Sharani

Today at the library where I work we had a big yard sale, bake sale and raffle of prizes donated by local businesses. It was a fund-raiser to benefit the library which finds itself in danger of losing state certification because of budget reductions in a town facing serious financial difficulties.

A yard sale, bake sale and raffle are not remarkable in and of themselves as far as homegrown-style fund-raising goes. What made it remarkable to me was that the entire effort was the vision of an elementary school child in town who loves the library and emphatically declared to her mother that they should have a yard sale for the library after an election to raise taxes was turned down by voters in July.

An article ran in the local weekly paper about her along with her photo and her parents spearheaded the efforts in support of their daughter’s wish to help the library. I came down on my coffee break during my shift today and the auditorium was buzzing with activity. I made a few purchases and was happy to buy a paperback edition of the complete poetry of Robert Frost, an American poet who I like very much. I know it probably sounds odd why someone who works in a library would buy a book but sometimes I do buy a few of the books that I read. Especially at bargain prices…

I won one of the raffle prizes for a gift certificate at the local wholesale odd lot store in the plaza next door and immediately went hunting for possible birthday prasad ideas to offer next week in anticipation of meditation activities close to home and in New York with Sri Chinmoy but came up short in that department.

I haven’t heard the results yet of this event to benefit the library but the young girl who felt compelled to contribute to our community is certainly rich with a wealth that money cannot buy. The staff at the library feels that her sentiment is replete with self-giving and enthusiasm and we sincerely thank her from the bottom of our hearts.

Life Coach Priscilla Palmer recently created a list of top sites to aid personal development. In her introduction to the list she defines personal development as “a large topic that includes but is not limited to (law of attraction, goals, time management, physical fitness, education, motivation, inspiration, and social skills). This list should include any blog you feel can benefit us in our growth process.”

I look forward to exploring this comprehensive list of blogs sharing a positive focus. And I wish to offer hearty congratulations to some of the sites that I already frequent and always benefit from reading which are included in this personal development list:

Tejvan at Sri Chinmoy Inspiration

Jennifer at Goodness Gracious (I love the way sprinkles of stardust follow your cursor on her blog – instant smile blossoms)

Surjit at Gurushubad

Bravo, Bravo, Bravo! I’m happy to see valuable resources on the Internet getting recognition and appreciation. I do hope you visit them too if you haven’t already discovered all they have to offer.

With the Fall Equinox only 2 days away, I shouldn’t be surprised that my habit of taking a daily constitutional (a.k.a walk) at around 7 pm would mean that the sun sets and darkness rises before I finish. Today’s warm summer-like day inspired me to journey on the bike path along the water located only a short distance from my house. Since the sun was setting even as I headed out, I left my camera at home – quite uncharacteristic for me since I love to take photos of nature and birds along this well-worn route, this shot of the moon over the path being one of them.

After staring for a while rather wistfully at the half moon as I walked, the darkness slowly enveloped me and led my thoughts to wander to a recent reference question at work. The patron (a.k.a customer) wanted books on visual and auditory learning. Once I determined that our library catalog used the subject heading “cognitive styles” to tag this subject, I unfortunately determined that we did not have any books particular to that topic. My colleague with more years of reference under his belt than myself took over mid-stream but we did not end up meeting her wish to walk out the door with books related to this topic. I wondered what type of learner I was – visual or auditory and this dusk to darkness transition seemed a metaphor for the visual to auditory shift.

As nighttime caused my visual sense to recede, I spontaneously turned my evening walk into a symphony of sounds. Like a child discovering her environment with newness and awe, I concentrated fiercely to see what sounds surrounded me. It was an eye-opening — or should I say ear-opening — experience to notice just how often I am focused on the visual when I walk on the bike path with all its stimuli of flowers, swans, clouds, marshes and water. Soon my focus swam instead in the chorus of crickets, the cry of a seagull, the wind rustling in the trees around me and the lapping of the waves against the river and marsh banks on each side of me. The shipyard on the other side of the Providence River added the noises of human civilization with its punctuated addition of cargo contents loading and unloading off of large ships. I decided that the auditory sense tends to get neglected when our surroundings offer charming visual feasts. The musicality of the sounds around me seemed just as worthy of attention and the darkness of night provided a shortcut to that particular destination.

The true test will be my vantage point during a daytime walk along the path. On a glorious fall day with a gentle breeze, the tactile sense may crowd in as well when that breeze glides into my heart. Have you ever tried to determine your learning style? Are you a visual, auditory or tactile learner? You might try my experiment and walk through a favorite environment during both day and night and see wherein you find the greatest charm.

