boardwalk on cootes

tall blades of grass, clustered in bunches

rooting upward through shallow, marshy algae water

the smell of mud and fishing when i was a young boy

hush in the leaves travels through tree tops

building force and splaying out over the marsh

grasses yield, arcing and undulating, nearby, their brown fall tips, reach forth and grasp for me

above grey clouds, the simmering burn of jet fuel

the injection of aerated fossil fuels into chambers

with sparks

repeated in quick succession by passing vehicles reaches softly in above the wall of trees

hot sunshine through opening clouds

brings waves of sensation across face, arms, chest…mmm, i wish this could last forever

lying down on the wobbly boardwalk, flapping grasses spit splashes of water as gustly visitation races into openings and bumps those in it’s path

ugggh!…pain shoots through my right mid-back, restrained during the rush of my morning commute

clouds in a traffic jam bring on a sadness, a feeling of not wanting to be here, to resist and move away from this moment and return to sunshine

as i stare up, listening and waiting, the clouds move and swirl as does this sadness

which has become boredom and then anxiety about why i’m bored

crickets start singing, picking up where the others leave off, or were they singing this whole time and and i just wasn’t aware

wasps lazily harvest pollen, do they know first frost is coming? i dreamt of snow just the other day.

Fall Arrives

The concord grapes in our backyard are at their peak juiciness. A bird with a chest as yellow as a banana popsicle flits about on the fence. Kids are back at school and soon the leaves will really show the transition we’ve started to make towards winter.

The summer went by like a big blur. Although I spent lots of time at my computer doing research, I found many occasions to shake this container of mine from head to toe. I prepared the soil for what is to come…

This year promises to be action-packed.

I’m  intending on doing some writing about mindfulness and environmental education this year. I’ll be teaching with Bob Henderson out at McMaster on course called “Environmental Inquiry” in January – Bob is a wonderful storyteller and has traveled extensively across Canada by canoe.

I’m also excited about running an 8 Week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course out of SpiritWind in Kensington Market. My Yoga/TaiChi Sifu (teacher) Dylan Kirk has opened up a clinic/studio in the market and I’m pumped/jacked about deepening my practice through teaching.

contact me if you want to taste some of the grapes.

The Contemplative Heart of Higher Education

Upcoming conference I should like to attend.

The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education Annual Conference (http://www.acmhe.org/events.html)

April 24-26, 2009
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts

The conference will focus on initiatives of contemplative pedagogy that are taking place in classrooms and institutions of higher education and explore the special role that contemplative practices can play in cultivating those capacities of attention, equanimity, wisdom and compassion that are central to the lives of students and educators.

Through contributed papers, poster sessions, and artistic presentations, as well as in plenary talks and contemplative practice sessions, there will be a wide representation of the ways contemplation can serve higher education. As educators integrate these practices into classrooms and studios they have the opportunity to explore how they help students develop greater mindfulness, open hearts and insights as they deal with the challenges of their studies and our world.

Featuring:

David Levy, Professor, The Information School, University of Washington and author of “No Time to Think: Reflections on Information Technology and Contemplative Scholarship,” will present “Cultivating the Contemplative,” discussing how contemplative practices can be understood as powerful means of cultivating the receptive dimension of engagement with the world.

Arthur Zajonc, Academic Program Director of The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society; Professor of Physics at Amherst College; scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogues with the Dalai Lama; and author of the recently published “Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry” and the forthcoming “Exploring the Heart of Higher Education” with Parker Palmer.

bomeward hound (January 24th, 2009)

Thousands of Buddhist pilgrims flock their way to Bodhgaya during January and February each year. The atmosphere is all smiles, if you ignore the intense Bihari poverty at the margins of everything. Monks and nuns from all Buddhist communities around the world and many lay folk like myself and Laura, walk circles around the Mahabodhi temple and the Bodhi tree, the site of Big B’s enlightenment. It wasn’t hard to conclude that this was easily the highest concentration of happy people we’ve ever met. You just have to make eye contact with the people here to get them laughing. The highest form of entertainment came from sitting on one of the ledges next to the Bodhi tree and watch as young novice monks stood with keen attention on the leaves that would fall from the tree. With good reflex, they would dash en masse to a leaf freshly fallen, knocking over people meditating in the process. Occassionaly, an old monk would come around the corner and yell at them and they would take off laughing. If you weren’t succesful in scoring a leaf from the tree, you could always buy one from one of the vendors outside the temple complex. With few noticeable exceptions, no economic niche goes unfilled here in India.

In my last writings, Jake, Laura and I were in Bangalore I believe. The highlight was Maaya, the grand illusion it’s referred to as. We decided to jump on the www.couchsurfing.com bandwagon, a community of residents and travellers that facilitates free home stays and connections for people travelling. We hooked up with a number of couchsurfer (CS) folks in Bangalore over dinner one night and one traveller suggested that we find Maaya, an experiment in community, philosophy and living spaces. Eric, a young man from New York, had visited Maaya a night earlier and described it as one of the most interesting living spaces he’s even seen. You could come and go as you please, any time of day or night, no rules but funky architecture, a sizeable library on spirituality and philosophy and a non-sketchy atmosphere. He knew roughly where it was on a map of Bangalore and had a scant description on what the place looked like from the outside.

