A Song, Sung

Human relationships: is there any greater test of wisdom, compassion, sanity than this?  Ayurvedic doctor Vasant Lad speaks of "the mirror of relationship:" for what we are doing in relating intimately to another is confronting our own deep-seated patterns, insecurities, karmic tendencies.  Some relationships fall prey to overbearing expectations, some to doubt; some to fear of failure, some perhaps to fear of success.  Some trundle along for years in second gear, belching foul exhaust and jolting all those in the vehicle, out of inertia, fear of being alone, fear of change.  Change.  Yes, change, the great constant, the elephant in the room, the skeleton in the closet and the monkey on your back.  [Anitya, anitya, intones Goenka-ji's voice: impermanence, impermanence...]

As if one person's issues weren't already difficult enough, the partner brings with them a complementary set.  In relationship, I figure one is doing pretty well if s/he can determine whose issues are at play in a given scenario, or even start to get a handle on how both partners are contributing to the conflict.  It's endless work, and there's no telling where it leads.  And yet we do it, almost all of us: we form bonds, share visions and dreams, interlock our bodies and mingle our fluids, generate new life so the process can repeat itself.  We have our highest highs and our lowest lows in relation to others, to an Other, another.  If I weren't so caught up in the cycle myself I might find it amusing, the predictable quality of it, like watching a cartoon mouse go around and around in a washing machine.  Here at the end of the spin cycle, I'm a little less tickled, but more aware if anything of the powerful gifts we receive in relationship, and the profound teachings.

In this blog I often keep personal content between the lines.  I can rarely resist the journaling impulse entirely--Illwind started out as "an open journal of my time in Nepal," after all--but have tended of late to keep this aspect subdued, secondary.  Not today.  I and Thandiwe--my partner of the past 20 months and co-pilot on so many of the interior and exterior adventures detailed on this site--are splitting up.  I want to acknowledge in this pseudo-public way the relationship we've shared, the incredible journey we've taken each other on, and mark its end consciously.

"Break-up," we call it, suggesting the jagged edges and suddenly disjunct pieces that are an all-too-common part of parting.  I am lucky today in that this parting of ways feels unbroken.  Our love's vessel has not been smashed on the ground in anger or jealous rage.  And yet, however neatly, it is splitting, and even a neatly split vessel spills its contents.  Memories, dreams, visions, plans, all become visible again, more so than ever, before gradually being absorbed into the earth.

In theory, in the quiet of pre-dawn on a sleepless night, in between the times of anguish, it's so uncomplicated.  Legendary hellraiser and songwriter Townes Van Zandt: "we had our day/and now it's over/we had our song/and now it's sung/we had our stroll/through summer's clover/summer's gone now/our walking's done."  Moments of such simple lucidity are a gift in these times, and yet it's never quite as simple as that.  The song continues "so tell me gently/who'll be your lover/who'll be your lover/after I'm gone."  Interlaced with endings are new beginnings, and it's hard to face up to beginnings we aren't a part of.  A rephrasing of impermanence: to everything its season.  Buds, leaves, flowers; pollination, fruit setting, swelling; ripening, sweetening, falling from the branch.  Rinse, repeat.

Relationships are complicated--that's one generalization I'll permit myself.  In casting them in words, we risk freezing them into one pose, capturing only one aspect.  Our words tell stories that carry grains of truth, but none of them can support the full weight of our lived experience.  Words, however, are what we humans have uniquely got, and we need our bits of story, no matter how inadequate they may be.

This past weekend was Thandiwe's and my last together as a couple--or so we must tell ourselves, not knowing what the future holds.  It was a beautiful and bittersweet few days, a stolen time out of time, filled with love and tears and, inevitably, with words.  Between bouts of loving and crying we struggled with how to tell our story, not just to others but to ourselves.  Were we simply "in two different places?" physically and metaphorically?  Was it a question of expectations, or one of our own challenges of doubt and insecurity?  A story we liked best goes "we loved each other so much we had to let each other go."  Catchy, dramatic, romantic--what's not to like?  It's as true as any of them, and it may be what we need to believe.
  
What remains is to honor the relationship, which in its less than two years has been an overwhelmingly positive and formative force in my life.  I want to set in stone, here on the aether, an expression of my love and respect for Thandiwe.  Thandiwe--Zulu for "beloved"--has given me so much: without trying, she has drawn me out of my shell, pulling me again and again into immediate relation with others.  She's opened my heart, helping me to live with compassion and see the best in people.  She's taught me, quite literally, how to smile.  I go forward carrying so much of her with me, as she carries so much me.  (We spoke of how I've gifted her with physicality, a sense of living in and increased awareness of the body; I taught her to love food, and how to cook it.)

And there is still one more story.  This one is about a beginning.

*     *     *

Thandiwe came back into my life two Springs ago, in Kathmandu.  I had known her from our study abroad program back in 2005, when we'd been friends and had stayed loosely in touch.  Now she was crashing at the Fulbright apartment I shared with my friend Alden.  It was a funny, funky place--pink cement walls, tacky Western-style furniture, a toilet that never flushed properly--and small by expat standards, just one bedroom.  I slept on a pallet I rolled out every night on the living room floor in a routine I'd originally intended to last me only until I found a place of my own.  I was in and out of the Kathmandu Valley doing my Ayurvedic research, and Thandiwe was on her own volunteer's schedule of field visits to rural parts of Eastern Nepal, so we passed like ships in the night for the first month or two of her stay.  Finally in May, as it was getting uncomfortably hot in the Valley, we both settled into the apartment in Bhatbhateni and started to spend more time together.  She'd sleep on the couch in the living room, not far from my pallet, and we got into the habit of reading aloud to each other before bedtime: Tolkien is what I remember.  I was in a tenuous long-distance relationship at the time and wasn't sure how to feel about the response the sight of Jyoti (Thandiwe's Nepali name, meaning "light," and the name I then knew her best by) with her radiant smile, in her well-worn green T-shirt and thin, faded cotton pyjama pants elicited in me.  Thandiwe claims not to have noticed at this point, but from my point of view there was some definite tension crackling in the muggy air.  There were also starting to be a lot of mosquitoes, and the window screens seemed only to keep them in.  In what turned out to be a fateful move, I bought a mosquito net in the bazar.  It was sea foam green (the old Crayola marker color) and hung from the ceiling, making my little nest into a canopy bed of sorts.  For a few nights Thandiwe must have stoicly slapped herself awake or suffered the incessant whine of skeeters in her ears while I lay under my sea foam shield.  Realizing this, and with a motivation I convinced myself was pure, I invited her to share the net with me.  After some hesitation and assurances on my part that it was OK, she accepted, and under the net's drape we read together.  I remember not being able to get any sleep that night, hyper-aware as I was of the compact, taut, fragrant body and glowing spirit next to me; she remembers me inching myself closer and closer and deciding, eventually, that she liked the feeling.  Innocently, we began to make contact, to cuddle, and soon were sleeping in each others' arms.  With my status as decidedly not single, we drew the line at that: kissing was strictly off limits.  This code of conduct, arbitrary though it was, put my mind at ease, and we indulged night after night in this sensual ritual, the tension waxing.  It reached a breaking point soon enough, I dashed off a conflicted but all-too-clear email to the States--Waverly wasn't reachable by phone--and the next night gave Thandiwe a quick and annunciatory kiss.  Enough was enough; there was no holding back the flood now.  Still, we took things slow, savoring getting to know each others' bodies.  Our worlds focused in on the confines of that mosquito net: the moonlight on our bodies, the intoxicating scent of huge, white, trumpet-shaped Datura blossoms drifting in through the window screens.  For almost a month, it seems, we hardly slept.  We walked dreamlike through our days and, after telling each other we would get some sleep that night, would lie awake 'til until dawn.  Then some days I'd walk her partway to the office where she worked, or we'd stop at the favorite expat breakfast joint for some pancakes.  (I remember feeding the rail-thin cat there a dish of milk and butter under the table.)  It was a charmed time, the most absurdly, unequivocally happy one I've known.  Free of analysis, planning, logistics, anything but moonlight and folds of pale netting and new love, our relationship gradually took shape, and we realized it wasn't going to remain confined to Nepal.  It eventually brought Thandiwe to Vermont, both of out to the West Coast, me to Chicago, and the two of us back to Nepal and India, all in the past 20 months.  But that's another story.

