Prashanta

Our beloved Anand Prashanta (David Leek) left his body 2 days after his 75th birthday, after a 10-year journey with Alzheimer’s.

Prashanta took sannyas in 1978 and spent time in Poona 1 and on the Ranch. In 1985 he helped Anuradha close down the Ranch. From there he traveled to California with his beloved, Ma Prem Ania, settling first in Carmel and later buying a home in Carmel Valley. Here he and Ania raised their adopted daughter, Ariana. Ania and Prashanta were married for 40 years. When he became unable to continue to work in his psychotherapy practice, they sold their home and moved to Federal Way, Washington to be closer to their daughter.

Prashanta was a wonderful provider, a loving husband and father, a gentle, playful man with a sunny disposition and a quirky sense of humor. Throughout his time with Alzheimer’s he wrote beautiful poetry describing his surrender into the simplicity of living in the present moment.

Prashanta is survived by his wife, Ania, daughter Ariana and son-in-law Gabriel and their 2 children Cy, aged 6, and Lily, aged 1.

Two poems by Prashanta:

The Shadowy Void

It’s not that I don’t know,
How Inevitable is Life,
How short is death,
How unending are both.

I am, as we all are,
Cursed with the fear of death,
Which is to say, fear of
That shadowy void of unknowing.

I live in my own precious world
With joyful surprises
And uneasy awareness
Of the very small part I play
In an unforeseeable, unimaginable
Chain of events.

I ride the carousel of life and hope
That circles endlessly
And promises me a future of endless exploration
But always brings me back to the beginning.

The unknown shows itself
To be as common as my easy chair,
As eerie as a blind alley on a dark night
And as inedible as a rock.

But the one thing I never could,
And never will taste, is the fear of death.
When it comes, there will be comforting
Remembrance of sharing life and death
With every Living creature
In the family of Earth’s children.

2/26/2018

It’s All Good

Nature has provided me with
Her own celebratory plaque.
It is white and, I believe, quite pure.
It fills my mind,
In a manner of speaking.

I had not previously heard
The mysterious and alliterative term,
“Pre-senile dementia.”

I must admit, it has a certain authoritative ring.
Medical titles usually do,
And this one is quite official sounding.

It tells the story of a slow, crustaceous process,
Sort of like the accretion of silt
At the bend of a river
Where movement is diminished
And small bits of detritus,
No longer carried forward with enough motion,
Begin to drift downward
Until they settle, softly,
At the bottom.
Memory, like the drifting silt,
Becomes inert.

But, it is a slow process.
And I am not yet entirely transformed
From flowing river to fen.

Sometimes I feel frightened
By the future I imagine.
But, really, my fears of what may come
Are quite likely to be forgotten
Once the process is complete.

And, as I write this
I hold tightly to my secret weapon,
My willingness to live now, in this moment,
With its ever-changing kaleidoscope
Of texture, temperature, sound
And every other sense that brings me
The wonderful awareness of living.

2020

Thanks for photos and text go to Pratima

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