Jake and I hopped in a rickshaw at 11PM and were dropped off on the other side of the city. Working from a rough map I had drawn, a police vehicle pulled up to us on the side of the road and offered to bring us along for a ride to find Maaya. They were miffed at how little we knew about where we were going, but didn’t seem particularly worked up about anything as they said the night was slow going. They let us off close to where we thought we needed to be and we searched the quiet residential side streets calling out ‘Manju’, the name of the man who ‘ran’ the place.

We were unsuccessful with our search, as the first two videos on my FaceBook page show. Determined with the force of Lord Krishna on our side (see Bhagavad Gita), we returned two days later during the day time to try and find Manju. Within twenty minutes we had succeeded and realized how close we were during the first attempt. Gaaya, as parts 3 and 4 show in the videos, was indeed a fascinating place and all three of us enjoyed some chai with Manju and his wife discussing how the space came about and it’s future.

We were happy to leave Bangalore’s pollution. Our lungs were burning from all the diesel smoke. The reprieve was limited as Hyderabad was not much better. The saving grace was the famous Paradise Biriyani. This restaurant is the king of restaurants. 600 staff and seating for 1200 people. Their special is the 425 Rs chicken mutton biriyani dish, which we made a dent in, but concluded that it fulfilled any future need to eat this rice dish.

An overnight train to Bangalore, some expensive coffee in Mumbai Airport, and a flight later brought us to Varanasi, the holiest Hindu site in India. If you can die as a Hindu and be burned on the ghats overlooking the Ganges river, you get a free ticket to paradise. Instant salvation from Shiva. Except if you’re pregnant, a child, a sadhu, died from a snake bite, or an animal. In that case, you are not cremated and you have a stone tied around your body and you are dropped in the middle of the river. Shiva will take you as you are.

It is impossible to give any justice to what Varanasi is like in a few words here, but it’s impossible to deny how intense this place is. The burning ghats, the maze of narrow streets in the old city (3000 years old!), the gangs of dogs, and the stench of cow poop, and barely moving Ganga river do nothing to diminish the filth but, as Jake said, when you’re this close to the end of your life, it doesn’t really matter does it.

Jake left us in Varanasi as he heads off to work as a logistician for Medicin Sans Frontiers (MSF, doctors without borders) in Eastern Congo. I ask that you send you love, thoughts, prayers and so on towards Jake and all the people living in one of the most war-torn places on the planet.

From Varanasi we headed into Bodhgaya, Bihar, the most impoverished state in India. Over half of the population lives in absolute poverty, meaning that they lack even the basics for survival but are somehow still surviving. 60% of the population is under 25 and this seemed consistent with many of the men we met who were gunning for as many eleven children (all boys, they hoped). Things are apparently improving here with literacy, health programmes, infrastructure, and promising economic development, but the violence, apathy towards Bihar, and corrupt governance keeps the indominable spirit of the people we met here from obtaining even the basics.

The remaining days of our trip will be spent enjoying the warm weather of Delhi, buying as much inexpensive goods from the markets as we can, seeing Slumdog Millionaire, hanging with our friends Abhi, Meem and Mia and preparing for the big transition.

Thank you to all of you for joining me and Laura on this trip from a far. Your letters, especially during the Delhi and Mumbai blasts, were a source of strength. I hope I’ve been able to capture even a slice of this trip for all of you, knowing of course that only so much can be said in so many words. I hope this has excited you about travelling, about coming to India, about challenging your perspectives and comfort zones. Perhaps it’s done the opposite – there are some things about coming here and living out of a backpack that would be a worst nightmare for some people. If anything, I hope some of these words have helped you fan your imagination and produce a little tingle down your back.

Be well, much love

sean

will work for food (jan 4th 2009)

Sitting on Kudle Beach and reading the odd news update from Canada’s recent weather can only muster up vague images in my mind about what ‘winter consciousness’ must feel like. I feel immense incongruence between the idea of riding my track bike down through the College Street slush in Toronto and the bubbling foam from a broken wave tickling my bum. Bum-bubbles!

It’s fascinating to be in a place so different from the rest of India – you would almost think you weren’t here if you didn’t make frequent trips into town. White folks from all over the world flock here in small numbers every year to escape reality, find pieces of it, and sometimes just show up for a nice swim. Each morning a number of folks would set up on the beach and run through their yoga practice. Once, we saw two bulls fighting near the end of their two hour epic battle for beach supremacy.

Time slowed to a crawl and most of it was spent swimming, staring out in to the ocean, reading, eating, and as much tai chi as one can muster up on the sand. Laura and I shared a kingfish sizzler on Christmas, the closest thing to turkey and gravy you could get on the beach. Our good friend Jake Wadland arrived on New Year’s Eve and we spent a few hours walking up and down the beach and being outrageously silly.

We arrived last night in Hampi, essentially the ruins of ancient empire strewed out amongst massive boulders. It was great to be back on the road again and we all got our bones rightly rattled by the eight hour bus ride, but I’ve reached a point in the trip where I’m not entirely excited about moving too quickly, seeing more sights, and driving an agenda. We have about a month left and some really great things still left to do, but I’m exceedingly jacked about transmuting the energy, ideas, stories, writing, and questions produced along the way into and with all of you.

I hope to be in Hamilton with my dad for the spring and summer revising and completing the better part of a ‘book’ I wrote here on my experiences in learning and healing through an epistemology of love. I will know in March if I’m accepted to SFU for a PhD in Philosophy of Education, after which Laura and I will figure out what the next few years of our lives might look like. Most importantly, I will need a job of some sort. Tutoring, consulting, gardening, cleaning, back rubbing, writing, ‘facilitating’…if you see anything juicy, let me know.

with coconut chutney love

sean

Lost in Auroville (December 18th, 2008)

I looked at my watch today and realized two weeks had gone by since i wrote my last update. Christmas is a week away but you would hardly know it here. There is the odd Christian shop with the plastic tree and tinsel, an advertisement or two with a funny Indian dressed up as Santa Claus, but absolutely none of the commercialism. I’m sure all of you must be sick of it and looking forward to spending time with your homies.

