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There has been a nice atmosphere in the house in the last couple of days, a sense of newness which has had me trying out new things and picking up some old habits I hadn’t touched in a while. In particular the following two habits stand out:

At the beginning of last year, I attempted what seems in hindsight a pretty brazen task - to learn a 224 line song written in Bengali (a language I cant exactly claim fluency, or even competence, in) in the space of one single day! The song, titled Dyulok chariye nara narayan, is a profoundly elevating experience of song, the words of which come from a poem my teacher, Sri Chinmoy wrote when thirteen years of age (roughly around the time that photo on the left was taken). The poem was written for his spiritual Master, Sri Aurobindo (right), in time for his birthday on August 15, 1945. Fifty years later, in 1995, Sri Chinmoy set the entire poem to music in the form of this song. I began learning the song at 7 a.m. armed with a recording sung by my friend Hiyamallar from California, only to retire five hours later with a severe bout of head-spinning, and not a lot to show for my efforts! But at least it was a start; I kept learning it for a while. But then I mislaid the MP3 player I was using to learn the song for a while and the whole thing fell apart. But in the past few days I’ve been listening a lot to a very haunting recording of that song sung by my teacher, and snatches of it kept floating to my recollection. So I dusted down my copy of the music and went at it again, and am pleased to record I have now done 17 verses out of the total 56. Hopefully I can keep a routine of learning one or two verses a day, and have the lot learned by the time I go to visit my teacher in New York in August.

The second thing is : often when the Dublin Sri Chinmoy Centre are giving free meditation classes in our beautiful meditation space, I talk a little bit on the importance of being grateful for living no matter what happens, and wonder aloud why is it that we don’t leap out of bed in the mornings and go “Yaaaaay! Another great day!” Well - guess what - the four guys in our house have agreed to do exactly that every morning! So at five to six in the morning - the time when three of us wake for meditation - all you can hear is a resounding YAAAAAAAYYY!!!! in one room being met by an equally resounding YYYAAAAAAAAYY!!!!! across the hallway. We’re hoping it will help eliminate the drawn-out ordeal that waking up can sometimes turn out into; more importantly, it means we have something to laugh about barely five seconds into our waking day and that can only be a very good thing…