We're Back!

A summer of non-stop travel – four and a half months on the road to promote  our book “Spiritual Economics” in five cities in America, five cities in India, France, Lithuania and Ukraine. Overall some 800 copies of the book ended up in the hands of readers. While traveling I spoke at the Festival of Inspiration at New Vrindavana, at 9 ISKCON temples, three festivals, two universities, one business school, at one press conference, and at the offices of Times of India. I also made a presentation of the book to a group of professors at Hyderabad University.

There have been some events here at Gitagrad—mainly the summer heat (similar but not as long as the heat in Moscow) destroyed the crops. Everyone in the village has been complaining what a bad year it was. Hot and dry. So next year we will have drip irrigation in place, and hopefully be able to avoid these problems.

We completed the purchase of Ekanath Bhakti’s house, and the winterizing process is going on now—adding more straw, clay and styrofoam insulation to the walls.

Our Kartika still has not given birth. After repeated failures with artificial insemination (with Holstein bull semen so that we could get a Holstein calf) the boys just took her to visit the local “Brown cow” bull next door. The outcome is still uncertain. She is quite restless these days. The locals think the cows didn’t get enough to eat this summer and are cantankerous as a result. The neighbors cow broke her chain and ate everything left in their garden – pumpkins, carrots, beet root – all of it! Kartika insists on walking down near the road to eat only one type of grass growing there. Startled by a car, she nearly ran me over.

Our men have begun marketing paneer (curd cheese) in town on the weekends, brining in about 600 hrivna a month ($80), which is enough to pay for the food and electricity. If Kartika would begin giving some milk it would triple the income. A vet is scheduled to come for a visit this weekend.

The boys got a table saw for cutting wood for the winter. A very crude version of what we know in America, but it’s the version that everyone here knows – the Soviet model. It has no pulley guard, no fence, and no guides. I have recommended some immediate improvements to make sure that it is a safer instrument. It’s not easy to get to the hospital from here.

I wrote a few articles that could have gone here, but I put them on the spiritual-econ blog instead. One is particularly pertinent – Revolt of the Elites. In this article I discuss the necessity of qualified men participating in village communities. My experience is that very few of them are willing to give up their lucrative positions or businesses in order to help build self-sufficient communities. That has to change.

The other one is about the destructive influence of money on a self-sufficient community. This is an important lesson for everyone who is trying to build such communities to understand. Check them out here.

Now that I am ‘home’ I hope to write much more frequently. There is a long list that I have collected over the last months that I want to comment on. This winter I will likely be leaving Ukraine to write in solitude. Where? Maybe Russia. Maybe Poland. Maybe even America. Let’s see what happens.

I’ll pop some photos in here tomorrow if the connection is strong enought. There is a new post below – a piece about the cows in my life now. Hope you enjoy it!

Dd