Search Results for: mithra kulatunga

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live, wrote Thomas Merton. Mithra Katalunga seems to know this, he did not need to make himself a slave to a life and work he hates in order to find out. His work in his garden at Blue Star Equiculture speaks to the power of a spiritual life, and to it’s importance.

This summer, Mithra is sleeping in his garden at Blue Star, living alone among the beautiful flowers and vegetables he has planted in his mystical and very beautiful garden. This is the third in a series of posts. about him.

Mithra rejected the culture of materialism he saw all around him. He accepts the reality of human suffering and death. He rejected a life built around making money and scrambling for security. “The more you try to avoid suffering,” wrote Merton, ” the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”

Our culture has become a fear one, dominated by lawyers, warnings, an abundance of caution, and a refusal to accept the nature of life, it’s crisis, mystery and suffering.

In Palmer, Massachusetts, in a beautiful and rapidly growing garden there is a  young man who seems to know this and who is not an elder, a guru, a monk or a priest. Yet his spiritual self is carving out a summer of great meaning, and perhaps, a life of the same. He is a young Thoreau for our times, he has found his own  Walden Pond, we need his message even more than we needed Henry David Thoreau’s.

In his encyclical, Pope Francis challenges all of us to ask “what is it we really need?” To recognize that what we take and buy comes out of the land and lives of others, and is bleeding Mother Earth to death. Mithra knows what he needs – a camping chair, some shovels and trowels, a tent, a piece of wood to write on, some fresh vegetables to eat, a cell phone.

In Sri Lanka, where Mithra lived most of his life, and in the United States, where he lives now, no one he knows says they want to be a farmer. “Everyone wants to be rich, to make money, to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer,” he says. “I never hear anyone say they want to be farmer, and it is such a beautiful thing to be.”

Mithra has always wanted to be a farmer. He wants to be a farmer still, only one educated in modern farming, in sustainable and environmentally responsible food growing.

Mithra wants a life that is humble and simple. He wants his garden to be self-sufficient, he wants his life to be the same. “Life is suffering,”he says “desire is suffering.” He does not try to hide from suffering, he accepts and embraces it as part of the sacred circle of life.  He wants to treat his farm workers well, much the way he has been treated at Blue Star. “They are a community here,” he says, “they have my back. I don’t have to worry about getting fired or not earning more money, I just have to worry about my garden.”

I have learned in my own life that anxiety and fear is the hallmark of greed, anger and spiritual insecurity. Spirituality is the antidote to anxiety and fear, it requires us to look inward and ask how it is we really want to live, and challenges us to turn away from a life of fear and anger and enslavement, living in barren and ugly places doing work of no meaning for people who care nothing about us. Our culture teaches us to sacrifice a life of meaning for a life of what they call security, a ghost life, a false vision. Visit any nursing  home where the elderly are hidden away without purpose and ask if they are secure, if their great trade-off of life for the safety they told they must have was worth it.

Mithra has made some of the same choices I  have made, some I wished to make but could not, some I have come to make later in life. He does not live a life in fear, anxiety, anger or regret. Perhaps this is the beginning of his search for Nirvana, a state of true enlightenment. He says Nirvana is his ultimate goal.

Some people, I have seen, understand that we will all die, and that everyone and thing we love will die. Some people seem stunned by death, in their lives, their families, their dogs. What, I always wonder, did they think would happen?  A garden is a circle of life, perhaps this is why Mithra is drawn to it, why he says he has learned so much from it.

“I suppose this summer that I want to live like a monk,” he says, and he does. Thomas Merton would have loved the life that Mithra is living this summer at Blue Star. His visits to the Peace Pole by the river, his evenings writing at his small home-made desk, his days working alone in the sun with flowers and vegetables, the sense of inner peace and contentment that he evokes. The wonderful garden he has brought to life.

How is it that Mithra Kulatunga knows the power of the horses, the importance of keeping animals in our every day lives, and the mayor of New York and his angry supporters who say they support the rights of animals do not? Perhaps because Mithra grew up with elephants working on his farm, and he knows how much the working animals need and love to work, and he knows how much people need to live and work in connection with animals. He knows things we have forgotten. The elephants, he says, were not belittled for doing cheap tricks for humans, their hard work with people is valuable and precious.

Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism and alarm, and solitude is what most of us have never known or will never know. That is a tragedy, Mithra’s life reminds us of the great beauty of solitude, rather than a live of devices  and pressure. I find some solitude every day, it is my salvation and my defense against the roar and rage of the world.

Mithra does not, I am sure, have a perfect life, nor does he crave one. He is not a saint, but young man who has thought about how he wants to life, and is already living a life of meaning.  He knows that a perfect life is not a life without suffering, but a life where suffering and struggle bring us to the great awakening, a life of  grace and peace and freedom and authenticity.

It is a great privilege to have met and talked with Mithra, I will make sure to visit him often. He is 24 years old, he intuitively understands so many things I am just beginning to grasp. He is my brother in the search for a life worth living.

This is the first of a series of posts I want to write about a  young man I visited today at a remarkable place, Blue Star Equiculture. I believe his story is important, I think it speaks to way we treat one another, to the power of animals in our lives and the need to keep them among us. It speaks of a better way, the way the next generation might  save the earth. I believe acceptance and a new consciousness of tolerance and harmony is emerging –  in just a few weeks, Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, the victory of the New York Carriage Horses over those who would banish them from the city, the removal of Confederate flags from government buildings, the ratification of personal freedom in marriage and commitment, the acceptance of good people like Caitlyn Jenner.

“When human beings fail to find their true place in this world,” wrote Pope Francis in Laudato Si,   “they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves: Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given, but, man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.”

And this is what is special about Mithra. He has found his true place in this world, he says, in his garden. He believes the earth is a gift to man, who must use it with respect for the purpose for which it was given. He respects the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.

I believe Mithra, who celebrates humility and simplicity, is the future, the way forward. So is Blue Star.

Mithra Kulatunga is 24 years old, he was born in the United States. When he was two his father, a farm manager, moved his family back to Sri Lanki where he spent the next 18 years running a farm in the rural gown of Matara. Mithra came back to the United States a few years ago to attend the University of Massachusetts and earn a degree in sustainable farming.

Last year, Mithra took a Blue Star course in agriculture and draft  horses, and was mesmerized by  the Blue Star idea.  He loves the United States, but not the stress of life here or the runaway consumerism and corporatism. He has no wish for a life behind a desk, worrying about money for his retirement. He wants to work outdoors, inventing a new kind of sustainable farming. He hopes to return to Blue Star every year to tend his garden.

Mithra says he felt a powerful call from the horses there. They changed him, he said. When Paul Moshimer, the co-director of the farm, died two months ago, Mithra came to the farm and asked Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach if she needed help running the farm’s composting system and helping to create and expand their new garden. He was hired. Pamela did  not imagine or expect so beautiful and mystical a garden.

Mithra works and sleeps in the shadow of the beautiful 400-year-old tree where Paul Moshimer took his own life, Mithra loves it there, he is pleased to work and sleep alongside of it.

Since Mithra came to Blue Star, he has spent four or five days a week living and sleeping in the garden as he builds it. The garden is spectacular now, it has grown to several acres, including rows and rows of flowers and vegetables. Mithra sleeps in a tent by the garden shed, he eats what he grows in the garden, shale and cucumber and shard, and cooks  his food on a portable stove. He works all day and into the night, planting, seeding, plowing, weeding, pulling.  Once a day, he goes into the farmhouse to eat or wash up.

Every morning, he wants down to the river and sits by the Peace Pole, the spiritual heart of the farm. Sometimes he sits there, sometimes he swims.

In the evening, at dusk, he pulls out a plank of wood and sits in a small lawn chair and writes at his makeshift desk. He has a journal of planting, a record of what he plants, how it grows, how big it gets, how healthy it is. His father told him that a real farmer, one worthy of respect, writes down a record of his  garden, simple laborers just work the soil. So he writes faithfully.

