mangolandia

heading out of mangoland early in the morning and i finally got around to taking some pictures of the nursery, mango hut, etc. im absconding with two kinds of pickle — one spicy and one a shredded jam — and a few kilos of rice, which some of you may get to joy if the goods make it over the border. also have seeds for three kinds of holy medicinal indian basil (ocimum santum) which i’m very excited to plant in the western hemisphere.

but the point is i helped start a nursery for vegetables and trees, and worked for the second year on a permanent vegetable garden, and, most importantly, all the little cowpea (it’s a bean) guys i direct seeded into the field last week sprouted, grew, and ARE ALIVE! all of them. this is no less than a miracle — a little plant in every place i buried (“sowed”) the seeds, sometimes two (there were two seeds in every hole), and — in one hole — THREE. truly a miracle since i diligently put two seeds in every hole. but then again the plant kingdom works in mysterious ways.

so, you know, i win. one day, getting closer all the time, i will actually stay in one place long enough to eat those dang beans and save seed for my friends. it’s coming.

on to ahmedabad tomorrow, to meditate with mukeshbhai, my friend and teacher, the guiding light in my life to return me to the focus on the One Love in the Amazon, though he wouldn’t quite say it like that. during our last chat he gave me new instructions (instead of the mountaintop, i just have to answer the little matrix phone these days)

“Ankur, no meditation: Only Love. You are made of Love.”

by which I think he means, meditate as much as you can, and when you do so, just feel the love in your heart. but really, what do I know of what he means. that’s why i continue to sit with him as often as I let myself.

travels ahead, troubles behind, pickle recipes on the way, and praying that the photos uploaded. there are also some other, older, smaller pictures Butter sent me that finally got up to the server, from our couple of weeks together in delhi and uttarkhand. the address is

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/photos/ghee

(what else would you call Butter in india? obviously.)

and the pictures of my mango hut, to which I said goodbye just hours ago, are at

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/photos/futane

and some posts I wrote last week but did not publicize are here:

http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/269

http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/268

and I am giving a reading at Bluestockings Book Store in NYC on August 9th, at 7pm. Teleport in and we’ll have a powwow.

under the stars,
ankur-la

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.

june 9th.

some culinary notes and quotations

1. from an art book on sujata bajaj

is there something secretly written inside each of us?
or is each of us a tiny fragment of the vast script which tells the story of the world?

2. breakfast:

poha. poha is a sort of pounded rice. i think it’s been processed in some way because it requires virtually no cooking, and thus is perfect for breakfast when people are heading to the fields at 6 in the morning and need something they can snack on at 9. all you have to do is (go to the indian store and) soak it in water for a few minutes, drain it, and have it next to your wok/frypan. to make it spicy (as all breakfast here is, apparently) you do a typically “vagar” (spices-in-hot-oil): heating oil in a pan (we get local peanut oil here) and popping mustard seeds and curry leaves and (i would use) green chiles. when they pop you can add vegetables (potatoes you’ve steamed and cut in small pieces work well) but here there’s nothing else to it — the spices, oil, and the poha. a little turmeric paints the whole dish an attractive yellow and if there’s coriander leaf in the kitchen garden you can run and get some to put on top with the juice of a fresh (green, still immature, but still sour) lemon.

but today meghali served me the poha covered and i do mean covered with thin filets of sweet orange mango, layered so thickly and everywhere that i could only get hints of the sunny poha below. i am learning there is no indian food — sweet or savory — that does not go well with mango.

3. lunch:

meghali interrupts my writing to hand me b owl of small green oblong cucumber-type creatures and a knife, then runs back to her crying six-month-young baby in the kitchen, closing the screen door bewtween us against the constant threat of kittens and puppies. a moment later, above the baby’s cries, i hear

“samsara, ankurji. samsara.”

samsara being the notion that all this world is an endless circle of petty happiness and misery, and as along as we’re involved and attached to it, we continue to earn our place. forever. it’s often used “popularly” to refer to the demands of the material world, and particular, it seems, the life of a “householder” or parent.

“samsara, ankurji. samsara.”

i begin cutting and eventually cut enough of the gourd-let in the wrong direction that it’s only appropriate for me to take over the operation, cutting potatoes (too big pieces) and onions and running out in the heat with a wet shirt wrapped like a shield around me to get lemon basil, ajwain (an oregano relative), and mint from the herb plot a full 350 meters (who plans this?) away.

so i make lunch, a provencal interpreation of whatever vegetable i have been honored to receive, without the garlic, of course, because ai (mom) is not fond of it, and without the tomato, of course, because it’s not in season. which is to say, there’s nothing really provencal about it except my memories of tartes bruno and i would make eight years ago, but i did successfully

a) invent a low heat setting for the (biogas) stove so i could lightly sautee instead of Fry the onions
b) refuse to overcook the vegetables
c) input some ground black mustard seeds (though ubiquitious on the supercontinent, it seems they are always fried or used in halves (for pickle) and seldom ground).

