Devotees at the inauguration of digging the ground in 2021
Just before mid-April until almost mid-May, New Talavan finished the foundation for a temple. A cow on the farm also gave birth to twins. Mother Earth probably felt pleased on both occasions.
Around Earth Day, the trenchers were digging, and Dustin Pertuit, the owner of Ground Level Construction Company, spoke with me about the future. Dustin asked who was going to come to such a big church out in the country. I told him that everyone is welcome, and invited him and his wife and two children to our Sunday picnic feast. He reads about ways leading to spiritual understanding, so I gave him a booklet.
Next, a devotee team began taping blue, plastic vapor barriers over the earthen floor: Sri Raga, his son Sesa, and his apprentice, Isvara Candra Puri. Then they put wooden forms, which they’d pre-built, in place around the perimeter, to limit the flow of the concrete.
Soon thereafter a company put down steel rebar, and finally the site was ready for the concrete to be pumped into the trenches and over the foundation. The concrete work started at two in the morning, as the moon moved toward a horizon.
Before starting, the owner and operater of the pump-and-crane truck asked me what this building is going to be. I answered, “A Hare Krishna temple.” Already chanting my rounds, I showed him the beads in my beadbag and repeated a line from The Lord’s Prayer: “hallow’d by Thy name.” The concrete work engaged a dozen men until the following afternoon. Their teamwork was admirable, and they earned devotional credit without knowing it.
Yogindravandana Prabhu the temple president (whose initiation letter from Srila Prabhupada was written fifty years ago, on May 10, 1972, in Hawaii), made a video with his phone camera from three-thirty a.m. until mangal-arati.
Dvibhuja Prabhu, another stalwart resident of New Talavan and the main gardener, informed me that about fifty years ago ISKCON’s famous architect of the Vrindavan and Juhu temples, Surabhir-palayantam Swami, visited New Talavan to offer his advice about the location of a new temple.
Jagadish Somani, the main donor, is a retired doctor, who lives in a rented room in a devotee’s double-wide house trailer around the farm’s property, which includes twelve hundred acres.
The sun rising above a corner of the concrete foundation. One of the rented units holding four strong lights is turned off