In the morning, the sun rises over his tent around 6:30, when he gets up, eats breakfast and goes to work, watering, digging, planting. When he got the job, he bought $32 worth of seeds, the rest have been donated by friends of Blue Star or people in the town of Palmer, Massachusetts. Every day, people come to walk along the river, run with their dogs, see his garden. Several of the volunteers at Blue Star come by to help him.

Raised a Buddhist, Mithra talks eloquently of his spiritual life. He talks of the “suffering of desire” caused by the perpetual wanting more and bigger things, and of the “suffering of life,” the Buddhist acceptance of death and suffering as a part of life, not as an unimaginable and unpredictable shock. Suffering, he says, is both inevitable and predictable, it is an elemental part of the human experience.

In his life, he seeks Nirvana, a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and where people may be  released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. Nirvana represents the final goal of Buddhism.

Mithra is important. He will not devote  his life to making money, he says, but to learning how to farm, to helping to heal the land, and learning at Blue Star how to love people, animals and the earth.  He hates no one, his time is not spent in argument and acquisition. His father is a farm manager, and he hopes to succeed him on the farm in Sri Lanka. He says his ambition is to treat the workers on the farm in the same way Blue Star has treated him. “I am supported here, I am part of a community, everyone has my back. When Pamela hired me, she said it didn’t matter if all I grew all summer was a rotten tomato, that would be fine. She just wanted me to try.”

That he says, has liberated him from fear and caution and dedicated him to his already spectacular garden. “I don’t have to worry about  being fired,” he said, “I just have to do my work.” That idea has worked, perhaps beyond anyone’s imagination. Support is a great motivator, an idea that perished in the corporate takeover of much of American business.

But support is  Blue Star idea. It rises from the conflict and argument that has hovered over the animal world like a storm. It is a new awakening, a movement to love people and animals, and to heal Mother Earth, as we are all called to do. The time for argument and delay and greed, say all of the wise and spiritual people of the world, is past. It is not enough to make more money and build more buildings. It is not acceptable to drive the animals out of our everyday life, Mithra knows we need them, they are part of all of it. We will either live in harmony or perish together.

Mithra is not alone at Blue Star, there are many like him, attracted to this vision of a more meaningful world and life, a life in community and acceptance, a life with animals, a life of re-connection to the earth and the natural world. This is important, so I’ll be writing about Mithra and his very magical garden this week. Thanks for reading about it.

 

Mithra Kulatunga may not know it, but he is hard at work building a shrine and a sanctuary at Blue Star Equiculture. People will soon enough be coming to see Mithra’s beautiful Garden, to walk in it, sit on it’s benches and see the coming of the new world, the city on the hill, where people and animals live together in harmony and purpose, and are treated with love and dignity.

They say mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause. The mark of the mature and exceptional man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

Mithra is an exceptional man, and I am going to Massachusetts to spend some time with him in a few days.

Most nights now, Mithra can be found at night sleeping outdoors in the gardens of Blue Star Equiculture, which he went to build and tend when he heard the news that Paul Moshimer, the co-director of Blue Star, had hung himself in the great old tree that is the spiritual center of the farm. Mithra knew Paul, he knew Blue Star. He wanted to come there and help.

Mithra is a college student. And perhaps an angel. No one asked him to come, he simply appeared soon after Paul’s death. He has taken it upon himself to till and plant and cultivate the garden, now big and long and beautiful. For now, he has given himself over to the farm, and the idea of the farm.

He comes to answer the call of his generation to build a better world than we have, while there is time.

Sometimes Mithra comes into the farmhouse for food, but mostly he tends to his garden, rain or sun. Mithra is from India, his family used elephants to help care for their gardens. Flowers and nature – and horses – are a passion of his. He invited me to spend a night with him when I met him, when I talked to him after Paul’s death.  I accepted, we are picking a time. I saw the spirit in his eyes.

I want to know more about him, why he has come to Blue Star, why he has devoted himself so selflessly and fully to the garden there.

Mithra studies at the University of Massachusetts Stockbridge campus, he graduated from Blue Star’s Draft Horse Husbandry Class in 2014. Pamela Moshimer Rickenbach says he is one of the kindest and most loving humans she has ever known. When Paul died Mithra appeared at the farm and took over the farm’s production and flower garden.

