Sugarcane

We came back from town through sugarcane fields. Srila Prabhupada said, "Pull over here. Go and pick that tall sugarcane." We picked that sugarcane, which was about ten feet tall, and when we got back to the temple, Srila Prabhupada changed from his dhoti into a gumsha. On one page of one of the Vyasa-puja books, there are four small pictures os Srila Prabhupada sitting on a big plantation chair eating sugarcane. What you can't see in the picture is that we're all sitting at his lotus feet. He said, "If you're trying to enjoy in the material world, it's like chewing the chewed. After the juice has been sucked out of the sugarcane, there is nothing left, there is no sweetness." However, after Srila Prabhupada chewed the sugarcane and discarded it, we scrambled for it and found that it was still sweet. We wondered about Prabhupada's sugar cane analogy, but we concluded that becuse the sugarcane was coming from Srila Prabhupada's lotus lips, its sweetness had become magnified. Prabhupada was just like a little boy happily chewing sugarcane, and we all got special mercy.