People whose paths I've crossed so far...

I was uploading some photos tonite, and, along with feeling nostalgic about the people I've already met and said goodbye to, thought it might be nice for you all to see the people who I've been spending time with and talking about.  So, here are some of the main characters who I have enjoyed meeting and who have become friends over the course of the last 6 months.  (As you can see from my descriptions, one of the things I am reveling in in meeting all these people is their diverse backgrounds and movements from their places of origin to current place of being.)

(By the way, that was written last nite when I first did this post.  Silly me, I tried to add one picture, and it messed up the order of all the pictures.  It is now the next morning, and I've just reuploaded all photos for the 3rd time!  I'm no longer feeling nostalgic, just cranky.  If the order isn't quite as flowing and logical as I might have liked, blame it on blogspot!)

The blonde woman in the first photo is Marelle, South African, but living in Paris for the last 20 years.  I just found out last night that she was photographed back in the day by Helmut Newton in Picasso's daughter's apartment.  She also met Catharine Deneuve!  Oh la la.

You will recognize me and my tummy in the next photo, sitting alongside Chef Bob, the other loud-mouthed American here at Moulin de Chaves.  We are sitting outside the main building to the left, which was originally a mill.  The river is immediately to our right and good for swimming and canoeing.  Across from Chef Bob in pink is the only French member of the work team, Elisa, who lived in Thich Nhat Hahn's Plum Village Zen Community for the last 16 years or so.

Next is sassy 16-year old Jaya, Gail and Martin's daughter, and behind her you can see Chris, another Brit and one of these fascinating long-term dharma bum wanderers who I'm meeting, making me feel like the most conservative person here.  Lots of people I'm meeting at some point quit their jobs, packed up their belongings into storage and hit the road.  Many of them have been travelling for 5-20 years, doing odd gigs here and there.  None of them are trustafarians, or trust fund babies.  A foreshadowing?

The two people putting up the tarp are Ian and Caroline, both Scots and 2 of the 4 people who run and/or own Moulin de Chaves, the center where I am living currently.  We are at Caroline's house in the village, about 2 minutes bike ride away.

In the next photo in forefront is Gail, and behind her, her hubby and the amazing teacher here, Martin Aylward.  Gail and Martin are both Brits and are the 2 main drivers behind le Moulin.  The couple in the next photo are Michelle, my friend from San Fran,  and David, half French half British.  Michelle already left about a month ago.   The last photo of France shows Sybille, an Italian-Swedish woman who was a nun in Burma for a few years, and Omer, the Israeli guy. 

 

Then jump back to India: You'll see friends and staff of the school I was studying at, JK and Mohan.  My singing teacher Manju is sitting crosslegged on the ground across from me, as she did every day for our lessons.

The cute photo of 4 is Soumya, dance teacher at the school, friends Anu and Gautham who worked on staff and were the cutest couple around, and Dilna, who I studied Sanskrit from for 4 days, enough to learn the alphabet, but not to remember it.  Then, Kannon and his family at their house where I had dinner.  Every time I thanked Kannon for taking such incredibly good care of us, running every errand we needed and answering every question, bringing me dehydration salts and serving us all ladle after ladle of food, he would just smile and say, "It's my duty," a phrase I became very acquainted with in India, which almost always sounded sincere.   

The skinny guy on the ground was my talkative yoga teacher, simply called Swami, at his request, and then friend Sreeja.

Now jump back to London, where I visited my friend Sarah, the one with dreads, who I met in East Jerusalem last year.  Her Scottish lass Jude is alongside, and friend and filmmaker Jess is there with them in Mucky Pup, the pub where Jude and Sarah met.  

I took a little train trip an hour out of London to see an old friend and roommate from the year I lived in Taiwan, Yimei, and her baby boy Nicolas, whose Japanese was at my level!

The three lasses are again, Sarah and Jude and Merijn, another friend from my house rebuilding trip to Palestine last year.  Merijn came from Holland to visit for the weekend I was in London.  Neal, looking serious in the pub as he contemplates which episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer we should watch.

Then jump to Vienna, where you see one of two Franziskas, who are Alys' flatmates.  Like the two Jills, but with names that are harder to spell.   Then there's Alys, one of my oldest bestest friends from my Stanford days, who was the reason for my visit to Vienna.  Alys is now Dr. Alys Xavier George, by the way!  She's pictured here making me traditional Viennese taflspitz, a meaty delight the likes of which I have not seen in my past 4 months of near vegetarianism.  The two German frauhleins retaught me how to play the Italian cardgame, canasta, that I used to play with my grandparents when I was a kid.

My first night in Vienna, you'll see me with Marius, a friend since my first visit to see Alys years back. 

Lastly, my new friends in Paris, where it all began during that cold month of January.  