He and some others have helped build a sanctuary for people in the shadow of the 400-year-old tree where Paul took his own life.  Without any money, Mithra has collected seeds and plants and gathered contributions and is building a beautiful garden.

And spending long and hard hours planting, weeding, watering.

When Mithra comes to the farm – four or five days and nights a week –  he sleeps out in the garden and works out in the sun all day long. Coming from India he is used to heat.  Pamela says they only see him late at night, and briefly, when his work is done and he needs something to eat.

He says he could not be more fulfilled. Mithra says he loves the big tree, it dies not upset him that Paul hung himself from it, or that he works and sleeps in it’s shadow.

Mithra is important for many reasons.

His work and time at Blue Star speaks to the  power and meaning of the farm to so many people. How many people of any age do you know who would live out in the garden and love it for free?  His story is important, it speaks to the goodness in human beings, the healing power of the horses,  and to the importance of animals remaining in our world and in the lives of everyday people.

This act of selflessness ought to be noted, I want to know more about it and share it. I know to know Mithra.  In a sense, he is the perfect poster child for Blue Star, as important as the horses are. Mithra is, in a way, just why Blue Star is so important, why it is so worthy of support and  recognition. Somehow, the farm has given meaning and direction to this great heart and soul and to the lives of countless others.

There are actually many Mithra’s working and volunteering and circling around Blue Star, but their stories can only be told one at a time.

I am not one of those to talk about the old days, or lament the state of young people today. The young in our world are amazing, tolerant and stimulating and filled with the energy of change, smarter and more intelligent than ever.

But I do not know many people, young or old, who would come to Blue Star and sleep outside for weeks in a pasture to build a garden for someone else. Our culture is obsessed with the fragile idea that success and happiness are mostly about money and security. We live in an aspiritual and increasingly angry world, we are obsessed with money, we live in fear, we dread risk, we work as money slaves for people who care nothing for us doing work we do not love, our spirits drowned by warnings and argument. We are disconnected from nature and from the world of animals. Our leaders are mired in greed and conflict and isolated from the real world.

Mithra is profoundly connected to nature and to animals. Like so many of the young and older people who find their way to Blue Star, they have found a better way to live than the frantic legions that have come before them.

Mithra is answering the call of the Native People and of Pope Francis, now one of the world’s great spiritual leaders, to live in harmony with people, to begin the very personal and individual process of healing the world, and of helping the beleaguered animals of the world and treating them well.

Mithra is drawn to people and to Mother Earth, he is  helping to heal and honor her right in the Blue Star Pasture, right in the shadow of the great tree that has shaped so much of life on this farm. The horses, he said, have changed his outlook and his consciousness.

That is the power of Blue Star, really, that is why the place is so  important. All kinds of people are drawn to it and are willing to surrender themselves to it, and to the idea of loving the animals and treating people with love and dignity. That we don’t have to hate people to love animals, we can love both and treat all living things with dignity and compassion. That is a cause to live for in our increasingly fragmented and intense world. Mithra has a Facebook page, but he is rarely on it. He will be sleeping out in the Blue Star Garden tonight, in the rain and chill,  helping to keep the Blue Star Rising. I imagine he will be out there for a long awhile, people tend to hang around there once they find it.

So I’m going to see Mithra. I have some questions to ask  him, I want to talk to him in his garden. I want to take his portrait. I don’t know if my back will survive sleeping out in that garden all night, but I don’t really need to be Mithra. I just want to get to know him, his story cries out to be told.

The Blue Star prophesy calls for great change, for a better way, for a wiser understanding of the animals and a compassionate understanding of the people who love them and live with them. Blue Star is the idea that has come, the place we need to go, a model and an inspiration. The idea that needs to grow and prosper.

When Paul took his life nearly two months ago, it seemed that the idea of Blue Star might be in peril. There was great shock and pain and dismay. There still is, but there is also great  hope and energy and commitment. Out of darkness, light, out of death, life.

