AFTER THREE YEARS in San Diego, we've moved to the other side of America, to the Hare Krsna farm outside the small town of Alachua, in north central Florida.
Alachua lies about seventy miles south of Georgia, eighty miles inland from the Atlantic, half an hour's drive from Gainesville (yes, Gainesville), home of the University of Florida, where students on the plaza, every day for the last twenty years, have augmented their studies with a full lunch of Krsna-prasadam.
Alachua gets weather that's pleasantly warm in the winter, blazing hot in the summer. Thunderstorms blow in and out at any time of day.
Magnolias thrive here. Spanish moss hangs from the trees. Morning and evening are ushered in by choruses of frogs, birds, and crickets. We've got rattlesnakes too. A few weeks ago Arcita's shotgun nailed one about five feet long.
Our new office is a double-wide mobile home we've plunked down on the edge of a field. Woods line the dirt road in front of us, pastures the other three sides. All of our neighbors are cows.
The temple's land runs for 120 acres, and other devotees own more land nearby. All together, the area has pulled in more than 200 devotees.
The force behind our move was the married people on our staff: Nagaraja Dasa, our managing editor, and his wife, Pranada Dasi, who proofreads BTG and helps us watch over the business side of things. For them, San Diego meant paying high rent and raising their child in the city. In Alachua, they're building a house on their own land (they'll share it with two cows they're adopting), and their son's growing up in the country, in a big Hare Krsna community.
A member of the community, Parambrahma Dasa, has become our new circulation director. He's taking charge of our efforts to bring BTG to more readers.
Moving here has brought us closer to one of our editorial goals to show a simpler, more natural way of life, centered on Krsna.
-Jayadvaita Swami