Well. It’s June.

Everything is a pastiche of flux and jumble, as always. This time around, something about the perfume of the mangos and the national elections, the month of pilgrimage in Hindulandia (the holy places alight with religious nationalism, if you can parse that one), the face of the “most sacred river in the world” and all the beggars, renunciants, dams, transformations, mobile phone towers, and superlatives that flow along with it — something about this makes me swim in the cold currents of ideas, criticism, romance. An attempted, aborted, understanding of Power.

I have developed, I note bumping along the state highway from Ahmedabad to Nadiad two months ago, an allergy to construction. My sneezes echo my ever-more-sincere thirst for something constructive, to be involved in a deep way somewhere, in something. Commitment. It has been made clear to me that everything that has happened heretofore is part of a clarifying scheme, is perfect in its unfolding, and yet I still hunger for more, for clarity, for ease, for someone to tell me that This is what you’re going to spend your next X years doing, and you’re going to be independent-minded, and you’re going to love it.

But Construction and Constructive Work. The metallic rubble and blast sites along the holy Ganga, referred to here by all as “Gangaji” or “Gangama”, our holy mother. She’s a sort of Virgin of Guadalupe for India, only many thousands of years older and born not of a peasant’s faith but the meditate penance (for 5500 years) of Lord Bhagiraith.

No joke, we visited the very spot he sat. No dent.

The metallic rubble, the hunks of old machinery. The blast sites and holes in rock face where the dynamite went into the father of India, the Himalayas.

For the renunciants, the saddhus (“the simple, the pure”), the Himalayas are father and Ganga is mother. They have nothing else in the world. At the last Kumbha Mela (the big renunciant party every few years) apparently the water was so polluted at Allahabad that the saddhus threatened to drink it and die _en masse_ unless somebody cleaned it up.

That’s about where we are, I think, as brown people, Indian, humans, whatever: drinking from the filthiest holiest river you can imagine, demanding it be restored to its orginal beauty, looking for someone to do the goodwork, and about three thousands miles downstream of where we should be starting.

So that’s why we walked, maybe. Still trying to figure it out. It’s hard to get anything out and that’s why I’ve been out of touch. That and the mountains and two weeks of Butter visiting and now the paradisiac joy of the mango farm combined with the 125 degree F enforced lethargy.

Let’s call it a meditation and move on.

The rubble. The leaky barrels of petrochemicals next to mandatory hardhat signs and all-English safety announcements to workers who speak none of it. The cycle Vasant and Karuna talk about it complete:

a) the destruction of local sustainability measures and village industries by industrial societies, on the basis of cheapness and convenience
b) the demand of cheap food by urban centers
c) the ensuring lack of labor and unfeasability of small scale agriculture
d) the burgeoning wage-labor pool in cities
e) government funding large “public-works” projects to employ those unemployed by a) and c)
f) the loss of self-esteem by those who haven’t yet fled to the cities

But it’s not just the big dams that make me sneeze. Even the proliferation of mud and brick structures Vasantji envisions here in Mangoland, to house visiting students or host childrens’ camps, and even the 8 x 10 bamboo wall-less hut we built under the old mango tree 200 feet from the house, for me to meditate and relax in the afternoons — even that simple structure makes my eyes itch.

It seems somehow wrong: too foreign, too active, too much. Thee is something inherent in the ability to effect change, to DO anything, that could go disastrously wrong, that could end up scaring and scarring millions, and I have begun to feel very cautious about the existence of and posession of such POWER.

Teachers. Architects. Heads of households. Directors. Politicians. Chefs. We all have it. Musicians.

When first I met Butter, back in January, she was studying something about Africa and child soldiers (anyone less than 60, I assume) and symbolism. Apparently — I think this is in Liberia — Bob Marley is really well known, and his songs and imagery were used (co-opted might be the term) by the “rebel groups” (what are you rebelling against? -> what have you got?) to house their own meanings and agendas. As in, they took the term “One Love” to be their own, and would cut off all the fingers of villagers hands so they could only give a “thumbs-up” sign, symbolic of the “One Love”.

You might see how this could scar me. We’re all used to Marx and Jesus being used to kill millions of people, to the death of the message and the poetry behind the machineries of churchs and states, but Bob Marley? One Love? And the only reason that is an effective technique for a rebel group assaulting villagers and trying to garner support in whatever twisted way they sit it is because Bob Marley and his music and those memes have POWER.

So there’s my spring allergy for you. That’s all I got.

I’m sharing emotions of course, not yet analysis — but that will come, guided and inspired by the present to understand what I am feeling. Something here, I sense, is tied up in the rushing flow of that Mother Ganga, at once blue green grey and brown, washing away the sins in its pure cold deeps to the flat decaying plains of central Mangolandia far far away.

In the midst of all this, a full month in the Himalayas, we actually walked 8 days and 100 kilometers, from Uttar Kashi to the source of Gangaji at Gangotri. More on that to come, when Denali can figure out his pictures, clean them up, comb their hair, and let me share them with the public. But I will say it’s like no other river I’m seen or swam in, something terribly inspiring and, yes, powerful about it, something that allowed me to sit in Gangaji for long stretches, in movement or meditation, despite the coldness of the water and my memories of hypothermia. Some sense of care, of motherhood, of belonging.

Worth the walk.

Now, a month later, I have once again lost the thread of time, the desire for place. It happens, I notice, every time I can stop resisting and fall back into that deep calm of selfhood, at peace with whatever and wherever I have become, because somewhere in that assured lack of concern lies the very peace I stopped searching for. I could be here another year or leave tomorrow and it seems very much the same, very much the right thing, very much appropriate.

But, alas, the schedule continues and will one day penetrate the mind. I’m helping to lead the Inspire Summer Program this July, from June 26 in Ahmedabad to August 4 in Delhi.

After that it’s a book reading at Bluestockings in NYC on August 9th, officiating the wedding of Holland McTyiere Smith III in California on August 15th, and saying a few words at Vanessa and Jesse’s wedding in Sequim on the 22nd. The rest is written carefully on the beach at low tide, as it should be.