Springtime Stirrings

It's been a long time, here at your random word generation device--over a month, I guess--and I apologize.  I try not to let more than two or three weeks go by between posts.  But I been busy with moving in, adjusting to school life, and getting my head and belly fully into the game of my studies in Chinese medicine and traditional Western herbalism.  I'm a month into my four year program in the former, and about to start a 9-month long course in the latter at the School of Traditional Western Herbalism with renowned herbalist Matthew Wood and some bad-ass local teachers to boot.  I'm probably slightly insane to be taking all of it on at once, but I'm awful thirsty.  More on the herbal stuff later, as it gets rolling.  Today (in honor of the advent of the Year of the Rabbit, perhaps?) I want to focus on the Chinese end of things.

Underlying the bustle of a busy new school schedule and tying together my seemingly disparate set of classes at the Classical Chinese Medicine program at NCNM is the real work: becoming intimately familiar with the conceptual framework of pre-modern China.  I may be spending a lot of time learning Chinese characters, probing auricular acupoints and practicing pulse and tongue diagnosis, but the fundamental task of this first year is getting grounded in another worldview.  This process involves a certain amount of culture shock, as when the "organs" of Chinese medicine turn out not to correspond too terribly closely to their anatomical namesakes, or even to anatomy at all.  In the CCM program luminary Dr. Heiner Fruehauf's cosmology course, we explore the esoteric resonances of each of the 12 "organ networks" one at a time, spending weeks on each one as we examine the hidden layers of depth that will ultimately serve to unlock the medical system but that modern "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM) too often misses completely in its drive to root itself in modern scientific objectivity.  Thus TCM usually dismisses the association of the Lung (capitalization indicating that it is the Chinese organ in question) with the Tiger as mere superstition, when in fact this connection is one of the keys to understanding the function of the Lung both in terms of healthy function and pathology of that organ network.  Check out Dr. Fruehauf's work for in-depth exploration of these rich and fascinating correspondences; here is a good place to start.  

Medical systems based on traditional worldviews, while themselves scientific and empirical, defy both the reductionist and the materialist assumptions of modern science; when these complex and ungainly pegs are forced to fit into the straight and narrow hole that currently prevails (but whose days, quoth the red one, are numbered), most of that brilliant complexity is shorn off.  I saw this happening in Nepal while studying Ayurveda, and I gradually came to understand that traditional Southasian medicine has been deforming in response to colonial pressures since the days of the East India Company.  Is it still Ayurvedic practice when local herbs like Guduchi (Tinospora cordifolia) are prescribed by doctors on the basis of their anti-inflammatory properties instead of based on their rasa, virya, vipak, and prabhav, on the prakrti and vikrti (constitution and current state of im/balance) of the patient, and on other factors like kala and avastha?  Likewise, Goldenseal may be a passable substitute for anti-microbial drugs, but in all honesty, why not just go straight for the Amoxicillin?  It'll probably work a lot better, and the principle is the same.  Really traditional medicine looks beyond the external manifestations of disease to the deeper, subtler, more internal realities that lie behind them.  What pattern resulted in the inflammation or the fever?  What is the state of the tissue, that it was unable to stave off the viruses or bacteria?  In wholistic medical thinking, the internal factors are at least as important as the external ones.  What sane farmer blames the weed seeds in his soil when, in mid-July, his crops are being smothered?  Of course there are weed seeds; of course there are viruses and bacteria out there; our job as stewards of the land or of the body is to cultivate properly and practice preventatively when possible, and in times of acute need to make the appropriate intervention.  There may be times for herbicides and antibiotics; to use them indiscriminately is irresponsible and ultimately detrimental to health.

The beauty and difficulty of medicine--any intelligent, sensitive, medicine, no matter what tools and intellectual tradition it comes out of--is that treatment depends always on particulars.  In traditional (as opposed to conventional) medicine, these particulars include such subjective factors as whether the patient feels hot or cold; some fevers call for "cold" herbs like Goldenseal, others for "warm" ones like ginger or even "hot" ones like prepared Aconite.  Of course this "energetic" understanding is much more nuanced than a simple spectrum measuring pseudo-temperature; herbs have many qualities, each with its own spectrum, and multiple dimensions beyond such considerations.  It's all beautifully knotted up into the fabric of traditional understandings not only of herbs, medicine, and bodies (the microcosm) but of the world, the universe (the macrocosm).  This is why it's a year before we even start learning herbs and points in our Chinese medicine program.  There's a couple millennia's worth of groundwork to cover.


This is one of those posts where I've come to a stopping place without ever getting to what I set out to cover, namely the rudiments of the Chinese system, the 5 elements or phases.  In truth, my plan was to paste in (and dress up and contextualize) an essay I just wrote for one of my classes on the phases and their relationship to the 5 flavors recognized in Chinese medicine.  Evidently I had some venting to do first.  This is what happens when I stay away for too long!  And, if I look at the historical trend, what happens to me at the early stirrings of Spring.  Hinting ahead to the next post's material for a moment here, it's relevant that the liver and the element of wood--think green growth, not dead lumber--govern this season.  Out of the abundant stillness of winter's water burst the new green shoots, up and out.  It's a time of shaking up, bursting out, and as I've just experienced, dredging stale remnants of resentment or frustration and doing a little good, old-fashioned ranting.  May the new shoots soon bear more palatable fruit!

Transition Time

...But then again, when isn't?  A time of transition, I mean.  Everything is changing constantly in a perpetual jitterbug of shimmying wavelets and fleeting sub-subatomic particles that may turn out to resemble bits of space-time string wrapped up at every conceivable point into 11 or so dimensions of space-time.  Still, there are times of relative apparent stability.  Times when the change at least seems linear, or a good approximation thereof, and even predictable.  This is not one of those times.  On a macrocosmic scale, or (in this case) on a microcosmic one.  What I'm saying is, shit has been crazy.  Forget the world at large for a moment--can't handle tackling that one right now--let me take the small view.  In the last few weeks I have driven across the country to Portland, Oregon (predicably enough, I guess), moved into a new home with an old friend from High School (didn't see that one coming), watched my relationship dangle by a thread, had the keys stolen and gotten locked out of said new house for 3 days (whoever lifted Thandiwe's coat from the Goodwill shopping cart got more than he bargained for), drove a fainting T to the emergency room after she stabbed herself nearly through the hand with a steak knife the same day we got back into the house...except perhaps for a very peaceful Christmas amongst the big cedars up in Bellingham, it's been eventful.  And now, after much ado, I'm finally back in school.  Today is Day Two of Grade 17.  I am going to be busy.  What novelty!  To go from essentially no schedule to one as tightly-regimented as this, in which I have more class time than I did in college.  And I'm excited as hell. There is really no place I'd rather be than here at the Classical Chinese Medicine program at National College of Natural Medicine.