:)  Smoking is Shermine from Montreal, my old boyfriend Karim's sister, who I met again in Paris.  I had my first absinthe bar experience and my first froglegs-in-France experience with Shermine.  In the picture of two gents is Vincent on the left wearing glasses, and his ex-student, Tahir on the right.  Vincent is French but not from Paris, and Tahir is from Niger but with French citizenship, recently returned to Paris.   Next is lovely Saskia, Vincent's wife, who cooked many a fabulous meal for me and who is another emigree to Paris from Germany.   The photo of the view is the first photo I took since landing outside of the States, from the window of the apartment I rented from Vincent and Saskia.

There!  Thanks for sharing my nostalgia.  I would love to have pictures of you guys, too.  Some I have, many I don't.  Send me a picture you like of yourself so when I show new friends pictures of old friends from home, you'll be in there!  :)

Yes, I am still alive, and this is where I am!

Hi all, sorry to have dropped off the communication cliff, as it were.  It's hard to believe I could feel this busy at a Buddhist meditation center in the middle of nowheresville France, and harder still to believe that somehow I feel more stressed out cooking at said meditation center 30 hours a week than I did tooling around the shabbiest neighborhoods of the Bay Area in a death-trap of a Chevy van knocking on god knows whose door, hoping that whatever stranger answered would invite me in so I could talk all about whatever messed up crime they had witnessed and/or been involved in.  It took me a few years to burn out as a criminal defense investigator, but it seems to be only taking me a few months to burn out as a vegetarian hippie-dippie buddhist cook.  :)

I shouldn't say I'm burnt out, though. Just a bit exhausted from the non-stop work of feeding people.  I don't know how families have done it throughout time....non-stop fed and picked up after the hordes in their home.  Mainly, I just wish I had more time to tool around this insanely idyllic part of France and/or to sit on my butt and meditate.  Part of my reason for not posting is that much of what's happening to me here is internal.  And as is my wont, I often don't talk about what's most real.  How many of you have that same, I'll say "bad", habit?  I'm trying to get over that tendency, to not bring what's most important or vibrant or real to the table.  Living in this little community of relatively like-minded folks is helping.  A symptom of trying to change may be noted in the slight confessional tone this blog is beginning to take.   :)

Anyway, lots going on in the heart and head, while the butt sits on a cushion.   And so, I seem not to have blogged.   I have been sick in bed the last 4 days, however, and thought it about time to post a few photos and say a hello.  I miss you all.  I miss home, wherever that is.   Someday, can we all buy land somewhere, and if not live there together, at least have an annual reunion?  All the people in the world (that I know, anyway) who I care or have cared about, in one place?  A big dinner party, with live music of our making, that lasts for weeks.   Ahhh.

The teachers this week have strong ties with India, so I'm running now to do some group chanting before the evening ends.  Another Ahhhhh.  

Send me news, and I'll do the same, probably belatedly.

Sand and Surf with no regrets

I lied. The previous post was not to be my last from India. This one is. I left the school yesterday afternoon, and got to Varkala a few hours later. And yes, it is a complete tourist trap/bubble. But the sprawling ocean, constant wind, crackling palm and coconut trees and sound of waves are all here nonetheless. This is a gorgeous place. Below is a bit of what I wrote to myself when I first arrived. The rose has already lost its bloom a bit, which is another interesting part of travelling; seeing how quickly the polish of the new begins to rub off. That being said, I'm so happy to be here for a few days!

I'm sitting, completely alone, on the 2nd floor of Trattoria, an Italian/Tibetan/Indian/something restaurant, looking almost straight ahead at bunches of coconuts hiding near the top of their trees. The massive leaves, as they blow, block out varying portions of the sun as it sets straight ahead. Below and to the right is Black Beach, with, yes, black sand, and far beyond that the coean shore roundly zigzagging out further than I can see.

There's a small sandy bit of land before that, near enough that I can make out the shapes of two people swimming together, then leaving the water to lie on the sand, and again going out into the water. The way the two shapes intermittently blend together to make one tells me they are a couple. I think how, perhaps, the memory of this moment, for them, may come back unexpectedly, again and again throughout their lives. Will it resurface at times of trouble to sustain them through the lows that any couple faces?

My iced coffee, after 45 minutes, has heated itself up.

Again, I feel gratitude, accompanied by the nearly constant awareness of how fortunate I am in my life, now and before. I think of the oceans I have seen in my 36 years, and the fewer number of those that I have swum in; from Florida, to the French Meditteranean, to Japan and Taiwan's island coasts, San Francisco's icy waters, Los Angeles and San Diego, its bay crammed with navy ships, Tel Aviv, filled with Palestinian and Jewish families enjoying the beach together, side by side, and now India.