Blue Star is rising, Pamela and the young people at the farm are all strong and focused on her beautiful mission, her great heart beats very strongly, her voice is loud and clear.

Mithra is an angel, and he and other angels and spirits have appeared out of the fog of loss and grief to make a stand for themselves, for the animals of the world, for the future of the earth itself. We will either learn to live in harmony or we shall perish together.

We are, in fact,  at a crossroads, and Mithra’s garden is right at the epicenter.   It is the next way, the better way. He has made his choice. I am making mine, I am standing with Blue Star, I am eager to spend a night with him. My camera is eager to come.

You can, if you wish, find a number of ways to support them here.

 

 

.

 

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

___

In the evening, when the people are gone, the dogs have gone home,  the summer sun is setting, and the hard work of planting and watering and culling is done, Mithra Kulatunga stops working. He pulls out a wooden board, sits in his camping chair, his only piece of furniture, and writes. He does not write stories or keep a familiar journal, he writes the stories of seeds and flowers and vegetables in his garden.  When they were planted, how they have grown, what they are like.

Sometimes, he has helpers. Most of the time, he is alone. Solitude is a vanishing gift in our culture, we are overwhelmed by noise and data and conflict and alarm, by messages injected into our conscious by the digital IV. And that is a loss, because solitude is precious and sacred, I always want more of it.

Sunday, I walked and talked with Mithra, I asked  him if he had read Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau. He said he had heard of it, but had not yet read it, which surprised me, since he could have written it. And what an irony, because it seems that Thoreau and this thoughtful young man from Sri Lanka are connected to one another, almost channeling one another.

This week, I will remedy this and send Mithra  Walden and some books by Thomas Merton, two wonderful writers and thinkers who loved solitude, simplicity, independence and humility, gifts that sometimes seem to have been washed away in our greedy and angry and distracted world. Walden and Merton are two reasons I came to live in the country, away from the maddening world of cities and suburbia in which I was mired. More than anyone or anything, these two men have been my spiritual guides and inspirations.

When I moved to this beautiful place, I first spent a year on a mountaintop reading Merton’s journals, they were my companions, along with two genial dogs. I wrote a book about it, was inspired by a Merton book, it was called Running To The Mountain. My publisher hated the book, did everything but burn it, but it is one of my favorites, it endures. The experience changed my life, and sitting with Mithra, I was once again hungry to  renew the joyful experience of solitude and purpose. And it always requires renewal, especially in our world, where every inch of space seems to be about money and worry.

Mithra has embraced all of this values intuitively, he is a profoundly spiritual being, he has never lost sight of values in his movement through his young life. It is perhaps easy for the young to be idealistic, but Mirtha seems to be to be for real. His journey has taken him to a place I call Mithra’s Garden, it is already a shrine and a sanctuary, just as Walden Pond is, people already come to walk there, see the flowers, see the vegetables, take in in the beautiful space. It is a powerful place, I have no doubt it will be an important place – perhaps a healing place – to many people.

As I wrote yesterday (this is the second in a series of posts about Mithra, and about Blue Star Equiculture in Palmer, Massachusetts) Mithra lives in the garden with a handful of things. He sleeps in a tent, has a canvas camping chair, a portable stove he can hold in one hand, a wooden board for a desk, a pair of sandals, a blanket and acres of flowers and vegetables, often his dinner. He has a cellphone, he leaves  his laptop behind in an apartment where he sleeps when he is attending college.

He is spending the summer building a spectacular garden at Blue Star. It is cleansing to talk to Mithra, inspiring. It is hopeful. The young are coming, I think, they may save us from the deprivations we have inflicted on our world.

Mithra means, he says, to avoid the “suffering of desire,'” the idea that he has to always get more, bigger and better things. He is almost a reincarnation of Thoreau in his passion for humility and simplicity. He shows us what we do not need as well as what we do.

He is also a powerful spiritual echo of  Merton, the brilliant author and Trappist Monk who craved solitude and spent much of his adult life alone in his hermitage in Kentucky, praying and writing. Both men worshiped the natural world, struggled for simplicity and independence,  and saw the importance of being connected to the earth and to the animals. Merton loved his garden.