But I'm going to be busy.  Business, in my limited experience with it recently, is not good for blogging.  What I may or may not be getting at here is that Ill Wind, too, will feel the effects of this particular transition, and I don't know yet how.  I hope it doesn't mean that I just post my favorite homework assignments here, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect to pull that stunt once in a while.  I suppose this is indicative of the happy occurrence of my interests--nay, my passions, my consuming obsessions--converging with my formal schooling.  It'll seem like the most natural thing in the world to share with my six or so faithful readers notes on classical Chinese cosmology, the relevance of the I Ching to medicine, and the esoteric correspondences between herbs, the subtle body, asterisms, organ networks and mythology.  Dear readers, correct me if I go astray!

That's all for now.  During this regrettable lapse in content, allow me to appease you with a few photos.

Early explorations in traditional cosmology: arranging foodstuffs amidst the Vedic framework of the 5 elements, 3 doshas, seasons, times of day, and qualities (gunas).

                       A favorite herb ship in the Ayurvedic district of Bhedasingh, Kathmandu.

Dr. Jonny performs minor trailside surgery with an Opinel knife.  Sorry, Alden.  

                                          
                     Playing with some Shilajit close to its source, in the Annapurna Himalaya.

Nepali Time, revisited

Back in the day!   Temporal dissonance in Kapilvastu district, early January 2009.  With my gracious host, Pusparaj Poudel, at his family's homestead.  

 

Back in January '09, after a rewarding but often overwhelming village stay in the mid-Western Terai, I channeled the frustration of cultural dissonance into a double-barreled post on "Nepali time."  It's still one of my favorite pieces of writing that's appeared here, and, thinking back on it after this past trip, I realized that there's more to be said on the subject.  Here, then, is part 3 of the saga.

    *       *       *

Nepali isn't as difficult a language as most people assume; it does share Indo-European roots with English, after all.  The pronunciation takes a sensitive ear and a lot of time to master (e.g. four different T's, four different D's, with differentiation between aspirated and non-aspirated and retroflex and dental sounds), but you don't need a huge lexicon to converse.  In fact, a small arsenal of key phrases can get you a very long way: ke garne (a rhetorical 'what to do?'), tyai ta ('that's what i'm saying!'), hawas ('thanks'/general acknowledgement), thik chha ('it's OK') and pugyo ('enough!'), for starters.  The committed language student finds that, once the initially steep learning curve levels out, he can stumble his way through a million iterations of the same few basic conversations with surprising success.  But there are certain...puzzling features of the language.  Things that don't translate directly and whose idiosyncratic usage has to be picked up through gradual exposure.    Of these unintuitive features of the language, the crown jewel is verb tense.

At first glance, the situation's not too bad: Nepali has fewer tenses than English and they all sounds straight forward enough.  A couple past tenses, a simple present, continuous past and present (was ___ing, am ___ing), and something sometimes called the Probable Future Tense.  I love this one: we never know what's going to happen anyway, so why pretend to predict the future with any certainty?  Hence we have an entire tense construction dedicated to statements in the nature of "see you again, probably."  What's disconcerting for the native English speaker, though, is that this is the only future tense in Nepali.  So how do you see "I'll see you tomorrow?" without sounding like a total flake?  The answer is, you use the present tense.  This must be a pretty common ploy in other languages as well, judging by the number of ESL students who say things like "I see you next week."  The Nepali "present" tense is used for this kind of confident near-future declaration and to express what's ongoing or true in general.  So far so good.  Where our deeply-seated ideas about time really start to get yanked around is in the realm of the past tenses.  On feeling the first raindrops of an approaching storm, a Nepali might declare "paani paryo," literally "water fell."  A novice student's natural response is, "when?  When did it rain?"  But if s/he tries to "correct" the temporal confusion the next time by stating "paani parchha"--the present tense--a Nepali might well respond "when?" As in "when will it rain?"  (And how the hell do you know?) To express that it is in fact raining, Nepali emphasizes that some water has already fallen from the sky.

Likewise it is truly disconcerting, at first, when you're waiting at a bus stop and someone hears a distant rumble, spies a far-off dust cloud, and says non-chalantly "bus aayo."  The bus came.  What??  The bus is coming.  It's on its damn way.  It has definitely not arrived!  To add insult to injury, the guy talking into his cell phone (in this village that has a single indoor toilet and no telephone lines) cuts his conversation short with an abrupt "la, bus aaisakiyo."  The bus already arrived; the bus finished coming.  All this before the damn thing's even in sight!  What insolence!

There is a pattern to these usages, a method to the madness.  The whole temporal framework of the language--and thus of the culture--is simply shifted back.  To talk about the present, you use the past; to talk about the future, you use the present.  And sure enough, if you want to talk about the past, you sometimes use the past perfect.  "(One time) I went to India might be ma India gaeko thie, 'I had gone to India.'  This backwards-slanted verb system jives well with a culture where the future is eyed warily, where the only certainty lies in what's good and done.

In addition to this usage pattern, what can strike Westerners as the maddening temporal imprecision of Southasian cultures is also firmly rooted in the language.  Take the word for now, ahile.  As might be expected on the basis of the usage of the present tense, ahile has a distinctly future-leaning sense.  At the old bus stop, perhaps you're tempted to inquire of your fellow passenger to be just when he expects the bus to arrive.  Wanting to reassure you, he replies "ahile aaunchha," literally "it comes now."  By now you may have enough experience to realize that not only does aaunchha mean "it will come," but ahile means "soon."  When are you going to the store, you ask your friend?  Ahile, replies, sitting there with his eyes glued to the TV screen, not moving a muscle.  

The words for yesterday, today and tomorrow--hijo, aaja, and bholi--are used precisely when they're used on their own.  But they can also be strung together, as in hijo-aaja or aaja-bholi.  These compound words mean "these days."  Nepali has words for 'the day before yesterday' (does English really take seven syllables to express that idea?) and 'the day after tomorrow:' asti and parsi.  These get a bit more impressionistic.  Asti can refer to practically any day in the past, and hijo-asti means, essentially "in the old days."  Parsi is relatively literal, since there are also precise terms for 'three days from now' and so on, but bholi-parsi means "in the future" or "one of these days."


Confusing?  Tyai ta!  But enough for now.  What can we do? We'll probably talk more on these things in the future.  Ke garne? Pugyo.  Bholi-parsi kuraa garaulaa.

Home Again, Same Day

It's my last day in Asia for a while, a fitting occasion for a post.  So I figured anyway, but the fact is I don't quite know what to write about, where to start, what tack to take.  Hmmm.  Ummm....Yeah, well, here's the situation, see: I've been on the move since late June in a sort of pre-emptive break from the intense 4 year bout of schooling I'm now, finally, about to dive into.  This was my last foreseeable chance to travel to India and Nepal with my partner, and we scrapped our initial plans to spend the summer in Guatemala to return to this part of the world instead, to the places that have hooked us, to deepen our connections here in Nepal and Northeast India and to branch out into the Hindi-speaking world of greater North India.  It's been part vacation, part pilgrimage, part adventure, part retreat.  Like any slice of life, it's included moments of frustration, ugliness, and boredom as well as sublimity, inspiration, and joy.  It's been a long trip and, yes, a strange one.  I find now as it draws to a close that I'm ready to return.
Perhaps out of some fear that these past months will recede into a slippery, dreamlike blur, I find myself wanting to somehow solidify my time here, to pin down a few experiences with words and images so I, and others, can refer back to them and say simply "see?  that happened."

