Places impact you for a variety of reasons. And the same place impacts different people in different ways. This is especially true when it comes to spiritual experiences, where every single person’s experience is unique. And personally, every spiritual experience is unique, the same person can have different deeply spiritual experiences at different places, at different times. This thought has emerged because of my own experiences over the years, but especially so this year, with different and unique experiences at various places I have visited recently. I began this year with a visit to Baroda (Vadodara) with friends. It was meant to be a relaxed trip, a touristy trip, with our sons. We enjoyed ourselves to the hilt, but the highlight of that trip was a visit to the Lakulisha temple at Pavagadh. It was the iconography of the temple that I connected with, and I spent a few hours simply lost in the details of the figures carved around the temple. There was an indefinable connect with
The most natural thing to do when it starts raining is to go looking for shelter, especially when it pours cats and dogs....... Most of us prefer watching the rain from the safety and comforts of our homes, and I have seen the same instinct in many birds which huddle among thick leaves, attempting to find some sanctuary.... However, every now and then I come across something which makes me wonder if these creatures actually want to get away from the rain, or if they,unlike us, are equally comfortable even when it pours.... like the kingfisher which patiently awaited its prey even though it was drenched.... . And just a couple of days bac k, I happened to notice this butterfly flitting around a tree (incidentally, a curry leaves tree - does it hold a special fascination for butterflies???), while it poured and poured. At first, we thought it was trying to find a place to settle, but it simply refused to sit in one place, going round and round, from one branch to another, intermittentl