Constant Practice and Detachment
By Phalini devi dasi
Twenty-five years ago today, Sriman Haripada dasa and I ascended the steps of the Orange County Courthouse. I don’t know about him, but I had butterflies in my stomach. We arrived at the marriage license window just as it opened. We were very shy to exchange rings, as we had never touched before. But after a couple of deep breaths, we somehow managed to awkwardly slip those gold bands onto each other’s fingers, and from that moment until today, we have been together through thick and thin.
Our fire sacrifice a year later marked the happiest day of my life. My husband had bought me a red silk sari embroidered with gold and silver, and my girlfriends helped me decorate my hair with flowers. The temple room was filled with well-wishing friends who had come to offer us their blessings. Ramesvara Swami officiated at our ceremony, my Dad had flown in from Cheyenne, Wyoming to give me away, and in front of Sri Sri Rukmini-Dvarakadhisa, we pronounced our vows.
Since then, my husband and I have experienced the ups and downs of married life as even aspiring Vaisnava grhasthas must endure in the unfriendly atmosphere of this Age of Kali. Although there have been periods of peace and even pleasure, they have been invariably followed by equal periods of distress and turbulence. After all, this is the world of dualities. Sometimes sukha, sometimes dhukha, up and down, back and forth, like a teeter-totter at a children’s playground. During times of happiness, when the teeter-totter is up, we experience a kind of euphoria. We sort of relax a bit and almost, almost start to think that everything is okay. Then the dhukha hits, and we bump! hit the ground with a dose of reality. "Oh, yeah. We almost forgot. We’re in the material world!" We again remember clearly that we don’t belong in this place.
Because we are endeavoring to return back home to eternally serve at the lotus feet of our Lord Sri Krsna, we are grateful for those times of distress. They remind us that there really is no continual happiness in this material world, and they make us want to return back home, back to Krsna’s lotus feet. "None of us wants calamities, yet when they come they may serve as an impetus to surrender to Lord Krsna." (Mukunda-mala Stotra, 11, Purport)
The happiness we seek is the uninterrupted kind that we’re used to in the spiritual world. We want loving relationships here, but the taste of love that we hanker for in our heart of hearts can only be relished when we reestablish our eternal relationship with Lord Sri Krsna and His loving devotees in the effulgent, spiritual realm from which we originally came. Those times of displeasure which we experience here in this material world help us to long and pine for that eternal sweetness which we can taste only by resuming our eternal service to the Lord. "I wish that all those calamities would happen again and again so that we could see You again and again, for seeing You means that we will no longer see repeated births and deaths." (Queen Kunti, S.B. 1.8.25)..
Sometimes people ask me how my hubby and I have managed to stay together and maintain at least a semblance of peace in our household. My first answer to them is always this: I don’t argue with my husband. Oh sure, sometimes we disagree, but we don’t have the kind of knock-down, drag-out fights that our parents used to have. Both my husband and I suffered anguish as kids whenever our parents fought. Neither of their marriages lasted-my husband’s parents divorced when he was ten, my parents divorced after I left home-and I vowed twenty-five years ago that whatever it took, I would never fight with my husband. I didn’t want my kids to suffer the same way my husband and I did when our parents fought. Granted, everybody has to suffer, including our kids, but at least I didn’t want them to have to suffer that way.
Of course we’ve made mistakes raising our kids. Every Kali-yuga parent has. But we tried our best, given the information we had at our disposal, the sincerity of our hearts, and the circumstances we found ourselves in. I hope that despite our shortcomings, at least our children will take into their own marriages the practice of avoiding quarrels with their spouses.