If I'm sorting through my memories of the past four and a half months, winnowing them, there's a lot of chaff to get through.  A lot of in-between times I didn't often have the grace to turn into a numinous present: sweaty bus rides, low evenings in cheap, mildewy guest house rooms, greasy breakfasts gobbled down in front of staring eyes.  The camel ride from hell.  Aimless times, times that felt worthless in their essential self-centeredness, miserable sick times.  Mundane as they were, these were all part and parcel of the trip, and they bear mentioning if only to avoid romanticizing my time here or giving the impression that this has been some sort of high-flying joyride through Northern Southasia.  And, of course, a lot of the hardest times have been the most important.  The grinding challenge of silent meditation retreat, the sometimes literal immersion in destitution and filth, the acutely uncertain days of relationship crisis that welled up amidst the karmic vortex of Varanasi. And the paradox of finding the sublime interwoven with mundane substrate, of finding Saraswati in a junk pile.

But at this valedictory stage, I'm just as much in the mood to look back on some of the fun, blissful and hilarious moments of the trip.  It feels like every geographical stage of the journey had at least one.  Sometimes highs were triggered simply by arriving somewhere: returning to the familiar alleys of Kathmandu and the Nepali-speaking sphere after days of travel across the Gangetic plains in the summer closeness and finding myself more fluent in the language than I'd remembered. Once more navigating the backways of the Newari old city around Indra Chowk, Bhedasingh, and Thahiti I found myself wanting to talk to everyone, to broadcast my joy to all comers.  The feeling faded back into rude normalcy quickly enough, but for a day or so I felt like a salmon who'd returned after years and thousands of miles to his own native stream.

Then, after an idyllic interlude in Darjeeling and some catch-up with our old host families, there was my and Thandiwe's two days at Khecheopalri lake, where we stayed with an amazing young lama who sent us on an unforgettable excursion to a sacred meditation cave in the leech-ridden hills above the secluded, footprint-shaped lake and then returned shortly after we did with armfuls of foraged greens and fiddleheads.  That 36 hours already inspired its own post (back in August), in which I think I failed completely to capture the charisma and youthful, exuberant wisdom of the lama, Sonam, and the time-apart quality of those couple of days.

In Orissa, the tropical, seaside East Indian state South of West Bengal, the undisputed twin highlights were seafood so fresh it seemed a religious experience and a ride on a rented motorbike to a perfect, empty stretch of beach.  After days of shying away from swimming at the crowded, tout-infested and shit-spattered beaches of Puri, we were finally able to cut completely loose and frolic free in the bath-warm surf.  It felt as if the world were ours alone, and that our lives were as simple as sand, surf, sky.  And motorbike.

Our final destination that day was the famous Sun Temple at Konark, where we figured we might as well hire a local guide to explain the esoteric structure to us.  Our guide, who proudly told us that he was the head of the architectural tour guides' association, proceeded to enlighten us as to the precise details of the erotic carvings that stretch for what seemed like miles around the temple perimeter.  He'd obviously picked the brains of generations of previous tourists to glean the most (in)appropriate phrases to employ in his good work, with results that would have been creepy if they weren't so utterly hilarious.  As this is a family restaurant, I won't be reproducing any of those here.      

The next substantive stop, Varanasi really does feel like a blur, a sort of fever dream.  The place immediately provoked some of the most intense highs and lows I've ever experienced, in such rapid succession that I keep finding myself at a loss for how to describe it.  But the place itself, by virtue of that sheer intensity, strikes me as a highlight of the trip. It also set the stage for one of the most important friendships, and certainly the most timely one, of the past few months.  Budding neuroscientist, dedicated meditator, shamanistic psychonaut, outrageous storyteller; Nicholas Anderson is all these things, as well as a godsend to both Thandiwe and myself during a time of extreme emotional instability.  In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, he offers up the notion of a karass, a group of people who are one's spiritual family in life.  (He opposes this to the granfaloon, which refers to all the groups we identify with consciously and, more often than not, emptily.  I always think of fraternities, and I wonder if Vonnegut, a fratboy himself in his day, would have agreed.)  I've been blessed with a wonderful karass, and it is one of life's joys when a new member appears.

The last major destination before Thandiwe headed back to start school again was Rajasthan.  Amidst all of that state's sands, camels, myriad turbans--India at its most photogenic--the city of Jodhpur stood out for its character and charm.  Besides the ongoing pleasures of delicious food, beautiful sights, and a warm welcome from the Muslim family who hosted us at their guest house, the time I spent with an avuncular Ayurvedic doctor a stone's throw from the landmark clocktower remains one of the most memorable episodes of the trip.  It was the sort of connection that could suffice as an excuse for another trip, the kind of connection I spent so much of my Fulbright year in Nepal looking for: here was a vaidya enthused at the prospect of sharing his vast experience and knowledge with a young upstart.  And it makes for a good story that the medicine he prescribed for Thandiwe and that finally cured a nasty five-day old bout of diarrhea consisted, mainly, of opium.  Everything is poison, everything is medicine...according to Dr. Vasant Lad, "Arurveda asks, 'but for whom?' "

In Delhi the night before Thandiwe's flight, we got ripped on fancy lattes in the tourist district of Pahargunj before turning ourselves loose in the intoxicating Old City, Shahjahanabad, where we must have walked five miles through its back alleys while stumbling upon all sorts of wonderful diamonds-in-the-rough.  There was the pristine, quiet, pastel-colored lane of the 500-year-old Jain temple, where an absurdly friendly man welcomed us into his antique facsimile export business and sent us on our way with gifts of little jewelboxes.  There was the bustling wholesale market of Khari Baoli, where dried fruit vendors' piles of dates, almonds, raisins, walnuts and figs towered in (to quote my favorite Just-So Story) "more than oriental splendour."  There was the locally-famous stuffed naan shop, the quintessenial five star hole-in-the-wall, where I was later tempted to order the spicy naan to my everlasting chagrin.  Never, never order the spicy naan in India.

Of course a lot of my best memories are tied up with the traveling itself, and this comes through in some of my earlier posts.  A good, long Indian train ride may itself be reason enough to travel to India, and, traveling sleeper class, it's certainly one of the most honest ways to do so.  Bus rides are harder to recommend, but they too have their moments.  Seize, seize the opportunities to urinate when they arise, and bring headphones.