We’re in Allepey right now, home of Kerala’s famous backwaters. If you have the cash (we don’t) you can rent a house boat for a few nights and live on the canals and rivers that snake their way through rice fields. We took a cramped and loud local ferry yesterday (only 10 Rs!) and watched people dine in luxury replete with satellite TV.

The last I left off, we were in the heart of Tamil Nadu, Trichy to be exact. We decided to head off to Pondicherry on the east coast and it was definitely a good move. Pondy is an old French settlement with charm and we arrived to find a real bakery that made almond croissants, vegetable quiche, and real coffee. It was decided immediately that we would spend a few days here fattening up on wheat, butter and sugar. To accomodate the monster in our stomachs, we picked up a real dive of a room that turned out to be spacious enough for me to practice kungfu in my underwear and do my laundry.

The higlight of Pondy was our adventurous day out to Auroville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auroville). This place is like no other and needs to be explained a little before describing our trip there. Sri Aurobindo and a Frenchwoman named “The Mother” were spiritual collaborators who drew from Vedic philosophy and modern science to create a community focused on integral consciousness. In 1968 a whack of land was purchased by this community to start the experiment in human unity. Auroville would be a place for people of all religions, creeds, colours, and so on, to live and work together for the purpose of evolving human consciousness. Quite a compelling task isn’t it? Are you skeptical yet?

We rented two bicycles early in the morning and plied our way along the coastal highway. Our years of riding in traffic served us well and we merged with the street chaos beautifully. It felt awesome to ride a bicycle again. After getting lost we found our way into Auroville as my front tire decided to blow out. I found a mechanic who said he would replace the ailing wheel and put me back on the road in 3 hours. Laura rode the rest of the 5km to the visitor’s centre while I hitched a ride with an Indian man on his motorcycle. The visitors centre was only a snapshot into what Auroville is about and if you click on the link above you’ll get a glimpse of the massive golden golfball looking structure that houses the crystal meditation room. It was on the way out that things got interesting.

The plan would be the same as before. Laura would ride back to the mechanic and I would hitch a ride on someone’s motorcycle. The first person I came across was a Bulgarian woman living in Auroville. She came a few years back, expecting to use her expertise as an engineer, but instead worked almost exclusively on moving rocks and building various structures. She spoke about how the experience deconstructed her identity and how the community changed her life. She told her story as we whizzed past fields of vegetables and as I listened I realized that we were not headed towards anywhere I was familiar with. We stoppped and she explained to me that Auroville is full of little towns and that I could have come from any one of them. I got off and in that moment waved down another motorcycle and tried to explain the look of the town I had come from. The man was somewhat assured of where I needed to go and happily took me. Again, I ended up somewhere completely different but with hearing another story of how Auroville changed a persons life. He took me back to the visitors centre where I found another motorcycle. The Italian man I met told me about how he was a musician who travelled the world for an alternative to the fragmented, violent and consumerist values he was surrounded by. He found Auroville and was now an organic farmer with lots of ideas about how transform local farming practices. He waved down aonther motorcycle as we drove and I was handed off to another man who was headed towards a town matching my scant descpritions. I arrived to a fixed bicycle and a slightly worried Laura. Lost in Auroville.

From Pondy, we moved onto Mamallapuram where we spent the better part of two days at our hotel hiding out from the rain. I picked up an acupuncture text and started locating the points and meridians on my body. Laura and I wrote and read as much as we could in between dhal fry and thukpa soup. We made a quick trip into Chennai where we picked up a train headed to the west coast. On the train we met a newly wed Indian couple going on their honeymoon. Their wedding lasted five days and they were half way through a 24 hour bus/train/train/taxi trip into the hills of Munnar. He worked for GM in India and she was a software engineer. They gave us insight into everything from how marriage and relationships are changing in India to how GM’s trouble at home isn’t affecting India that significantly.

We arrived in Cochin, a small former Portugeuse colony on the Arabian Sea. Walking about the town one day, I saw some school children playing soccer in a field and had some sudden gall to walk into the school. I met the principal and asked if some students and teachers would be available for an hour the next day to talk about the Mumbai blasts and peace. I told them I was a teacher back in Canada and he told me to come back at 10AM the next day. I didn’t know what to expect and arrived the next morning to a very rudimentary classroom crammed with 50 students who were about 10-12 years old.

We practiced mindfull breathing with each other, did the famous paper tear, and some small group discussion about how they felt about the blasts and their ideas for peace. When they closed their eyes for mindful breathing, most took the task on with a relaxed determination and others found it exceedingly difficult to not laugh. The paper tear created a huge mess on the floor. They were saddened by the loss of life in the blasts and talked about corrupt government, human unity, awareness campaigns and the sensitive issue of Pakistan. The hour was quickly over and the teachers asked if I would take another class. A few minutes later, 50 more students replaced the first bunch and I did it all over again. As I was leaving, both a teacher and an admistrative office person asked me here I was staying and how I was going to the next town. The teacher ran a guest house and gave me her card and the office guy had a son with a taxi service. Everyone in India it seems has a job in tourism.

