june 9th. almost noon and i’m finished with the morning labor, appropriately enough. i’m been steadily waking up earlier each day, trying to get to a placetime where i can follow the advice of the himalayan swamis (all so caring, all so dedicated to my learning) who advised me to wake up at 3:30 every morning, so i could have 90 minutes of sadhana (from 4:00 to 5:30) every morning before beginning by day. by sadhana they mean ‘practice’, spiritual practice. it can take any form, as long as the intention is clear, selfless, focused, and dedicated. in my case i usually see sadhana as sitting meditation, flute practice, writing, or painting, but as the days get filled with farm operations, i am learning to intend my repetitive work in the nursery or the field as sadhana as well.

by 6:30 i’m planting pumpkin, melon, and ash gourd in pits along an irrigation canal denali and i dug last week, and carving three short beds for cucumber and planting those as well. by 8:30 i’ve finished weeding the perennial eggplant beds and preparing the soil for companion planting of cowpea and cluster bean later today. and by 9:30 i’m in out of the heat, having prepared 20 plastic bags with nursery soil and sowed seeds of bael (aegle marmelos, grapefruit meets coconut) in them.

there is a feeling of nativity, of place, that accompanies everything we do. all the handles of all the (iron) tools I use are made from bamboo, from here. the sieve i use to screen the nursery soil was made here as well, and even the vines hanging from the mango tree can be used to lash posts together. all the paddy straw we use to incubate the mangos as they ripen upstairs was harvested last fall, and tomorrow — the mangos going out of season like they’re going out of style — i’ll take it downstairs once more, and mulch around the cucumber and eggplant with it. the gober (cow dung) we use to refurbish the floors and front porch comes from the cows 20 meters away, who i visit many times a day with plates of mango skins and kitchen scraps, whose yogurt i eat at lunch, whose milk we make into kheer (rice pudding), whose urine we use to make fertilizer for our seedlings.

as the shower room is busy when i’m back and there’s no sense in eating mangos while i’m still sweating, i pick up the hoevel (shovel? hoe? somewhere in between) and head to the back yard to teach myself a permaculture lesson: for whom are you planting? if it’s meghali (brother’s wife) and ai (mom, karuna) who do most of the cooking, why are vasantji (dad) and i deciding where the kitchen garden (far from the kitchen) goes and what to plant in it? so i ask ai and she says coriander leaves and maybe it’s too sunny and the wrong season but dammit she’s making the breakfast each morning and i’m going to give her what she wants. or try to.

earlier, back when i had friends, malavika and i decided to clean up the back yard. the backyard is a 25′ by 50′ plot between the house and the road, dry as ice, full of trees, shrubs, weeds, and hidden root crops. i recognize bael (aegle marmelos), mango, sitaphal (custard apple / cherimoya), various invasives, banana, papaya, and teak. many more i do not.

there is no concept of garbage collection here at Samvad (the official name of this mangoed farm, and there is a sincere attempt to reduce consumption as much as possible, and to sort what little garbage does enter our private world. but not everyone knows or cares enough to sort, and there are windstorms, so there are bits of paper and plastic, detritus and anthropology, all over the backyard. there are blue coconut hair oil contairs and matchboxes and old student id cards and newspapers and whatnot: a record of what, over the years, my family here decided they could not or would not produce for themselves.

so mali and i spent a sweaty hour picking up trash and sorting it, weighing it down in the appropriate drums and baskets so it won’y blow away again, raking the forst litter and making little paths through the jungle. after an hours work in the grueling son, denali and his stomachproblem come out to say hello. we give him the ‘what do you think’ expression as we lean contendently on our hoevels and tree trunks and he shruggs and tells us\

“it looks about the same.”

which just goes to show. which just goes to show no matter how clever and liberated and free you think you are, it’s still nice to get praise after hard (unnecessary) work in the 120 F heat, and how attached we are to such minutae.

when i saw ai a couple of hours later, she asked me if i was planning a kitchen garden in the back yard. i was not.

“no, i was not.”

“oh, because it looks so nice, now!”

thank you, mission accomplished. ego fed, clothed, housed, comfortable, and sedated.

“well, not nice exactly, but Swachha.”

“swachha? not nice?”

so she explains the distinction vinobaji makes, relevant, i think, to spaces and to objects. first there is “sahya”, tolerable. we must first make the situation tolerable. she tells me that before our work this morning, the backyard was intolerable. next is “swaccha”, clean. that is the basis for being able to live and appreciate there. then comes “sundar”, beautiful, a pleasant place to be. and highest of course (remember, this india) is “pavitra”, holy, when we have sufficiently put work and intention (“work is love in action” – findhorn) there that even the gods would come down (up?) and chill.

so, not yet sundaram, but through sahya and swaccha. not bad.

and this, now, my friends, this touches my point about growth, desire, hard work, stress, and beauty. which, given household duties (samsara) whcih have once again bugan crying my name, will have to wait for another day. but just so you know, that’s where i’m going with all this — trying to figure out why we are so busy sometimes, even busy doing beautiful things, that we allow ourselves to get into intolerable states where really, truly, everything we do and touch should be beautiful, if not holy.

until then i rest comfortably in the midday heat with my body’s feedback of contentment: my fading muscles from our himalayan pilgrimage and the growing callouses on my hands from all the digging and hoeveling. these signs are not merely physical, they indicate to me i deserve to rest mentally as well, i can go easy and be content and proud in the knowledge i am living, that i am alive.

the best of course is removing the splinters each night from my hands. i sit alone with a needle, lancing through my own skin, huting for thorns. it’s a sort of easter, a hunt for evidence that i did something day, a review of action and satisfaction, a moment of silence.