After Thandiwe left, once the initial shock of separation from someone I'd been attached at the hip to for nearly 3 months wore off, the nature of my trip changed completely. I felt the need to structure my time much more, partly to keep the five weeks until I met my mother in Nepal from yawning like a hippo's maw.  Apart from a gritty week in Amritsar and Delhi (where I ate the spicy nan and ended up in my little hotel room watching more TV than I have in years, including the undisputed and incredibly unexpected cinematic highlight, Moonstruck), I spent this time in the hill districts of Northwest India: Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.  I did a short meditation retreat and a short Buddhism course, both of which were wonderful in their own ways and in the people they put me in contact with. I got to see the Dalai Lama give public teachings, though I admit I'd had enough after the second session of listening to the rather dry discourse translation through FM headphones. I fell briefly into the black hole of touristy Dharamshala after being seduced initially by the bustling energy of the place.  And I spent a highly enjoyable week with the current crop of volunteers and interns at Navdanya, Vandana Shiva's biodiversity conservation farm.  Like most of the foreigners there, I probably spent more time strumming a guitar ("Quando sei qui con me / Questa stanza non ha piu' / Pareti ma alberi / Alberi Infiniti..." I learned to croon, from a wonderfully impish young Tuscan Indonesian named Nicolo) than weeding the herb patch or sorting chickpeas.  There again it's the people I'll remember most, and the hope and inspiration they lent me through their visions, projects and experiences.  Ali and Thea and Hannah from Brighton; Nicolo from Firenze; Sinclair from South Dakota and Abhyudai from India; and the local old woman (I just called her "didi") who was the head of the chickpea sorting operation and a font of wisdom and anecdotes that I struggled to understand with my intermediate Hindi.
This brings me almost to the present.  The last two weeks and a bit have been a third distinct stage of the trip, one that began when I met my mother at the Kathmandu international airport.  I've been playing guide, translator, son, and, increasingly, friend.  There has been considerable luxury and equally considerable squalor, as on one unforgettable incident in a tourist trap of a town called Chisapani, a day's walk uphill from the Kathmandu Valley, where we ended up sharing a bed in a hotel "for sheer animal warmth," as my mother put it, after a miserable evening of waiting for our daal-bhaat to arrive while being accosted for hours by a well-meaning and thoroughly unbearable troup of piss-drunk Bahuns who'd decided to ride their motorcycles up for an evening of the sort of debauchery normally taboo to members of their caste. Overall it's been a time apart for both of us; riding elephants in Chitwan National Park is something neither of us would normally find ourselves doing, but that seemed quite natural in the context of our time together in Nepal.  I've had a chance to see this place with fresh eyes, and to watch my own reactions to someone so close to me that I have no filter as she herself reacts to the sometimes shocking realities of this place.  Finally, mundanely, we're both ready to go home.  For my mother this means going back to her life in New York City, with its literary, social, professional and personal commitments.  For me it means moving again, this time to Portland, Oregon, to start a Master's in Oriental Medicine.  Moreover it means resuming what Gary Snyder calls "the real work...what is to be done" after a lengthy, nourishing, and orienting moratorium.  I feel like I'm about to dive back into the one-way stream of life, and soon this journey will seem a very long time ago.    

Eating India on a Dime

Without a doubt, the best food in India comes from home kitchens--be it a mud hearth in a wattle-and-daub hut a half dozen kilometers from the nearest road or a gas burner in a fully-outfitted city apartment.  This is a culture where literally every woman and plenty of men know how to cook, they generally do it multiple times every day, and they know how to turn not much of anything into a little some-somethin'.  The basic Indian home pantry (ignoring regional differences for a moment) stocks rice, wheat flour, cooking oil, maybe ghee, salt, a few kinds of daal/pulses, sugar, tea leaves, a small galaxy spices and spice blends, some prepared chutneys or pickles, and that's about it.  Of course this is supplemented almost on a daily basis by good from the nearest market, the backyard garden or the neighbors ruminant: milk, yogurt, veggies, fruit, meat or fish in the non-vegetarian households.  And there are plenty of extras, either seasonal, regional, or caste or ethnicity-specific items that make things more interesting.  In Bengal, for example, there's gur, the unrefined palm sugar that's boiled down into fez-shaped blocks every autumn in the Eastern hemisphere's equivalent of maple sugaring.  But the point remains that the magic is not just in the ingredients but in the hands of the cook.  And in the heart.  How else to explain how amazingly good everything I've ever been fed by Kaanchhi didi (youngest sister) in my host family in Pedong?  It's just ridiculous.

Unfortunately, home-cooked food of even the most rudimentary sort is in short supply for the traveler in India.  And, let's be honest, the myriad dining options that remain are appealing enough.  These come in a few basic sorts, in roughly ascending order of price.  There are the street stalls and carts, the holes-in-walls, the well-established, locally famous holes-in-walls, the standard shiny eateries, the tourist places, the hotel restaurants, and truly upscale places.  A few of these may want explaining.  "Standard shiny eateries" refers to places that may or may not be regional or national chains but might as well be.  They have laminated menus and are usually decorated in bright primary and secondary colors, and are frequented mostly by families or couples who are out to dinner as a treat.  "Tourist places" are distinguished by their clientele and by the fact that their menus usually try to do everything: not just the commonly-seen Indian-South Indian-Chinese (though the last part of this triad really deserves scare quotes) but also Western-style breakfast, various other Continental classics (scare quotes, scare quotes!), and perhaps Mexican, Korean, or Israeli dishes.  Or all of the above. 

The funny thing is, there's almost no tendency whatsoever for the food to improve as you ascend the price scale.  Of course, you won't find high-end Mughlai cuisine like Chicken Korma or rich Punjabi food like Shahi Paneer at a street stall.  But if you were to find street fare like Bhel Puri or Poha at a high-end sit down restaurant, the chances are very good it wouldn't improve a whit on the version available twenty paces away on the sidewalk for a tenth of the price.  In all likelihood, it would lack a certain something--a magic masala of sweat, motorbike exhaust, and ink from the newspaper cone it's wrapped in--that would make you pine for the real thing. 

Of course not every street vendor or proprietor of some cavern-like eatery with three grubby tables and one yellowed incandescent bulb is a culinary genius.  But there's a definite percentage of these places that have a cult following, and some of the them achieve city-wide renown.  Every Delhi-ite can tell you where his or her favorite tea shop or Chat spot is and how much better it is than the competition.  And everyone in Jodhpur knows about Lal Mishri Hotel and its Makhaniya lassis.  After months now of exhausting--but far from exhaustive--research, I've picked up on a few patterns.  Rather obvious ones, actually.  For one, the very best places usually specialize, like the aforementioned tea, chat, and lassi places.  This allows them to focus their energies and hone their skills to a razor-sharp edge and also to achieve a high turnover rate.  For another, and relatedly, they're usually located in busy or central parts of cities.    

As this cyber cafe is emptying out ominously and I'd like to finish this post up in one go, I'll cut to the chase and describe a couple of my favorite holes-in-the-wall and local institutions.  These are places that follow the trend I've just laid out, and add to it each a certain ineffable character that elevates them to the next level.  They're quirky.  Perhaps the proprietors are unduly gruff (a common pattern in the very best eateries everywhere, I think--at least that way you know you're there for the food).  Perhaps they have the exact same limited menu as dozens of other places, but just somehow do it better.  Whatever the source of that charisma, these places have got it.

Mishri Lal Hotel, Jodhpur
Keep in mind first that "Hotel" often just means "restaurant" in the Indian context.  Mishri Lal is definitely not a hotel in the American English sense; it's barely a restaurant.  It is rather two rooms--one for men, one for women, though couples and foreigners can bend the rules--outfitted with benches and counters.  There are no menus, except maybe for a chalkboard or ancient painted sign mounted on a wall somewhere.  It's irrelevant.  Everyone's there for the same thing: makhaniya lassi.  This is not hard to discern; the pastel yellow glasses full of the stuff are everywhere, at least one of them in front of each customer, and more always heading out the door for carry-out.  They are absolutely divine.  Way thicker than a standard lassi, just the right level of sweet, and subtly scented with a masala that must include saffron, cardamom, and rosewater.  This is a magic combination, but again, this place somehow elevates it to the realm of the devta.  They're rich and large enough to serve as a meal in themselves, yet one isn't really enough.  They put you in a zombified love trance.  They're reason enough to visit Jodhpur (which is even otherwise a fascinating and charming place) all on their own. 


