A View of Tompkins Square Park

Try to capture the panorama of the harinama in Tompkins Square Park: happy, simple faces.  Ecstasy.  Black man plays a wooden recorder.  Girls in dark glasses.  People dancing according to their own style, devotees dancing the Swami Step.

Swamiji loved the way young Americans took to chanting.  He said, “You Americans are able to capture a good thing.”  It was our innocence, our willingness to try something new despite the risks.  When we applied those tendencies to Krishna consciousness, they became valuable.  We didn’t care that our conservative neighbors looked at us askance.  The Swami was a good thing.  Why didn’t anybody in Straight Square Authority swing with the Swami?  We just wanted to play the music.

He accepted us the way we were: raw youth, flirting faces, dancing bodies, most of us standing while he sat, the vibration of his drum punctuating our movements.  He was not lost in the sea of American youth.  It is not that he started chanting and later someone else took over and sang rock-n-roll.  It started and ended with him in control, glorifying Krishna.

These images stand by themselves, childish as they are in their happiness and simplicity.  As I describe them I try to reach back through my complicated present, my seventy-seven year old mind and body, through everything the institution has been through, everything I have since seen and done and realized and thought, to remember that simple happiness.  Those days were not false or sentimental; we were really singing and dancing in the park, and as the New York Times reported, finding ecstasies during those long, warm October afternoons.  It never rained on us as we distributed our “Stay High Forever” flyers.