These ideas- simplicity, faith, a need for animals, humility, a love of Mother Earth, are all evident in Mithra’s Magical Garden, it is as if they grow out of the soil there along with the flowers and rows and rows of vegetables. It was, in fact, the big draft horses who plowed the field for Mithra’s Garden.

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”  – Thoreau, Walden.

In the garden, Mithra says he has what he needs. Mithra is 24, he is a student at the University of Massachusetts, he is studying sustainable farming. He was drawn to the garden by the idea of the community of Blue Star Equiculture, there, he says, the horses and the people have brought him to this magical summer. At Blue Star, he says, there is no pressure, no fear, he is free to imagine and create his own garden, and it is an astonishing place.

Mithra has the focus of Thoreau and the faith of Merton. He seems to be swimming in the very opposite stream of the world around him, the stress, greed, stress, scrambling, the search for discounts and sales, gadgets and enough money to fool oneself into thinking they can be safe. That takes great courage and faith, it is very rare, it is a holy thing. I wonder how someone so young acquired so much faith and purpose. He said it began with the farm he grew up on in Sri Lanka, then the horses at Blue Star, and then being nourished by the people there.

The garden sits in a large pasture behind Blue Star farm, framed by a beautiful 400-foot pine tree where Paul Moshimer, the co-director of Blue Star, took his own life two months ago. The very ground seems to shimmer with mystical power. Two rivers connect at the edge of the pasture, there is a Peace Pole where people come to meditate and pray. The horses come by regularly, to ride, to swim, to work.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” – Thoreau, Walden.

I asked Mithra what it is he wants. He wants, he says, to return to Sri Lanka and manage the farm his father is managing. He wants to manage the farm in a sustainable way, he wants to use draft horses instead of tractors, he respects the power of the working animal. He wants the farm to be sustainable, that is, respectful of Mother Earth and with a great consciousness towards healing the world, and not harming it further.

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” – Thoreau, Walden.

Mithra says he loves his life in the garden. He is not certain where it is all going, or when. But in the moment, it is where he wants to be. He is a Buddhist, he believes in living in the moment. He notices that many of the Americans he knows do not.

“You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.” – Thomas Merton.

Mithra has worked in several jobs in the United States, his family is not wealthy. He has not liked any of them, they are pressured and tense and unfulfilling. He loves this job. In his country, as in this country, farmers are not always held in high regard. Their work is often considered menial, he says, less than glamorous, less important than the work of engineers, doctors, lawyers. He does not believe that is so. Farming, treating the land well, growing beautiful things from the soil is beautiful and sacred work. He is very happy to be doing it, he hopes to do it for the rest of his life.

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.” – Thoreau, Walden.

Mithra’s life is grounded in spirituality. Every morning, he goes to the Peace Pole by the river, a sacred spot at Blue Star, he sits and thinks there, he savors his solitude, his ability to think, to ground himself. No e-mails, no text messages, no news or weather alerts, no cable news. He is free to think, to organize his life and his values, to adhere to them. He often visits his friend Chip, who brought him to Blue Star, who has encouraged him. He feels enveloped in the community of the farm, he is, he says, supported and loved and encouraged. It makes all of the difference he says.

And compassion is perhaps a healthy virus, a new and powerful meme. As a farm manager – he is studying sustainable farming at UMass – he hopes to treat the workers on his farm the way he has been treated as Blue Star. He hopes to bring the Blue Star idea out into the world.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

— Thomas Merton

Part One: Mithra’s Magical Garden

Going to Blue Star Equiculture this afternoon, to spend the night, visit Pamela, attend a pig roast party, and visit with Mithra Kulatunga, the young man who is building a beautiful garden on the farm in the shadow of the big tree where Paul Moshimer died. I believe Mithra’s Garden will become something of a  holy space, a destination, a spiritual place. Mithra is living out in the garden this summer while building and tending it, I want to spend some time with and try and understand what makes him do this in an age of selfishness, greed and conflict. We want to see how Pamela is doing also.

We’ll be back on Sunday.