Kashi Chat Bhandaar, Varanasi
This place is another justly famous classic.  Counter on the outside, cramped little two-story restaurant within, it serves up all varieties of Chat.  Now just what Chat is is a good question.  It's defined by no one set ingredient, but rather consists of a variety of sauces, crunchy fried bits, savory curries, and bits of fruit all combined just so on a little plate.  It contains all the basic tastes in an almost overwhelming profusion: sweet-salty-tangy-spicy with elements of bitterness and astringency (those Ayurvedic outliers) to keep your tastebuds cocked.  A typical version is Samosa Chat, and Kashi's version contains (if memory serves) a broken up samosa more or less buried under some pea curry, yogurt, tamarind chutney, chopped cilantro, diced raw onion, and...there must have been at least one other thing.  That's the thing about chat.  You never really know.  But to tell the truth, I wasn't bowled over by this joint until I saw what my neighbors we're eating and decided to try it.  It turned out to be tiny little puri, the crispy fried puffed-up breads often seen in glass cases on street carts, filled with a combination of sweet tamarind chutney and yogurt and...something else again.  Each bite--and there were seven to an order at about 15 rupees a plate--is an explosion, literally, as the crispy shell gives way and the yogurt and sauces potentiate each other into a gushing climax.  Sounds sexy, no?  It is.  Especially when you're seated three centimeters away from the next customer and you're being ain't in the guidebook, you see.

Other contenders:
Paratha Wali in Paratha Wali galli, Varanasi
Pokhar Restaurant in Jodhpur (even though it's a proper restaurant)
Various sweets vendors in Jodhpur (the point is, Jodhpur's a good place for eating)
Santosh Dal Bati, Udaipur

Tending the Spark, Following the Weirdness: Reflections on Religion and Spirituality and Cultivating Compassion

Few subjects conjure up as heated debate as that of religion.  What is its nature, and what is its rightful role in the modern world?  Plant the question like a smoke bomb at a Bat Mitzvah and run.  Things are probably going to get ugly.

After abandoning my initial plan of studying theoretical physics in college, I found myself drifting for reasons I didn't understand very well at the time towards the nebulous topic of Religious Studies.  It wasn't out of the lingering urge to understand the workings of the universe, as some have assumed; I was too much of a materialist to go barking up the religion tree for that.  Instead I was motivated primarily by ethical questions--and by the need to scrap together a major from my motley coursework thus far. 
                                                                                       Image: His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama telling China he's "no demon."   The DL is in fact revered as a reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion.

 Within the hallowed halls of the Religion department I found answers to some burning questions--sometimes.  Sometimes I simply learned that I wasn't asking the right questions, the important or useful ones.  And sometimes in Postmodern Religious Thought seminar we simply drank Guinness or sangria until our brains were numb enough to broach Derrida or Heidegger.  Finally, with a B.A. in "Religion" under my arm, I found myself with more questions than I ever started with.  (This is tangential, but I can't pass up the opportunity to mention my classmate and former roommate Toby Louis David's brilliant graduation speech, in which he likens the Swarthmore experience to the Jews' journey through the desert to the promised land--and manages to reference the "scrotum-tightening sea.") 

After college, I did the only reasonable thing and forgot about religion entirely for a while.  I proceeded to take my own advice and "follow my weirdness."  As my weirdness is considerable and rather strong-willed, I roamed the country, worked in an Indian restaurant, dabbled in homesteading and goat-rearing on a much beloved once and future commune site in Vermont, and eventually landed in New Mexico at a funky little place called the Ayurvedic Institute.  It was there, in a strip mall a couple miles East of the Rio Grande, that my journey really began.

I speak, not too obscurely I hope, of my internal or spiritual journey: my own idiosyncratic way to growth, meaning, and fulfillment in what a mass email I never subscribed to keeps calling "this dream of life."  Thanks, Chava, whoever you are.  Having by now taken a few steps along this path, I find I have a somewhat altered perspective on religion.     

Religion can be thought of us as the larger construct: the institutions, the encapsulized traditions, the ritual--that which the living force we might call spirituality leaves in its wake across history.  Spirituality doesn't require religion--what use the flame for the tinderbox?.  And, unfortunately, religion doesn't require spirituality either.  Religious violence, pederast priests, and the myopic bigotry that so often attends religious life in America all stand as a reminder of this.  No religious tradition I'm aware of has escaped some degree of degradation once the living spark that Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha brought to be bear faded. Material concerns loom larger, doctrinal issues arise.  In the case of Christianity, people spend two thousand years fighting over just how Jesus said to love one another. 

Of course religion does have a role to play, as the living spark of spirituality does tend to fade or be lost.  Religion provides the structure to bridge the gap until the spark can be recovered.  It preserves vast amounts of learning, and if it can remain separate from power as such, it usually doesn't too too much harm.  It certainly provides an an inspiration or at least an excuse for huge amounts of timeless art and music.  It gives the masses some idea of ethical principles, even if it has to do it by scaring them with threats of hell or lower rebirths.    

With my renewed interest in the world of religion--for all its flaws, religious institutions are still likely places to catch whiffs of spiritual insight--I was relieved, then, during a recent 5 day Intro to Buddhism course at Tushita Meditation Center in Dharamshala, when the teacher stated during the first session that "the Buddha doesn't want you to become a Buddhist." This was a good sign: non-sectarianism is a characteristic of genuine spiritual searching.  The appeal of Buddhism for many is precisely that it tends the living spark of the spiritual quest.  Such questing is always an intensely personal matter, since we each come with our own baggage: the habit patterns of mind, speech, and body. Of these, it is the mental patterns which are most deeply-rooted.  It is an example of the principle that the subtle governing the gross.  Every vicious act of rape or murder begins with a "defilement"--anger, hatred, envy, lust--in the mind.   

Now, it is one of the central insights of the Buddhist tradition that the nature of everything is "empty:" empty of inherent, independent existence.  This is only another way of saying that everything is interdependent.  This emphatically includes ourselves: though we like to re-ify our personalities as real objects, Buddhism correctly argues (and Wittgenstein agrees) that the word "me" is ultimately an empty signifier.  The "me" in question always depends on such a host of factors, causes and conditions that to look at it as anything essential is absurd.  Of course there's a conventional me; we all know what this means; the trick is not to mistake it for anything ultimate or inherent.  It's important to recognize the unreality of the me as well. 

The most significant aspect of our "me"s is the mind.  Subtlety, again, trumping grossness. Never mind that the mind, too, is empty of inherent existence; like "me" and so many things, it is a useful fiction.  All the Buddhist traditions are intensely preoccupied with the mind, because the mind is where all the action is.  We construct our worlds in the mind, shape our experiences, and, as pointed out earlier, gestate our actions of speech and body.  Not really existing anyway, minds are infinitely malleable: look at all the things they can learn, the feats they can perform: from Polynesian stellar navigation to polyrhythmic drumming, from the Macarena to multivariable calculus.  They've invented Nutella. 

The mind, for all its talents, is awfully good at getting us in trouble.  This is a way of stating Buddha's First Noble Truth: that life is duhkha: suffering, discord.  Of course there's the mundane suffering that so many billions of have-nots experience due to their material circumstances.  But even amongst those who do have, lasting happiness is exceedingly rare.  What's the problem?  Why can't the many of us who have what we really need just be happy?  Buddha's answer acknowledges the tendency of our minds: to desire, to grasp at, to crave.  Or, on the flip side, to shy from, to avoid, to fear or hate.  What we do--almost all of us, almost all the time--is to look for happiness in experiences that by their nature are fleeting.  We repeatedly seek out those neurochemical states that we learn to induce whether by food, drugs, sex, exercise, or someone laughing at our jokes.  This craving mind is like a child, undisciplined, and we don't at first know any better than to indulge it.  We do so all the time.  The trouble is, where we indulge, the child spoils: the craving only grows stronger.