All of which drum the dish out of the standard indian cuisine category.

Which is to say, there’s a low chance people will like it, but I’m pretty much over being attached to my actions, at least in that respect, these days, when the watchword is gratitude and nothing on this farm escapes tasting divine.

4. from pema chodron, a gentle buddhist teacher

renunciation is the realization that nostalgia for samsara is bullshit.

- ankurbhai

An article by Derrick Jensen, I’d like to share. I think it’s very very good.

I say it’s very good and also, I think you will see, I think it’s a direct attack of my entire style (read: joie) of living.

But I don’t disagree, per se. Indeed, I cannot, but rather, I think his comments and criticisms are entirely accurate from a material (in the Marxist, not mall-ist sense) perspective. That is, if this beautiful world of love and (the rest is just) poetry is all we have and all we are, than Derrick is right. But if the marching saints and Gandhi’s were right, it’s that there is more than this material beauty and starving suffering in front of us: there is Spirit.

That spirituality, to me, does not mean tarot cards and crystals and hoping for the best, but rather, the simple notions that:

1. Death isn’t real, and we should start acting like it (ie ahimsa, love without mortal fear).
2. Coincidence is not.
3. Time and space are ideas we deeply hold and cherish.

There’s probably more and less and different ways of phrasing it, but that’s the general level of understanding I’m talking about when I say “spiritual”. So if Derrick is right and what matters is how our next seven generations of children are able to survive on this floating orb, then yes, I think the words below are the most powerful and relevant I’ve read in a long time. But if he’s not, then I still think that one honest smile from Dick Cheney could potentially change everything for all of us,

right now.

[ Derrick Jensen from Orion Magaine, May/June 2009 ]

A FEW MONTHS AGO at a gathering of activist friends someone asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?”

The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a good part of the problem.

The second is that this is pretty much the only question that’s asked in mainstream media (and even among some environmentalists) about the state of the world and our response to it. The phrase “green living” brings up 7,250,000 Google hits, or more than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards combined (or, to look at it another way, more than a thousand times more than the crucial environmental philosophers John A. Livingston and Neil Evernden combined). If you click on the websites that come up, you find just what you’d expect, stuff like “The Green Guide: Shop, Save, Conserve,” “Personal Solutions for All of Us,” and “Tissue Paper Guide for Consumers.”

The third and most important reason the question stuck with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question. By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can start looking for some of the right questions. This is terribly important, because coming up with right answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.

So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause. Think about global warming and attempts to “solve” or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t changing, but to blame global warming for those disasters is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop, or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m merely saying we’ll have a better chance of succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable (at this point) result of burning oil and gas, of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture, and so on. The real threat is all of these.

The same is true of worldwide ecological collapse. Extractive forestry destroys forests. What’s the surprise when extractive forestry causes forest communities—plants and animals and mushrooms and rivers and soil and so on—to collapse? We’ve seen it once or twice before. When you think of Iraq, is the first image that comes to mind cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reaches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this extractive culture; one of the first written myths of this culture is of Gilgamesh deforesting the plains and hillsides of Iraq to build cities. Greece was also heavily forested; Plato complained that deforestation harmed water quality (and I’m sure Athenian water quality boards said the same thing those boards say today: we need to study the question more to make sure there’s really a correlation). It’s magical thinking to believe a culture can effectively deforest and yet expect forest communities to sustain.

It’s the same with rivers. There are 2 million dams just in the United States, with 70,000 dams over six feet tall and 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall. And we wonder at the collapse of native fish communities? We can repeat this exercise for grasslands, even more hammered by agriculture than forests are by forestry; for oceans, where plastic outweighs phytoplankton ten to one (for forests to be equivalently plasticized, they’d be covered in Styrofoam ninety feet deep); for migratory songbirds, plagued by everything from pesticides to skyscrapers; and so on.

The point is that worldwide ecological collapse is not some external and unpredictable threat—or gun barrel—down which we face. That’s not to say we aren’t staring down the barrel of a gun; it would just be nice if we identified it properly. If we means the salmon, the sturgeon, the Columbia River, the migratory songbirds, the amphibians, then the gun is industrial civilization.

A second part of the problem is that the question presumes we’re facing a future threat—that the gun has yet to go off. But the Dreadful has already begun. Ask passenger pigeons. Ask Eskimo curlews. Ask great auks. Ask traditional indigenous peoples almost anywhere. This is not a potential threat, but rather one that long-since commenced.

