At around 1:45pm, while watching the last hour of Devi Bhava darshan, a few of the Brahmacharis appeared on stage carrying trays.\u00a0Yes, it was ice cream!\u00a0 Little cups and little wooden spoons were passed out to everyone.\u00a0Not surprisingly, there seemed to be an unusually large number of Brahmacharis appearing.\u00a0 Perhaps it was the timing of the broadcast that allowed them to break away from their seva.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We felt like little kids as we sat there.\u00a0No one was eating yet.\u00a0The temptation was there, but most of us were silently wanting to offer some to Amma once She called from inside the Mandapam.<\/p>\n
When Amma did call, shouts of ‘Ammeeeeee’ arose.\u00a0\u00a0Amma asked if we had our ice cream.\u00a0Some of us held our ice cream cups over our heads or held out our spoons for Her to taste.\u00a0 Amma made a few jokes.\u00a0She then told us to start eating \u2013 and we did!\u00a0Of course, by then, most of the ice cream had turned to soup, so there were slurping sounds all around as we drank rather than ate our treat.\u00a0Even though I was fasting today, I didn’t mind breaking it just once for this Depavali prasad. (I later found out that the ice cream is made and packaged right here in Amritapuri in the Juice Stall \u2013 with the cream coming directly from the cows in the cowshed).<\/p>\n
It seemed that this chat was longer than others.\u00a0All the while, Amma was beaming at us.\u00a0Her face was so radiant \u2013 perhaps She was reflecting our ice cream bliss.\u00a0Or maybe it was that of a Mother giving a special treat to Her children.\u00a0 Either way, Amma’s smile will remain with me for quite some time \u2013 as will memories of a sweet Deepavali Devi Bhava.
\nSri Pati<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At around 1:45pm, while watching the last hour of Devi Bhava darshan, a few of the Brahmacharis appeared on stage carrying trays.\u00a0Yes, it was ice cream!\u00a0 Little cups and little wooden spoons were passed out to everyone.\u00a0Not surprisingly, there seemed to be an unusually large number of Brahmacharis appearing.\u00a0 Perhaps it was the timing of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ashram-diary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e.amritapuri.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}