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Krishna Das
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posted by Daniel on October 8th, 2011"How did you first get into kirtan?" she asks me. We had finished the last session of our three-day harmonium intensive a few hours ago, and were chatting now in Kripalu's hallway.
My mind flipped back through an imaginary photo album of kirtan highlights - the sweet bhav of Jai Uttal retreats, the epic woodstockiness of Bhakti Fests, the drinking deeply of Radha-Krishna nectar on pilgrimages to Mayapur...
It wasn't the first time I'd been asked this question, and I could remember my usual response: that in my first trip to India, when I was 21, I saw a kirtan in West Bengal. And, totally didn't get it. A year later, a friend would loan me a booklet of CDs, including Krishna Das and Jai Uttal, and it would all suddenly fall into place, how music and spiritual practice could be one path.
But on this day, another memory was nagging at me, whistling in my ear, singing a song of coming-full-circle, like a kirtan sung in rounds that begins where it ends, or like the bright red sugar maple leaf outside in the new england autumn breeze, falling to the ground to begin its life cycle anew.
"Well, actually, I first got exposed to kirtan... here at Kripalu!" It was amazing to remember. I was flashing back to the warm, dimly lit room where I'd first heard kirtan - first heard a harmonium, being played by a man with dreadlocked hair who had "recently returned from India" - a new concept to the then-19-year-old me who had just dropped out of engineering school. I remembered struggling to keep up with the strange sanskrit words, but feeling a kind of magical energy permeating the room while we all sang. Together. Sacred. Music.
And now it had come full circle, that first seed having blossomed into the yearning to devote my life to the practice and sharing of kirtan, to the promise of a music that can awaken the soul's memory of - and love of - God.
And so there we were, in Kripalu's hallway, having woven 24 budding harmonium students together into a veritable harmonium orchestra, and having recalled how it all began.
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