One last note – it only seemed fitting that I should write this post while listening to music. I picked another theme song of sorts for this girl on a road. I hit repeat on Itunes and wrote with the song Never-ending Road (Amhrán Duit) from the Ancient Muse CD on playback loop. Loreena McKennitt, another Canadian vocalist genius lyricist and singer, writes/sings:

The road now leads onward
As far as can be
Winding lanes
And hedgerows in threes
By purple mountains
Round every bend
All roads lead to you
There is no journey’s end.

Over at the blog The Cool Librarian, I saw the widget for the first time from the All Consuming site affiliated with 43 Things. All Consuming solves the unresolved issue for me related to LibraryThing, in which I would rather show what books I am currently reading instead of the ones I own and in most cases have already read. Since I work in a library, almost everything I’m reading is also a borrowed library book so it doesn’t really qualify as an item to catalog in my personal library at LibraryThing.

The All Consuming site is pretty fun. It allows you to share books, movies, music and food – yes even food! that you are either currently consuming, have already consumed or are intending to consume. People ask questions about what they should read next, rate what they read and create favorite lists. You can upload photos for items missing one and add entries for something not already in there. I already uploaded an album cover for Ferron’s Impressionistic CD which is a nice greatest hits retrospective collection of her music.

43 Things‘ purpose is to inspire you to set goals and get ideas from what other people are entering there as well. Since I like to meditate, reading entries related to the meditation tag already found me referring someone to a homestudy class in meditation available on the Sri Chinmoy Centre website. Once you set a goal, you can also prompt a message to you at some future point in time to remind you of your intentions.

So that’s the background on my new “I am consuming” widget in my sidebar. Maybe my next post will mention more about the two spiritual books I’m currently reading “A Sacrifice of Praise” and “Wisdom Walk.” Until then, what are you consuming as we speak? Hope you’re enjoying it!

Paper lace grace
flutters al fresco
a ticker tape parade
thousand happiness wish
-Sharani (July 2006)

I slowly moved forward in walking meditation, silent, reverent, linked in a seamless circle with others taking darshan from the teacher. With each completion of another time around in our circular passage, a rarefied and angelic feeling of happiness washed over my interior being, deepening with each step. My usual enchantment with beauty found mostly in nature stepped aside as the overwhelming beauty of this breeze of happiness dawning within fed my soul. What kind of fool must I be not to realise it sooner! Happiness is the best kind of beautiful. It feeds our myriad longings and banishes dissatisfaction. Now instead the centrality of abiding satisfaction bubbled forth from within into the bloom of a smile – or to be precise more like a wide and open grin.

Happiness is a complex and elusive wayfarer on my life road. It evaded me when I faced hardships as a child and as I wrestled with feelings of inadequacy. Now these many years later, unless felt as an authentic reality I am usually reticent to paint it on the surface of my life in some kind of superficial nod to its legitimate importance. If it doesn’t honestly dawn from inside up and outward, I shy from hastily donning this garment, however valuable it might be.

Therefore, the solid feeling of happiness that spontaneously graced this walking exercise in meditation struck me with its immensity and tangible power. One thing I know for sure – my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy offered a very special gift this day with a blessing in the form of kindled happiness. I felt ever so ready to jump up on a soapbox and eagerly declare that happiness is the best kind of beautiful. Not to worry. Maybe my smiling eyes did the talking for me. They can serve as shining testament along with the sweet memory of this experience now imprinted on the tablet of my heart.

My heart’s dawn has come.
Inside my heart
I see only one thing:
The happiness of a God-intoxicated
Beauty-life.
-Sri Chinmoy
Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants, Part 9

Just as recently as three months ago I was writing about my non-techie foray into understanding RSS and some Firefox add-ons recommended within my virtual circle of blogging friends. Since two months ago, my job now is fully involved with working the Information Desk and trying to take a crash course in the world of 2.0. Each day I learn a little more and while I have yet to start leaving comments, I’m finding it immensely helpful to learn from reading other librarian blogs such as Free Range Librarian, The Shifted Librarian and The Other Librarian.

My current favorites on my newbie 2.0 toes in the water include:

• David Lee King’s Basic Competencies of a 2.0 Librarian, Take 2
• Infodoodad’s Top *13* Web 2.0 Tools for Librarians

I must be at least skimming the surface with my Flickr badge, Twitter, MyBlogLog, and Library Thing on my brand new Wordpress blog. I truly enjoy dabbling in these kinds of content and social networking. As the town I work in struggles to balance their budget and the library is eye-to-eye with the proverbial chopping block, my personal goal is to seize the 2.0 day and strive to inject a modern relevance of content in this changing world for libraries.

