Dana Point, California

Celebrating Compassion for All Beings

at the Festival of the Whale

By Los Angeles Reporting Team (Originally in English)

Los Angeles initiates prepared excitedly for the 15th Annual Festival of the Whale, held this year over two weekends in March. The festival is a large outdoor fair celebrating the gray whale’s annual migration down the California coastline on its way from Alaska to Mexico. It seemed a perfect opportunity for sharing the message of Alternative Living, especially since the festival also featured other animal-friendly activities such as a ‘dog walk’ benefiting a no-kill animal shelter, and the Ocean Institute, which seeks to educate people about marine life.

Prior to the weekend of March 4 and 5, Golden Year 3 (2006), initiates prepared food, flyers and display materials for the booth they had arranged. Very early on the morning of March 4th, they arose to a beautiful dawn. It seemed to initiates that God was already smiling upon them since the entire previous week had been wet and rainy. Around 15 fellow practitioners traveled together to arrive before 6 AM at the fair venue where they set up the booth with fresh flowers, banners, inflated balloons and played Master’s DVD. They also set up a display of photos from the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association’s disaster relief efforts such as Pakistan and hurricane Katrina.

As soon as the fair opened at 10 AM, the area was immediately filled with people. Many families arrived with their children, who happily received the balloons from initiates while the parents stopped to take an Alternative Living flyer and converse. Initiates also went out into the crowd to distribute flyers. Along with the flyers, initiates had also printed some recipes with appetizing photos of the dishes themselves. People seemed to really like the recipes, with one person commenting, “This is nice because without the recipes, I wouldn’t know how to cook the vegetarian food.”

Some fellow practitioners went to a large nearby park, Balboa Park, where they also had good success in distributing flyers. They found out they could get a permit to set up a table at this park as the “Alternative Living Group.”

Many people had positive comments about the flyer and even remarked about the animals. One gentleman, for example, said that he really liked the dolphin picture on the flyer. Other people asked where they could get the food for vegetarian living. Along with the flyers, initiates passed out printed copies of recipes from the Supreme Kitchen web site and also pointed out the web sites on the flyers where they could find more information and more recipes.

Initiates also noticed that those who wore the yellow vest, bearing the name of The Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association, were able to distribute far more flyers than the initiates who weren’t wearing it. Initiates commented to each other that Master’s recommendation for working teams to wear them really had a very good reason indeed and it brought great blessing to the people who saw Master’s name!

At the end of the two days at the fair, some fellow practitioners went around to look for any Alternative Living flyers that people might have discarded on the ground or in the trash. But, miraculously, they could not find any! All 6,000 flyers passed out to the public had been kept rather than thrown away. Initiates left feeling deeply thankful for this opportunity to participate in God’s work.

Celebrating Compassion for All Beings at the Festival of the Whale

By Los Angeles Reporting Team (Originally in English)

Celebrating Compassion for All Beings

at the Festival of the Whale