From Cochin, we headed to hills of Munnar and hung out for a few days in the tea plantations. As we arrived a massive 60 foot wooden cutout of Lenin stood next to a dwarfed but also impressive lit-up red hammer and sickle. Richshaws proudly drove around with the communist flag and we learned that members of the tea planters union from 9 states would be descending on the town for a conference. Kerala is a democratically-elected communist state and is the only place in India with almost 100% literacy. The hills were awesome as well on the way to Periyar where we spent a day in the national park hoping to see some tigers but all we got were some leaches on our pants that fell off when our guide poured tobacco powder on them. From Periyar, we arrived here in Allepey and must now sit down to the task of figuring out the perpetual question “Where next?”

I hope to get out a message to everyone on Christmas.

loving y’all lots and dreaming about fun things to do when we return.

peace out

sp

far away from mumbai (december 4th, 2008)

I finally accepted the fact a few days ago that all I will be eating for breakfast for the next little while is idly or dosa. Both are made from rice and come with cold coconut chutney and sambar (a dal veggie soup). I prefer the idly because it has less oil, but oh man, when you get a crisp meter long paper masala dosa, you know the food crew is showing off. I’ve temporarily accepted that my diet is not healthy and as there is not much I can do to change it, I might as well enjoy it. Bring on the oil!

From the sandy beaches of Goa, we took an overnight train into Mangalore, arriving at 400AM to a very active train station and some rickshaw drivers who did nothing less than extort us for the position of being some distance from the c ity with no other transport options. “Bahut mangha hai!” I laugh….too expensive. This little drama of negotiating the price always takes the same pattern. I ask how much and they offer something crazy. “But it’s only two kilometers, my map says so”. Two kms turn into 6 kms because of some hill, strike, parking fee, or other prop designed to make the trip seem so arduous that such a high price is absolutely reasonable. I make a counter offer, which is usually declined, and walk off. I get maybe five or six feet, and I wait for it…oh, sir, yes 40 rupees. But not this time.

From Mangalore we headed into the rainforest of the Western Ghats. The bus ride was a fun one. The roads were so rough that a window rattled itself off it’s frame. The bus driver and his sidekick, the ticketman, had a hearty laugh. As we climbed, we could see coffee plantations, rubber trees , betel nut trees, and rice fields. A cool breeze came through the dusty window, gently. We arrived in Madikeri, a town in the region of Coorg (or Coorg Light as I would refer to it thinking of people in my life that I love, but cannot understand because they, for some insane reason, actually like Coors Light).

Again, it was so awesome to roll into a town and have everyone, including the rickshaw drivers, treat you as a local. Everything was hot ghee in this place and a couple of thing worth mentioning.

1. Field Hockey and Ice Pops

We ran into some kids playing field h o ckey and they let me join in. Not long into a game an old man with an ice box on a bicycle pulls up and starts yelling at us. One of the kids, obviously the kingpin of the bunch, says “hey, that man over there has ice pops, only 2 rupees each…buy us some will you sir”. Realizing that I could buy everyone an ice pop for the equivalent of 50 cents, I agreed and set these kids crazy. That poor old man on his bicycle was so overwhelmed by them that he started yelling and swatting their hands away from the sugary womb on wheels.

2. Rainforest Retreat

If there was one thing Laura wanted to do on this trip in a big way, it was this “Rainforest Retreat” in hills above Madikeri. Some years ago Anarog, a biologist from Gu el ph moved to India, met and married Sujata, a botanist, and both of them bought 25 acres of land to start a ‘natural systems agriculture’ organic farm. Coffee, vanilla, cardomom, some cows, and veggies under the canopy of the rainforest. Running for almost ten years now, the couple is running the farm without pesticides and is starting to build a critical shift in farming practices in the region. So many farmers in India have committed suicide because they have become dependent on monoculture farming, pesticides, and corporate seed and become unable to survive the rising cost of farming in this way.

To keep their work growing, they initiated a guest house and hired an intern to conduct tours. We were lucky, because when we arrived, a number of biologists were also staying at the guest house. Sujata took us on a number of tours over the two days that we were th e re an d I was so excited with how everyone was geeking out on botany and ecosystem talk. The best was Sujata’s talk on plant consciousness through the lens of biochemistry and how important science is to shifting our understanding of ecosystems. She went on to describe how ‘pests’ were accomodated in the ecosystem and now live at below pest threshold levels. The parallels between the kind of holistic approaches used in the forest and those with the human body sparked some good conversation.

To sweeten the kitty, there was another woman staying to review the guest house…. her name slips me know but she is a travel writer for Frommer’s Travel Guide on India. She’s been up and down the backside of India for over 15 years and it helps greatly that her family also owns Royal Enfield, one of the largest motorcycle companies in India. We sat with her late into the n ig ht as she told story after story. My favourite was about the ’scooty culture’ raging here right now. Scooter companies are now targeting woman with sexy, purple scooters as part of their ‘Pleasure’ line – “Why should boys have all the fun” read the ads. She spoke about how mobility for woman is greatly transforming their role in society.

The stay lasted only two days and the minute the rickshaw pulled away from the Rainforest Retreat, I entered into the most depressed state I’ve been the entire trip. I’m still not sure what it was, but I think all the guests, the conversations, the food, and the surroundings allowed me to put my guard down a little, to really open up to others more full on. We were back into the fray, the diesel smoke, the horns.

