I get up late: at eleven o' clock in the morning. I have had ten hours sleep, but I still feel tired. Of course, my body — which was unceremoniously yanked out of India yesterday — still thinks that it is 12:30 a.m. (Kolkata time).
It has been a while since I was last here at the Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Seva Ashram in Soquel. It is so peaceful here in the quiet hills of Soquel, just a few miles south of the Santa Cruz beach resort.
The countryside is lush and verdant: California has a Mediterranean climate, so it rains in the winter. Hasyapriya Prabhu takes me on a tour of the land, and points out some of the new beehives near the orchard (which is fenced to keep the deer out) above the temple.
In the evening, Janardan Maharaj drives me over the hill to San Jose to the Mahila Sakha branch of our Seva Ashram. I have been invited to give the lecture at the weekly Saturday evening program at the St. James Street ashram.
It is good to meet many of my old devotee friends (I used to live in San Jose). I have not seen many of them — Ramananda Prabhu, Shobana Krishna Prabhu and their families — since I went to India to become a sannyasi a little over a year ago.
I talk briefly about my travels to Africa, Asia, and Europe, and of my past few weeks in the association of Srila Gurudeva and the other senior devotees at the Math during the recent Gaura Purnima festival.
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