I've ordered baked tandoori fish and Tibetan dumplings (momos), to avail myself of the odd culinary combination of this restaurant, and I think of the handful of places I have eaten Tibetan momos before, each edging a bit nearer to Tibet. The first was in Berekeley, at the little restaurant I stopped at regularly when I crossed the Bay Bridge. I wonder if on this or another journey, I might eat them in their proper place, or at least a bit closer to it, in Dharamasala or Nepal.

I think, as I always do at times like this, of how I wish someone I loved, family, friend or future partner, were here with me now. And this makes me remember all the wonderful moments in the past, when I have been somewhere beautiful and still, that someone has been there with me.

Now, a few eagles enter in my line of vision, flying in circles, dropping and catching and dropping again tufts of material they have found for nest building.

And just now, the first other customers have come and sat down at the table next to mine, breaking this space of no words. I realize again, more and more, how I am coming to prefer quiet. As my yoga teacher kept telling me, it sounds like I should go up to the mountains. :)


And indeed, the newcomers were a few Indian guys who chased me off by talking to me too much. :) The perils of being a single female traveler.

Last nite, I went to one of the many cafes along "the strip"....to the left, the ocean, to the right, hotels, shops, cafes, restaurants. There was a semi-classical India music concert. After hearing a good amount of "straight" classical music at the school, it was great to hear these two guys play drum and violin, with effects on the violin.

It's mid afternoon now and the sun is much too brutal to be sitting under, so I'm relaxing inside until it cools down. I'm meeting a few folks I've met from London and Vancouver tonight for dinner, more relaxing tomorrow, and then off on Wednesday.

Wish you could all teleport here!

Finally leaving the school!

Hi all,
Sorry I have not shared any news or fun tidbits as of late. But now that my time in India is coming to a close, I thought I'd post an update. As many of you have likely intuited, or directly heard from me, I have not been thrilled out of my mind here in this small village in southern India, so, though I have shed a few tears, I am feeling happy to be moving on from Aranmula tomorrow.
I decided to take it easy, considering the upcoming flight back to Paris and then train down to the center of France in the next 2 weeks, so I won't be taking the 17-hour train up to the "ideal" beach. Instead, I'll be going to the "touristy" beach only 2 hours south from here, relaxing for a few days, if that's possible, and then will head 4 hours back up north to fly out from India at 5 AM Thursday morning.
I wore my sari for the first (and only) time yesterday, when a group of us went to a temple concert to hear the singing teacher from the school perform. I quickly learned that a westerner wearing a sari in these parts gets alot more attention than a westerner wearing the less formal pants/long shirt combo. Along with the general stares, I got a number of head nods and "OK" signs from women. :)
I hennaed my hand today (will it survive swimming in the ocean for a few days?), ran around to say goodbyes and do last minute shopping, etc. etc. I have many photos I would love to share from various dance and theatre performances I've seen during the last few weeks, but my computer memory is full, so we'll all have to wait!
I arrive back in Paris next Thursday, where I will spend 4 too-short nites back in the company of my newfound friends there, and then down to Moulin de Chaves near Bordeaux (www.moulindechaves.org) to start work on April 30. I hope I remember how to cook! Or for that matter, how to be an employee again (albeit, one who doesn't receive paychecks...). I am greatly looking forward to eating plenty of leafy greens. The food here has been delicious, healthy and amazing, but despite the fact that the fare has been vegetarian, there hasn't been much in the way of leafy goods.
I hope all are well, and I will write more once I get settled again.

Unabashed Plug for Birthday Wishes

Here it is, my 36th birthday. Usually, I would not write a blog or send an email announcing my birthday, but I am feeling very entitled at the moment, as I am bereft of family and friends, as well as the usual comforts which I would enjoy on my birthday.

I am not wearing my sari, as I have not been back to the tailor after an initial bad experience where the two shirts I had made did not even fit over my chest. Oops. But, to celebrate my birthday, I finally took the various pieces of material I have accumulated during the past few weeks, as well as ready-made clothes which have burst seams or otherwise need to be altered, to a different tailor this afternoon. I am wearing an unbelieveable amount of bright colors since in India, and loving doing so. As most of you know, I'm a monocolor, black or brown or grey kind of girl. But here, it seems almost everything I wear is in the family of reds, oranges, purples, and even PINK!

My day started out with a few neighbor kids giving me a few flowers they picked off the tree in front of the house. Someone gave me cookies at lunch, another woman bought a Carnatic music CD for me, and a third got me some incense. After lunch, one of the vocal teachers (he's amazing, and sadly, not my teacher) and one of the drum teachers did a little impromptu jamming with each other, so I went to listen and considered it a free birthday concert. When I went home after lunch to practice, someone had rolled something in newspaper and stuck it behind my doorhandle. I found an exquisite painting of peacocks on homemade dark brown paper inside. I still don't know who the mystery gifter is. Biking from home here to the office to email, I saw a type of butterfly I have never seen before...it looked like a monarch butterfly, but was blue rather than orange. Nature was also conspiring to help in my happiness today.