The larger problem with the metaphor, and the reason for this new column in Orion, is the question at the end: “how shall I live my life right now?” Let’s take this step by step. We’ve figured out what the gun is: this entire extractive culture that has been deforesting, defishing, dewatering, desoiling, despoiling, destroying since its beginnings. We know this gun has been fired before and has killed many of those we love, from chestnut ermine moths to Carolina parakeets. It’s now aimed (and firing) at even more of those we love, from Siberian tigers to Indian gavials to entire oceans to, in fact, the entire world, which includes you and me. If we make this metaphor real, we might understand why the question—asked more often than almost any other—is so wrong. If someone were rampaging through your home, killing those you love one by one (and, for that matter, en masse), would the question burning a hole in your heart be: how should I live my life right now? I can’t speak for you, but the question I’d be asking is this: how do I disarm or dispatch these psychopaths? How do I stop them using any means necessary?

Finally we get to the point. Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped—whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world—are not going to care how you or I lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not enlightened. They’re not going to care what sorts of excuses we had to not act (e.g., “I’m too stressed to think about it” or “It’s too big and scary” or “I’m too busy” or any of the thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.

They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They’re going to care whether the land is healthy enough to support them.

We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, and if the people (including the nonhuman people) can’t breathe, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but that we stop this culture from killing the planet. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this. The land is the source of everything. If you have no planet, you have no economic system, you have no spirituality, you can’t even ask this question. If you have no planet, nobody can ask questions.

What question would I ask instead? What if, instead of asking “How shall I live my life?” people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?” If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?

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.

Humans, mangos, dolphins,
You are with us, and we are in Gangotri, and so you are in Gangotri. We got here on the 6th, after 8 days of padyatra (including one day of rainy rest in Gangnaani hot springs, delicious healing). Ankur has gone to bring Kate from the plains. We (4 of us) head upstream for Gomukh and Tapovan day after tomorrow, inshallah. We are drinking lots of masala chai, even Ankur, for the cold.

We have found a tree robed in paper! No more killing trees, this bhojpatra tree sheds paper for us all over the forest!   [Malavika]

And so we have arrived. This far, at least. The cold is bitter at times, and the sun is brilliant and warm at others. Gangotri is full of pilgrims who come on buses for a few hours, sadhus and beggars who line the streets, workers hauling stones and sand to build more ghats, trekkers preparing to leave for the really high country, people here to meditate, to pray, t bathe in the holy (frigid) waters, to explore the hills, and more… Through the middle of it, the rushing waters of the Ganga, murky brown with glacial salts, crashing through the rocks all day and night. Soon we set out for the glacier, , to the true source… [May 8, 2009: Denali]

Three Little Pilgrims

You take the high road

I’ll take the low road

And I’ll get to Scotland

before you

May 1, 2009: 3 days from Uttar Kashi

After 3 days of walking upstream from Uttarkashi, we have discovered the following:

“You have to take the main road, there is no footpath on this side of the river,” or “the footpath only goes to the next village, then you have to cross back to the asphalt,” or “You can’t do that,”

all actually mean “I wouldn’t take the footpath myself because I’m afraid of it,” or “I’ve only taken it as far as the next village,” or “I have no desire to do that myself,” respectively.

Nevertheless, we have walked all but two hours of the last three days on the footpath, with no cars or buses, no dust or smog, and no engine noise. Up and down the valley walls, through thick forests we only lost the trail in once, in tiny villages where perfect strangers feed us and put us up for the night and bring us tea in the bed in the early mornings. Life is too glorious. The road just keeps climbing, and Gangaji keeps on roaring down below.

April 27, 2009: Uttar Kashi

It’s really hard to be in need
& have people treat you poorly
when you know how poorly
you’ve treated people in need.
That’s why a majority of humans
do everything in their power
not to be in need
of other people. [Ankurbhai]

Learning about giving & receiving, expectations & offerings, what it means to walk together, & how big together can be. [Ankurbhai]

We ate a lot of cucumbers today. No potato chips. We saw a sadhu buying potato chips a few days ago. But I drink chai. Perhaps I should not be given to till I purify myself? I don’t think it works that way, friends. [Malavika]

But what’s wrong with chai? Besides, Ankur shaves. We all have our vices… [Denali]

April 23, 2009 [baadaam sheikh]

Denali’s newest AVTAR — Badam Sheikh [Ankur]

Or, “almond chief”, in Hindi-Arabic-English.

Today we bathed in the Ganga at sunrise, in silence, with only a few other pilgrims around us at the banks near the ashram we slept in. Two hours later at the main bathing site in the city we watched hordes of people splash around like a carnival. And we gave thanks for our early morning of solitude. [Denali]

April 23, 2009
Ganga Ma bathed us today. And we now sit in an orchard of jackfruit, guava, mango, mulberry, and a chipmunk experimenting with sitting on Ankurbhai’s knee (whose new pilgrim name is Swami Poojitji) [ie Just Poojit]
Tomorrow we walk, really walk, packs and all, and you all, Beloveds, come with us.
Love, (signed) Malavika, Ankur, Denali

There is no owner