This is one way of looking at the human condition.  It may sound pessimistic, but actually this Buddhist view looks on the bright side: there is a reliable medicine for our ailing minds.  It is known as the Dharma, the truth, the way.  Buddha himself is the doctor that has prescribed it for humanity, and the third essential component, the supporting staff of nurses and attendants who do much of the day-to-day curative work, is called the Sangha--the community of other practitioners.  A nice quality of the dharma is that it is true--at least it regognizes certain fundamental realities for what they are--and is therefore true by any name.  So enough about Buddhas and Sanghas.  Back to the living kernel of truth, as best I understand it. 

We were at the point of turning to a new approach to the mind-child, a disciplinary one.  This is a matter of re-patterning, cultivating new habits and understandings until gradually the old ones fade out and our spoilt child becomes a model Timmy.  A number of tools are useful here, including but not limited to the proverbial stick and carrot.  All of them involve meditation at some stage, as this is where we can work directly on the mind. 

The particular pattern of the mind we've recognized as an enemy of our own happiness is the part that is ever hungry for more happiness, or rather more pleasant sensations.  In earlier posts I've written about Samatha or calming meditation, the technique of stabilizing and focusing the mind so that we can see clearly.  I've described the Vipassana technique of deep insight and re-patterning as taught by S.N. Goenka at his international centers. Vipassana trains us not to blindly grab at those pleasant sensations, but to observe them as they arise and watch them pass away.  In the process we gain insight into impermanence.  This is deep work but slow, and requires a firm foundation in Samatha, concentration.  Here I want to introduce something else, something that stands alone and that doesn't require such sustained, committed practice to bear fruit.
Since what we're aiming to abolish is a kind of selfishness, the tendency always to seek more pleasure for ourselves, we can apply an antidote in the form of an altruistic attitude.  We can consciously practice putting others first, and not only in terms of their happiness but in terms of their suffering.  If we take on others' suffering ourselves, it will act as a sort of poison that the "self-cherishing mind" can't abide.  The self-cherishing attitude will loosen its grip, and as it does so it will free our minds--a concept coterminous in many Asian traditions with that of heart--to release love.  Put this way, it sounds like a tall order.  The trick is, we can do it in our minds first, using the faculty of imagination to lay the first lines of a pattern that we wish to become our reality. 

The technique is called "Exchanging Self and Others." It is based on the following piece of reasoning. 'All beings deserve happiness and have the potential to achieve it.  I want most urgently to help them along the way, but my abilities to do so are limited.  Therefore I should do whatever I can do help myself help others.'  As this is a technique from Buddhism (a Tibetan branch of Mahayana Buddhism, to be a bit more precise), the logic continues 'I should become enlightened so that I can help others as much as humanly possible.'  This desire to achieve for oneself so that one may help others achieve is a step in the direction of what's called bodhicitta, the altruistic Mind of Enlightenment.  The meditation technique I'm going to describe is a means of cultivating bodhicitta, that is of expanding one's circle of compassion, in Gandhi-ji's terms.  But wait, some might say, wasn't the whole purpose supposed to be to increase our own happiness?  And all we've even started to think about doing is taking on the suffering of others in exchange for what happiness we've got?  False advertizing!  Ah.  But our own happiness is not a fixed quantity, nor something to be hoarded.  As this practice can reveal, helping others generates happiness in ourselves as a by-product.  As the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi says, " it is in giving that we receive...".  He weren't just being a romantic. 

      Exchanging Self and Others Meditation

Seat yourself comfortably and stably and take a few minutes to settle using whatever method works.  Let thoughts slow down as the awareness sinks down into the body.  Become aware of the breath and let it lengthen and deepen.  Relax.

The practice begins with the understanding that others are equally as deserving and capable of happiness as oneself, and that since there are so many more others than there are of oneself (which is only one, in fact), it is appropriate to work for their happiness rather than one's own.  With this altruistic motivation established, the practice begins.  It is easiest to start small, so we in fact begin with ourselves before expanding outward.  Imagine all your future suffering, the pain, the negative emotions, and imagine being able to take it upon yourself now.  As you inhale, draw in some of that future suffering as a black, noxious cloud.  This is distasteful and may be difficult, if you are visualizing strongly, but try and keep inhaling the black smoke.  As you do so, imagine it flowing to your hard, self-cherishing heart.  The selfishness in you can't stand all this suffering, and the presence of the suffering weakens it.  Keep breathing in the black suffering smoke and letting it dissolve your self-cherishing, and begin to envision happiness flowing back out with your exhale.  This happiness can take the form of a pure white or golden light.  Direct this happiness towards your future self.  Keep breathing in the black smoke from your future and breathing out the pure light.

The next step is to expand your scope to include another person.  It's easiest to start with someone you love.  Picture inhaling their suffering, little by little, letting it dissolve the hard selfishness in your heart, and exhaling pure light of happiness for them.  Watch the expression on their face relax as you relieve them of their burden. 

As you feel ready, add another person.  At some point, try visualizing someone you've had difficulty with in the past, an enemy, even.  They are no different than you in wanting happiness, and maybe less clear about how to achieve it.  And it will relieve you to comfort them selflessly, even in the mind.  

 As you work, imagine the scale of the enterprise growing.  You're no longer breathing in the suffering of individuals, but of households, entire neighborhoods, regions, countries.  As your energy and imagination permit, you can work up to the point of imagining yourself breathing in the suffering of the entire planet of sentient beings, unleashing it on your self-cherishing, and returning back the selfless love that results. 

However far you take the practice, at its apex, breathe in extra deeply of the black smoke and hold it in.  Feel it massed there in your chest, caustic, noxious, stinking, unbearable.  It is unbearable that beings should suffer like this.  It is unbearable that you should have to take it upon yourself.  Feel the explosion as your self-cherishing attitude disintegrates, leaving only a wash of pure light for you to exhale to everyone in your scope.

The practice can end in the traditional Mahayana way, with a dedication to all beings.  Or just sit quietly for another few minutes, watching how your mind has reacted and reflecting on what significance the practice holds for you at this time. 


Finally, in the spirit of non-sectarianism, I'd like to offer the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.
  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

A Listing Fancy...and the best of Indian English

I'm a list maker by nature. Groans? Chuckles? Knowing sighs? Yes, I'll make a list of just about anything. In the most neurotic stretches of my college career, I would give in to insomnia and sit up at the computer, making a Master List. A list of lists. That way I would always have another list to work on. I must have felt that this meta-list, if it could only be made thorough enough, would define me as a person. Take one particular sub-list, that of favorite music: surely a few data points (say, The Fall, Chopin nocturnes, and Doc Watson) taken together would define a unique individual, just as three points uniquely determine a mathematical plane? Something like that. This was list-making as an exercise in self-definition, at a time when a sturdy identity is worth its weight in Monte Cristo sandwiches. But greasy culinary adventures are another topic, and another list, entirely.


I've been indulging in the old vice again, now largely as a way to get a handle on the ungainly, wildly varied mass of memories that have piled up over the course of my travels this season. List making as mnemonic device, an age-old strategy, I suppose. And there's the thought that each list harbors the seed for one or more pieces of writing. Little seeds I hoard jealously, as, now that I've embarked on the solo phase of this trip, writing is my lifeline. Lord help me if I can't come up with something to write. So, lists.

Here then, are parts of my master list for this time and place, with each item to be made flesh by the great Word as my fancy and/or readers demand:


Best Samples of Indian English
Best Hole-in-the-Wall Eateries
Worst Hotel Experiences
Most Memorable People Encountered
Causes of Continued Culture Shock


In fact the first of these lists is easily completed--or at least begun. Without further ado, then, here are my favorite examples from signs, menus, etc. across the Subcontinent, of the way English is used and abused around here.