Our bus hammered on into Mysore, the ‘other’ yoga capital of the world. We had heard mixed things about this place – ‘nothing special’ to ‘wow, talk about culture’. The minute we arrived, the touts set in on us in what is perhaps the most aggressive we’ve seen all trip. Putting together the grey weather with no windows in our hotel room and failed attempts to take some classes in tabla and yoga, we got grumpy. Thank goodness for TV! I can’t remember the last time I allowed myself to numb out on television and ignore my shitty mood.

We sat in shock as the images from Mumbai started to pour in. Many of the streetscapes were familiar. We ate at both the restaurants that were attacked down the street from the Raj and the Oberoi. We walked the platform at the train station. I’ve been struggling with how I feel about it. This trip has b een su ch a wild blur, moving from one place to the next and to the next, that what happened yesterday or two weeks ago both seem so distant. It’s hard to grow roots about a place when you’re moving about so much. But we remember the people, the smallest conversations, and the integrity and warmth that so many people have given us here, and particularly in Mumbai. I fear for what will transpire next…

Our last day in Mysore brought some soothing closure as we took an Indian cooking class alongside a group of American woman who came for yoga training. We learned to cook up a pumpkin curry, some spinach dahl and homemade roti. Can’t wait to share when we get home!

When you’re not feeling good about a place, it’s n ice th at y ou can just pack your bag and leave. And so we bid farewell to Mysore and headed for the hills of Ooty. This hill station is 2200m up and it was indeed moist and chilly compared to what we’ve been used to – maybe 5 degrees at night. These mountain folk are definitely on the relaxed wavelength and had the most interesting way of dealing with the cold. Almost everyone was running around barefooted, but wearing shawls and togues. I got yanked into an Indian wedding happening at the guest house we were staying at and danced to some crazy percussionists and flutists.

Seeing time fly by, we’ve decided to pick up the pace a bit and are doing a whirlwind tour of Tamil Nadu. We’re in Trichy right now (Rangachari’s home town!) and off to Pondicherry and Chennai today (we had a change of plans since my FB message last night).

every inch of my love…

sp

castles made of sand (November 16tg, 2008)

Gandhi was in my dream last night. He was driving and rolled up to me in a beat up k-car with no tires, only rims. I guessed at the time that going sans-rubber was part of his austerity thing, but it was hard to tell because he was totally silent throughout the entire dream.

Our adventure last left off in Udaipur, famous for having a few scenes in the 007 movie Octopussy. The place has a rather European feel to it with it’s more upscale shops, winding narrow roads, rooftop restaurants and the palace on the water lit up with hundreds of golden lights at night. We’ve held back on buying things thus far and decided that we’d break the seal and spend a few rupees on some nice clothes and some art. There are many artisans here and we were impressed with the prints and paintings we saw around town. I honed the craft of bartering in one shop – On the second day of checking out some work by an artist, I made an offer of 1000 Rs for three small pieces. He punched a few numbers in the calculator and showed it to me, “1600″ he said. I waited patiently and said nothing. & ; ; ;nbs p;Five minutes went by before he said, okay, let me call my boss and ask him. After a few minutes on the phone, he turned to me and said “1500, best price”. Again, I waitedandsaid nothing and after a few minutes more he told me to wait, the boss would come down. I again made my offer of 1000 Rs to the boss and he said “1200 Rs, final offer”. I could tell he&am p;n bsp;had other things on his mind and was anxious to get on with his day. So I waited in silence for a few more minutes – “Okay, 1000 Rs…but don’t tell anyone!”

We also contemplated the utility of a cell phone and inquired about prices. It’s only $30 CDN for a basic phone, $5 lifetime startup fee, and 2-3 cents a minute to call anywhere in the country. It was easy to see why so many people, even most of the rickshaw drivers, had phones. Many people have two phones. Five years ago cell phones were unheard of, but their emergence has, along with the modernization of the highway system, brought old and new India into greater proximity wit h ea ch other.

Perhaps we were a bit anxious to leave Rajistan and should have stayed longer, but we wanted to head south towards palm trees and sandy beaches. We left Udaipur on a sleeper bus (regular buses with a low ceiling and sleeper beds above!) during the day and made our way to Ahemdabad in Gujarat. We had never inititally planned to go here as nothing we’d heard or read about particularly made this place stand out, but what a surprise it was. Ahemdabad is a dynamic, cosmopolitan, clean and despite some crazy traffic, a relaxed place to walk about. We spent almost a week here and it was nice to be treated as visitors, rather than as tour ists with money.

We checked out a few mosques dating back from the 14th and 15th century, the ashram Gandhi lived at along the river, a textile musuem, 007 Quantum of Solace in Hindi, some fabric markets and lots of walking. One thing in particular worth noting. We stayed across the street from the ‘New Lucky Restaurant’. This is the place to be on a Saturday night – with full on 45 Rs Thalis and metre long dosas, you can’t go wrong. The highlight of the restaurant is that it’s built directly on top of a mausoleum. Cement-encassed coffins dating back centuries are lined throughout the dining area. The roof and seating accomo date a large tree growing through the middle of the place. The photos we have are pretty whack.

From Ahmedabad, we took a night train to Mumbai (Bombay). By 2025 analysts predict this city will be the largest in the world with something like 26 million people. We erred on the side of sanity and planned to be in the city for only two days. We did extensive walking through South Mumbai and, despite the pollution, I could see myself spending more time living here. The architecture, the diversity, and the food were all yummy. Not much to be said for the small neck of the woods we stayed in except for the Sasoon Docks fish market. We followed the strong smell of fish out t o a large covered pier where hundreds of woman in colourful saris sat crouched in circles shucking shrimp. We were impressed at how these woman could keep their clothing so impeccably clean while the nature of the work they were engaged in was so ‘gutsy’.