I have given this blog the tagline “girl on a road” and thought a slight word of explanation might be timely while the blog is new. As is true with many of us, you could say that I have been traveling on a road figuratively and literally for some time now. Viewing the horizon of life through this lens came into focus when my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy offered me the spiritual name “Sharani” which is the literal word for road in Bengali. I surmised that it was not a coincidence that shortly before receiving this name I had written a poem that ended in the stanza:

God for God’s Sake
Mantra breath
No other road
to ignorance death

The figurative aspect of the road travel lies in the context of journeying on a spiritual community or “path” for the last twenty odd years as a student of meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy. I find it fosters unfolding hopes and dreams to become a kinder inhabitant of the planet and a closer friend to God found inside myself and in the world around me.

The literal part lies in the fact that I have also been a girl actually on the road if I stop to ponder some of my far-flung travels and sharing of cultures across the globe. I love to take pictures when on the road and my travel diaries include places such as Singapore, Turkey, England, Bali, Scotland, Malaysia, Paris, Java, Japan, Brazil, Australia, Hawaii and climes closer to home such as Seattle, Chicago, Arizona, Martha’s Vineyard, California, Victoria and Vancouver.

Ferron – called the female Bob Dylan by some and “cowgirl meets Yeats…a thing of beauty” by Rolling Stone – is one of my favorite folksingers and some of the lyrics to her song “Girl on a Road” are calling out to me in this blog post. Just this excerpt alone shows the serious poetry in her lyrics. She is emphatically one of Canada’s crown jewels of folk singing.

I don’t know what it’s like for you but here’s what it’s like for me… I wanted to turn beautiful and serve Eternity and never follow money or love with greasy hands, or move the earth and waters just to make it fit my plans. My eyes would be the harbor, my words the perfect place for a girl on a road…

I did my best to follow the calling of my soul. But, it’s like that first guitar I played…at the center is a hole, at the center is a…longing… that I cannot understand as a girl on a road…

But if music be a boulder, let me carry it a long while. Let it turn into a feather, let it brush against my smile. Let the life be somewhat settled with the life that song has made. Let there be nothing I am longing for in some plan I may have made, in some story quickly written during a long forgotten time as a girl on a road.
Ferron “Girl on a Road” c1994

I was looking for a fun outing with a friend of mine from the Sri Chinmoy Centre for the beginning of Labor Day weekend. Living in New England near beautiful vacation destinations such as Newport, Rhode Island and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, we decided against going to some of these familiar haunts. We feared that many others might be trying to enjoy the last weekend of summer before school starts by going to the beach or other popular locations. A day trip to Boston also beckoned but with colleges on the verge of beginning it seemed foolish to go anywhere near Harvard Square, etc.

She asked where I had taken my parents whenever they came to visit from Michigan and Arizona. I thought of Jamestown – a small island between the southern Rhode Island coast and Newport. I said let’s go to Wickford first and then bring a picnic dinner to eat at the Beavertail Lighthouse and Park in Jamestown. Spontaneously I added, “let’s watch the sun set at the lighthouse.”

My friend had never been to Jamestown or the lighthouse and it had been a while since she had visited Wickford so our itinerary was set. Before we knew it, a short half hour drive brought us to Wickford, a town on the ocean’s coast with all the charm and flavor of Martha’s Vineyard or Bristol with many houses bearing historic plaques dating them back to the early 1800’s and cottage gardens spilling over with flowers.

Because I am in seventh heaven when photographing the likes of flowers, butterflies and other aspects of nature, my friend quickly lost me to paparazzi mode in front of a delightful cottage garden of flowers. Then further down the road I encountered a monarch butterfly and bumblebees and finally had to ring my companion up on my mobile phone so she would know where I was – crouched over in front of the monarch for at least 20 minutes.

Once we hooked back up, I finally switched into shopping mode and couldn’t resist some of the sale items at Green Ink where they sell a wonderful line of comfortable linen clothes called “Flax”. I bought this wonderful jacket and after we got frozen hot chocolate drinks at Wickford Gourmet (their brownie was featured on Rachael Ray’s cooking show on television) we were finally ready to drive to the Beavertail Lighthouse.

When we arrived at the lighthouse and its surrounding park, we joined others who had the same idea. People were perched on portable camping chairs and many had their cameras out. As the time for sunset approached, people arrived in droves and sat facing the horizon across the bay where the sun would bid farewell to the day. Most left as soon as it set. When I said let’s watch the sun set in Jamestown at the lighthouse, I was only guessing that this might be a picture perfect spot for a sunset. Boy was my intuition right about that!

We headed home shortly after night fell and marveled that yet again a treasure chest of delights awaits the explorer in the wonderful state of Rhode Island.