"Yes...we are less dirty" - restaurant

"We all made out of one radiation" - ashram banner

"Sweets problem? Solves with us" - sweets shop

Oil Pouch, Water Pouch, Es Cambal - egg preparations on a menu

Butter Scrotch - ice cream flavor

Cheaf & Best - hotel advertisement

Beans Coffee - menu item

Testy Snakes - menu heading

Fooding and Lodging - ubiquitous hotel offer

Shirting and Suiting - tailor's sign


...and many more, if only I could remember them all. Or figure out which mildewed, scrunched up notebook I'd jotted them all down in.

Holy Shit

Another day in Varanasi.  The sun rises red on the far side of the Ganga; down by the Ghats, boatmen ply their services to groups of pink-faced tourists whom they lead down the grimy steps between bodies in repose to the water's edge.  Ah, the water's edge.  The broad sweep of the ghats and their steep stone stairways, the boats boring their way upstream or floating serenely down at dawn and dusk; multitudes of pilgrims bathing their sins away in the turgid drink--these are the images that Varanasi has impressed upon the psyche of generations of visitors, domestic and foreign, from Lord Rama to Mark Twain.  There is a great deal more to the city than the river, of course.  But not for nothing is a twilit Ganga scene the memory millions of visitors will take home with them.  The river at the liminal dawn and dusk hours is a fitting encapsulation of this place, of its simultaneous subtlety and grossness and all of its other contradictions.  Let the image linger: legions of devout purifying themselves in a mighty river of filth.

*    *    *

As I write this, I can feel the shit drying on my heel.  This is the price of a moment of abstraction in the twisting lanes of the old city--and this is An Old City--a mis-step into a mass of cow mess.  To call it manure is optimistic, when it will fertilize no more than an algal bloom in the river 30 yards away, and when the cow's diet consists of what it can forage from trash strewn along the roads and--gods' grace--the occasional sweetmeat or dosa.  It is shit.  And it is in fine company: the narrow alleys are smeared, plastered, and adorned with excrement of all sorts.  It is so ubiquitous that one quickly grows used to regular, garden-variety crap; it is the diseased stuff that continues to horrify.  That, and the stuff that looks like it might have come from a human. 

But between whiffs of fecal matter wafts the aroma of flowers.  Marigolds, jasmine, garlands in orange and white; the streets are decked with blossoms.  Every petal is destined to be placed lovingly around the neck of a god, draped across one of the city's thousands of Shiva Lingas.  This, after all, is Shiva's city, the City of Light.  At night especially the whole place glows,and no beacons burn brighter than the multitudinous temples.  The maze of alleys around Vishwanath temple, site of the most famous of the 12 Jyotir Linga--lingas of light--blaze like a carnival.  To the eagles that circle above the city, this district must appear as a network of multicolored glowsticks arranged end-to-end.  At street level, the effect is dazzling.  But not all the luminosity comes from the god-houses.  Looming equally large in the minds of masses are Banarasi sarees, silken ones with metallic threads worked in.  And bangles, yes, bangles in teetering stacks, colored and shaped for every woman's wrist.  Other stalls hawk metalwares, fried and spiced snack mixes, you name it.  Benares, they say, is not just the best place to die.  It is the best place to live!  The betel leaf mixture called paan is legendary here, the sweets succulent and profuse, the perfume and attars sublime.  Surely Benares is the best of both worlds!

But a casual visitor could be forgiven for thinking that religious matters have been forgotten altogether out on the main thoroughfares.  The bustle and din here is unbelievable: it's the usual Indian mash-up of cycle rickshaws, pedestrians, three-wheelers, bullocks, and swarms of pedestrians all inching their ways along.  Along either side are hundreds more fabric shops, bank branches (with ATM), and snack vendors.  Indian society (by some measures, apparently) is the most materialistic on earth, and in the City of Extremes the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming.  On closer inspection, though, one of the little shops is found to be a "government shop," i.e. the official distributor of sacred marijuana products: powdered "pollen" mixed (for locals) or unmixed (for tourists) with holy Ganga water.  Less officially but no less visibly, the lassi sellers at the corner offer a conspicuously green "special lassi" that is likely to offer a great deal of bang for the rupee.  Shiva-ji loves his bhang, or at least his devotees do.  It's not just the ash-smeared saddhus who partake of this sacrament; so do most of the foreign tourists, and plenty of shopkeepers I've run into in the Bengali neighborhood I'm staying in.  The flute teacher who sits in the doorway of his music shop-cum-opium den, and the two equally-stoned proprietors of a dosa-and-idly restaurant a few doors down.  The City of Light has a decidedly cloudy side.

Piercing the haze are the ever-sharp eyes of the beggars.  Religious mendicants sincere, charlatan, or in between; old women and lepers; undersized children slipping barefoot through the labyrinth they know better than the minotaur.  And bovines.  As a rule, locals ignore the children, mischievous or desperate as they are, give an occasional coin to the helpless, may hand out regular alms to the sannyasi, and feed the beloved cows lavish treats.  The ever-resourceful children (the others have been culled by natural selection by now) have learned to solicit the foreign faces, unused to such stark inequalities.  And who can say no to a grubby, bright-eyed boy who knowingly takes you by the hand and leads you to the store where your 24 rupees (75 cents or less) can buy him enough biskoot for him and his little sister, too?  My own guilt-assuaging strategy has been to sit these kids down in the restaurant with us and get them some real food rather than put coins into outstretched hands.  On a larger scale, the city is a hotbed of charitable organizations, which may for all I know attract more of the destitute.  The city is a magnet for rich and poor.

For sinners as well as saints.  And what more attractive place for the rogue with the slightest religious tendency than the city that promises to wipe out the accumulated karma of all who so much as bathe in the holy river?  Dying here is better still, which is why, according to Diana L. Eck in City of Light, the truly devout take a vow never to leave the confines of the old city even to venture to Benares Hindu University a scant few yards South of the official line.  The greater the negative karmic load, the greater the incentive to stick around the maze beside the river and thus end up on a pyre at the burning ghat.  Less sinister but more menacing are the touts and hecklers at every turn, those who at the sight of fresh tourist meat may go so far as to try and lead you bodily into their trinket shop.  Here as everywhere else, the thin get thinner and the fat fatter as the wheels of commerce grind on.

Up another narrow galli from the touristy Bengali Tola lane I have found a bastion removed from worldly concerns, at least if one can get past the 100 rupee ticket: the grandiosely named International Music Ashram.  Twice a week a modest crowd of mostly (indeed) internationals gathers to have the latest generation of classical Hindustani musicians lull them into an intoxicated state without the use of any chemicals save those produced in our brains at the prompting of sitars' microtones and tablas' polyrhythms.  The ceiling fans blow, the sweat drips, the mosquitoes bite, and I don't care.  The trio seated cross-legged on the white-draped little stage has rendered me one-pointed.  Another day in Benares, redeemed.

*    *    *

The Ganga flows on as rivers are wont to do, swollen now by the monsoon and carrying along with bits of vegetation votive offering of flowers and ghee lamps.  In the depth of its channel, the unburnable bodies of pregant women, children, lepers and animals must be scuffling along, inching closer to the Bay of Bengal.  The bathers, whose rank I will be joining tomorrow on my last day in the City of Holy Shit, pay no heed to this or to the fact that open sewers continue to empty themselves into the great river, but continue placidly to wash themselves.  They may have noticed a striking fact: despite the feces, the chemical load that must permeate these waters, and the corpses burning around the clock, down by the Ganga there is not a trace of a bad smell.