Just as soon as we arrived, we were off again to our current digs along the beach in Vagator, Goa. We feel like we’ve arrived here five years too late. Scores of beachside restaurants and guest houses tell of rowdier days when ravers from all over the world would come and get funky on the beach. The drugs and the crime got a little out of control and the scene, in many parts of Goa, were effectively shut down. Our guesthouse o wner, Ben, told us yesterday about the community’s brand of local justice that started around that time. Many of the police could not be trusted to maintain the peace (you could and still can pay them off to let you go), so the community took things into their own hands. When someone was caught robbing tourists members of the community would band together and make him ‘half dead’. When someone did something more seriou s, like steal a rented vehicle or attack someone at night, the community would make them ‘nearly dead’. Although Ithinknon-violent means totally rock, I really am fascinated by this brand of vigilante justice – not so much for how the punishment takes place, but for how these people really see justice and policing as a community responsibility.

Our good friend Jake will be joining us in this neck of the woods for New Years, so we will spend some time scouting the beaches of Goa before we take off further south to Karnataka and Kerala next week. Our trip is half completed and there’s still many things on the list we hope to see and do before we have to walk out of that airport and into the February air in Buffalo.

sending waves of sandy love.

sp

Slow that roll (Monday, November 3rd)

hey kids.

It’s hot and dry here in Rajistan – your nose has a slight burning sensation, clothes dry on the line in hours, and you just can’t but help to add to the plastic problem by buying water in plastic bottles you’re not entirely sure are just refilled and recapped with tap water.  Neon turbans light up the arid landscape, curly moustaches reflect off indigo buildings.  Camels pull heavyset tourists and luggage on carts.

Our plans in Dharmsala, from where I last wrote, took a nice twist when we realized that we couldn’t book a train to Darjeeling.  Everything for weeks in advance was booked and waitlisted and so we decided to start the long trek south.  Going south meant a trip back through Delhi, which  was quite exciting – we discovered the king of all sweet shops in Paharganj, made a trip to the Ba’hai Lotus Temple, and were in the clear 24 hours after eating a sketchy meal.

My very basic Hindi skills have started paying off as most people are delighted with a very casual and gangsterized, ‘kaise hain ji’? (how are you?).  ‘Teek hai’ to all my bhais and bahans out there.  We watched a few minutes of ‘Home Improvement’ and thought if Tim Allen and his ‘ho-ho-ho’ could make the transition into Hindi, I should at least be making an effort.

From Delhi, I called my friend Abhi, a young teacher we met at the mindfulness retreat.  He invited us to stay with him and his family in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi developing with an intense fervour, pumped in by Indians excited to join the 21st century with style. The car trip to Abhi and Chaundaree’s house was sided by ambitious building projects – all you could see were concrete condos, elaborate business parks, and shopping malls.  This is where Delhi’s elite come to work, shop and play but not without notice of the dirt poor labourers who live temporarily in makeshift shanty huts outside the concrete and glass monuments to India’s new economy.

I felt strange about walking through a department store in this area -  the aisles, the shelving, the products all arranged just so, just like it is back home.  As excited as the Indians around me seemed to be about the convenience and cleanliness, I could feel the voracious and insatiable appetite for consumption pressing hard on the surface.  Human needs, human desires are not fundamentally any different than they are back home.  I was most impressed with Snoop Dogg playing softly over the PA, the profane value of gin and juice lost on everyone except for me.

We arrived by taxi at Pathw ays (www.pathways.ac.in), a “World School”, offering Int’l Bach. degrees from primary to 12 with a very inquiry-inspired curriculum.  The place is immaculate – from the architecture, olympic-sized swimming pool, teacher residences, classroom courtyards and learning facilities, this is the ultimate in ideal learning conditions.  Most students are Indian (70%) with the rest being children of parents from Europe, NA and Australia.  Yes, it’s apparent that most of these children come from the most privileged of backgrounds – Abhi and his wife, both primary teachers here, are concerned about the impact this has on a student’s development, but feel that there are endless opportunities, even for these kids, to assist in their development as whole persons.& nbsp; Many of these kids go on to big positions in society.

Because we arrived shortly before Diwali (Hindu new year) most of the students had left for the week.  Abhi’s mother  flew in from Calcutta on a last minute flight to join us for a few days.  Protesting the violent antics of Raj Thackery, a political leader from Mumbai, a number of trains in the state of Bihar were firebombed, cancelling most of the trains travelling through the state.  This somewhat validated my belief that you need to let India tell you what to do rather than trying to overimpose your will – even if we somehow forced a ticket to Darjeeling, we would have been stranded in Bihar.

During our four days with Abhi Dasgupta, his mother Manju , his wife Chaundaree and their daughter Mia, we were given a crash course in Bengali hospitality.  We were quickly informed that most Bengalis spend excessive amounts of time figuring out and preparing food.  As soon as one meal is finished, everyone is already arguing about what and how the next meal will arrive.  Our firm commitment to not eat meat in India was quickly obliterated as we were fed massive dishes of fish curry, mutton, and chicken.  Combined with a special kind of rice, all our meals were eaten with our right hands.  The trick, we learned, is to mash everything up in your palms into small boluses that you can just drop into your mouth.  The centre of attention was Mia, a independent-minded 1.5 year old with an endless smile.  My fondest memories will be of her jumping on the bed as we s at with Abhi, Manju and Chaundaree in their evening buddhist chanting.  We danced for each other, I taught some qigong to Abhi and his mother, and we talked away late into the evenings.  Remind me to cook some aloo gobi for any of you when we return…I have a killer recipe.

