia Naturalism". However, similarly, there is also "Spiritual animism" and "natural animism". These are all basically slight variations on the same sentiment: that the earth is sacred and alive. (I never knew people could break it down into such sub-categories!) And I suppose, when talking across borders, these kinds of categorizations are at least helpful. And why not bring spirituality into the academic realm? It is true that until recently, it hasn't been considered appropriate to speak of personal spiritual experience in the world of academia. And yet, this is such an essential function of human life. It does feel a bit awkward trying to box my spiritual beliefs into such terminology, but it is a useful exercise. I am not actually aiming to define it, but it is helpful to exercise my brain in the pursuit of communicating my experiential wisdom in myriad settings.
So, I realized that I feel akin to this idea of Gaia spirituality, and so I bought the book The Secret Life of Plants. So far it is very interesting: plants and humans do communicate!
Other than that, I had a wonderful day on Friday. I helped in Anandi's kitchen all day to prepare for a big raw food buffet! We made raw soup, mashed cauliflower, salald, chocolate mousse, cheesecake, and a whole gala of other sorts for about 150 people. Then we went to serve it, and it was a flurry of marvelous activity! I can say that I was really in a kind of heaven- serving masses of yummy sacred raw food to so many people! And all my friends were there coming through the line. It was magnificent, and I snacked on raw chocolate mousse the entire time. (I could live on that stuff!) Somewhere in the process, though, I realized that for the first time really, I really received so much joy out of just giving my effort and time to help. There was no exchange of money in it for me; I just wanted to absorb myself into the act of giving my services. It was a really energetic experience! Especially since I have so much care for raw food, it was easy to give so much time and energy to just this simple task of giving.
It made me reflect on the value of volunteering though- to really put your agenda aside to give your time and energy to someone's cause is really rewarding for everyone involved. Good karma, as they would say here!
Here are a few pictures highlighting a couple of fun events in my life recently:
