Editor's note

The poems in this final volume of Seventy-seven thousand Service-Trees were mostly written by Sri Chinmoy while he was visiting Malaysia, in January and February 2006, and Bulgaria and Thailand, in January and February 2007 — a few months before he left this world on 11 October 2007.

Sri Chinmoy embarked upon this marathon poetic odyssey on 24 January 1998 at 4:30 a.m., just three hours after completing his series Twenty-seven thousand Aspiration-Plants, which had taken him fourteen and a half years to write. By contrast, he wrote the fifty thousand poems completed of the Service-Trees series in just over nine years.

On the day he began that creative journey, while he was visiting Cancun, Mexico, with a group of his students, he recounted the experience in the previous chapter.