From Delhi we took a night train to Jodhpur in Rajasthan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodhpur).  At the Delhi station, a man who was standing next to us for almost half and hour told me how anxious he was to speak to me after I had approached him with a question.  Like so many India ns (mostly men) I have talked in depth with, they somehow seemed deeply honoured to learn about what life is lik e back in Canada.  Social health care is an unimaginable utopia here.  The night train, our third, was by far the best so far.  We both slept reasonably well and awoke on the edges of the Thar desert to wide blue skies and houses painted indigo (good for reflecting light and keeping the bugs away!).

Laura and I checked ourselves into a small, family run guesthouse that also serves as the homebase for an NGO helping single Dalit mothers (from the ‘untouchable’ caste) gain employment and education.  It was difficult to leave the guesthouse.  Jodhpur is now synonomous with a new phrase I picked up from Sam Mcree from Tennessee: “Slow that roll, brother”.  We met Sam and his friend Nadia and a friendship was borne quicker than a taxiwallah moving in on our tourist stepping off a bus.  We sat around the guesthouse dinner table for ho urs on end leaving few questions unturned.  The highlight of Jodhpur was Diwali.  There is a long story about the Festival of LIghts as it is called (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali), but for all intents and purposes, it is a night of sweets and fireworks.  One of the guests at the guesthouse purchased an excessive amount of fireworks and we all joined him in the street, setting off dangerous, toxic and mostly annoying explosives into the night sky.  I felt somewhat reassured that at least a few of the fireworks packages stated that no child labour was used to make them.<
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Feeling unsure about where to go next, Laura and I decided to join Sam and Nadia on their trip to Pushkar, the site of the infamous camel fair and one of the holiest places in India.  This small town swells 6-fold for the camel fair, an annual event bringing camel traders, hindu pilgrims, artisans and tourists together for about ten days or so.  We arrived during the week of trading just before the fair and were all quite put off by how pushy and aggressive the vendors and children were.  It seemed more like entertainment than a way of living for people to watch the tourists squirm as they artfully toyed with people’s emotions.  This is what I have co me to appreciate most about some of the touts and vendors here.  Their tactics brashly exploit any uncertainty or emotional vulnerability and confidently offer the answer to any doubts.  As we walked towards the ghats in Pushkar, someone handed us rose petals at one corner, and at the next corner, men from all directions starte d to yellatus-according to them, it would be disrespectful not to go down to the ghats to put the petals in the water.  Of course, as soon as you walk down to the ghats, there are still others who demand that because of what they have shown you, that you must make a donation.  Oh and the donation must be at least 100Rs!  I think it would be cool to design an entire course that examines and rehearses how to respond to these kinds of situations.

The dust, camel hair, disgusting hotel room, and generally uninsipired feeling for the place, we parted ways with Sam and Nadia.  As they headed north, we continued south to Udaipur, our present location.  Loading pictures is a pain in the ass, so we’ve decided that a ma ssive slide show with food, followed by dancing, is in order upon our return.  You’ll just have to use your imagination unti l then.

slowing my roll…

sp

Mcllo, Mcllo (Tuesday, October 14th)

I had one of those dreams last night that seemed to be a reiteration of one that I had a few years ago.  I found myself in an auditorium filled with people.  Andrea Blackler, a good friend of mine, and a few other familiar, but unnamable faces, sat with me.  At the front of the room was some sort of important person.  I could not see his or her face, but I recall the first time I was in the presence of a person it was a male, but now it could be female…I was not sure.  Everyone was given a plastic cup of pure water to drink.  Close to 520 PM, two assistants sitting next to the person at the front started to sing and at 520, the room was filled with an intense energy field that started to pull the water out of our bodies and through our clothes, into the air as a vapour.  My body felt like it was in one of those spinning vortex rid es you find at travelling amusement park s.  The G-force pulling on my body produced a very euphoric yet equanimous andstablestateofmindandlasted for what might have been 30 seconds.  It subsided and everyone quietly got up from their seats and left the room.

We’re still in McLeod Ganj and will be staying here until the end of the week.  We thought about a possible Annapurna circuit trek in Nepal, but have ruled out the option in favour of seeing more of what’s around us – some next step decisions still need to be made.  Delhi is still 34 degrees celsius so we might hold out here in the mountains before we charge south. Within the relative calm and groundedness of staying put for over two weeks here in this bustling village in the hills, lots of interesting things have happened.

We arrived a day before the Dalai Lama’s last public talk.  Security at this temple was high and rigorous, by Indian standards, and I found a seat next to some monks on the upper level of the monastery just outside where the HH (His Holiness) himself does his thing.  Fortunately the woman next to me was an english speaker because she, like everyone else who couldn’t understand Tibetan, had a radio that picked up the instant translation of his talk.  The Dalai Lama has a healthy sense of humour and the crowd was often laughing to jokes that I only caught onto minutes after they were actually made.  He was speaking about developing ‘calm, abiding mind’ and wisdom in meditation.  He made some good points about how to calm the mind, yet still keep it active enough to study various phenomena of mind.  He said that if you could do these things well, sitting for 3-4 hours straight would be easy-squ e e zy.  Ev eryone else around me seemed to agree.

McLeod Ganj, which sits just above Dharamshala, is home base for the Tibetan government in exile.  The communist Chinese government’s brutal genocide of the Tibetan people forced many Tibetans to walk here by foot over the Himalayas in 1959, where the Indian government has allowed the Tibetan government in exile here to govern it’s own people here.  From what I have seen, thousands of people continue to make the trek every year, both to Dharamshala and to other places in India.  Some don’t make it and many lose toes and feet because of frostbite.

Buddhism is very central to Tibetan culture.   Throughout the town are many monks and nuns in red and yellow r obes.  Many have cellphones, sip coffee at cafes, and otherwise completely demolish the stereotype of what a monk or nun is supposed to be.  Their role in society seems both highly respected yet so very normal.  Lay Tibetans, particularly the older ones , remind me so much of the aboriginal crew back home.  Someone said to me that Tibetans take a long time to age on the outside because most of their wisdom is developing on the inside.  The hair, the facial features, etc. of the Tibetan profile somehow seems to echo this in a way in see in native peoples from around the world.

You can often see Tibetans walking about town with prayer beads and mumbling ‘Om Mani Padme Hum’.  Apparently all of the Buddha’s teachings about suffering and liberation from suffering are contained in these six syllabales, which from what I’ve been able to learn, have no English translation.  Colourful prayer flags, hot steamed momos, thukpa soup, and well-fed dogs (a rarity in India, t he Buddhist compassion for all beings being their saving grace) line the streets with smatterings of tourists from all over the world (but mostly Israel).

After making a number of short hikes in all directions and eating at all the restaurants we started to find ourselves wanting for things to do.  We decided to take a stab at learning Hindi and for 2000 Rs ($50), we arranged for 10 private classes with Surinder.  We’re on Day 6 or 7 at the moment and we’re slowly putting the basics together.

Mujhko ek chay bina chini ke dijie = Give me one tea without suga r please!

This is important to know because the chai here comes with WAY to much sugar.  I’m finding that even though English will more than do, people are appreciative of the effort to learn.  It’s been sometime since I’ve studied a language and I’m enjoying how confusing a completely new symbol and grammar rule set is.

Sometime last week I happened to bump into a young monk and his friend on the street.  Tsampa and Sonam, both refugees from Tibet, have been here two years and are working on their English.  They said it was imperative for them to learn it in order to find jobs (well, not for the monk, but he wants to teach young Tibetans).  I agreed to ‘tutor’ them for an hour and half every morning and it’s been quite hilarious.  Tsampa has, for some reason, been given the name ‘Horny Monk’.  We work through an old beat up Intermediate Grammar book over chai, crack jokes with each other, and ponder our life paths in the world.  On request of my dad, I asked Tsampa to pray for world happiness and he said, in his funny Tibetan accent: “Hey man, that’s my business, I do it all day, of course I can”.  There is a small make shift movie theatre here in town (it has inspired me to make one when I return) and Laura and I took them to see ‘Wall-E’ the other night and they were like giddy little kids, munching away at popcorn – given their situation, this kind of night nearly never happens for them.

I will be sad to leave them both, but encouraged Tsampa to think about travelling…possibly making a trip in Canada.  He’s interested in learning English and Chinese so that he can return to Tibet one day and be a translator and English teacher for young Tibetans.  If anyone knows of resources, programs, services, etc. for Tibetans to come and do this in Canada, let me know and I will pass the info along to him.

Things were looking perfectly smooth until I came down with strep throat a few days ago (I wasn’t actually sure if it was strep, but the condition of my throat and the absence of other symptoms over a few days somewhat assured me).  The great, or perhaps not so great, thing about India is that you can get many drugs at the chemist without a prescription.  Not so great because the level of professionalism can be quite dismal.  Take the chemist in McLeod Ganj for instance.  I walked up to the roadside shop where I waited a good five minutes staring at the unattended wall of drugs.  After asking the next door shopkeeper where the chemist was, he took me into the back of the kitchen of a nearby restaurant where he was oogling over something on a cellphone with a few friends.   We walked back to the chemist shop and he asked me what I needed medication for.  “Easy, this is what you need”, he said, as he through down a few packets of Amoxycillin.  I’m fatally allergic to drugs in the penicillin family so I assured him quite strongly that this wasn’t what I wanted.  I knew I needed Azithromycin and so began my self-medicating regime.  The throat has cleared up and I’m feeling tonnes better.

Just as this was happening, Laura came down with a rough case of traveller’s diarrhea with healthy side shot of vomitting.  The bugs here do a real number on your system.  And so began Laura’s journey into the land of Cipro – she is recovering well, but needs a few more days before she’s back to being Superwoman again.

I’m feeling calmer, less anxious, and more relaxed than some of my best days at home.  There’s a lot we can do on an individual level to cultivate inner peace, but I’m really starting to see how certain environments have a big impact on your state of being.  I guess it helps that I have no real daily responsibilities other than to feed myself.

Well my friends, as my friend Jake Wadland wisely advised me today (and I think others would benefit from his advice), “go easy on the bhang baby, keep your head up, eyes open, and don’t shake or eat with your poo hand”. (NB: “Bhang”, Hindi for the ganja you can find in yogourt drinks, is ubiquitous.  Also because there is not much in the way of toilet paper here, people wipe with the left hand and wash it using this little funny tap on the wall – hence the no shaking or eating with the poo hand).

big love

sp