Now to dinner, where there will be a little birthday cake for me. Alot of the new folks who have arrived recently are professional musicians from Australia, so we'll probably get together after dinner and have a little jam session. So thanks to all these things, along with many sweet emails and a homemade card from my grandmother, I've had quite a lovely day today. I of course continue to welcome more birthday wishes! :)

Other than that, there is not too much news.....more frighteningly large insects, including a spider so massive in my bathroom that I could see its mandibles slowly moving back and forth in a most threatening manner. I did scream like a girl. There have been many beautiful sunsets, the audible sound of sweat landing drop by drop on the concrete ground during yoga practice, a few dance and theater performances at one of the many local temples, shopping excursions into nearby towns, and the inevitable planning to go.

Next week is my last week at the school. Singing classes continue to be excruciating, so in my final few days here, I'll actually stop singing class and switch to Sanskrit. This will give me just enough time to learn the alphabet. For Indian classical singing (if I actually keep it up), yoga practice, Buddhist studies, it can't hurt to have the building blocks of the language.

I was planning on going to the most celebrated red-cliff beach town in Kerala, Varkala, after I leave the school to chill out (literally) for a few days before flying back to France. But I got a report from a friend that it's horribly touristy, along with a suggestion for a better beach just a bit south of Goa, which is the most notoriously touristy beach area in India, for both foreigners and Indians alike. That town is in the northern neighboring town of Karnataka, and would require about 20 hours of train time to get to. Though my inclination is to take it easy, the thought of ending my time in India in a truly gorgeous and relatively quiet place, versus a gorgeous tourist trap, is pretty appealing.

Hope you all are very very well.

I tore my pants sending you these photos!

Not really, but it's a good title.   I did tear my pants, the cute new green ones I bought on my weekend trip...the ones that are comfortable and don't look ridiculous, unlike the "Ali Baba" pants that are part of the traditional dresswear of long top, baggy pants, that is worn uniformly by women in this part of Kerala.   Yes, that cool breeze I seemed to feel while riding my bike was in fact a cool breeze with inappropriate access to a certain part of my body that should have been covered.  But no more about that now.

I'm posting some photos from the weekend.  All the crowd photos are of the festival celebration I described in my last post.  The close up photos of vegetation are from our trip to a spice plantation on Sunday that I didn't write about.  Cardamom plants, pepper vines, coffee and cocoa trees, little tiny coconuts sprouting from the ground, only one per plant, nutmeg and rubber trees, allspice and curry leaves, gorgeous, fragrant and time consuming in their harvests and processing.  

Enjoy.

Creatures large and small, and piercing of flesh

I just returned from a weekend trip about 4 hours by car northeast of Aranmula, where I have been living. A gaggle of us girls went to another one of the tourist "must-see" spots in Kerala, the Periyar Animal Sanctuary, which is very close to the border of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. We left Friday night, arriving around 10 PM at our homestay in the nearest town outside the sanctuary, Kumily. We just returned to the school at 5 PM today, Sunday. It feels like at least 4 days have passed; so many things I have never seen before, more assorted stimuli to take in. I feel like a fish, floating around, gills fluttering, letting the water flush little invisible nutrients into my system.

Again, I want to write more than I will write, but this would take hours, so I'll just jot a few things. Saturday morning, wake at 5 AM, so early that (I think) many minutes pass before the alarm actually penetrates whatever part of the brain serves to wake one up. 5:30 AM, little jeep arrives to take us to the sanctuary. Pitch black, beautifully refreshing cool air, I get the front seat as the others rotated it the night before driving up the mountains. Since our package tour (I am ashamed to say, I did a package tour) was officially entitled the "Jungle Safari Tour", it felt particularly apropos that I was half dangling out the side of the jeep during our ride.

Driving the half hour to the sanctuary, the roads were remarkably empty, though already there were large groups of people walking. I kept thinking how it's too bad that I'm not an early riser, as pre-dawn hours are so still and subtle. I still remember taking the Greyhound bus in high school from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where I had visited my sister. Riding back home in the early morning, I was amazed that sunrise, unlike sunset, seems such a large gradual process without the sun's movement as a focal point. Instead, just a gradual shifting from pitch black to black to near black to the most awesome indigo indigo less indigo and then suddenly, it's daylight. Being in nature, especially in changing weather or light, truly makes you realize how lacking our verbal language is to describe the vastness and variety of life. During this indigo time of morning, we passed into tea plantation territory, and the blankets of terraced hills in that light couldn't have been more beautiful. And then, daylight. But it was a sweet daylight, as the fog and mist of the mountains didn't burn off until about 9 AM.

We entered the park after passing the tiniest most shack-like structures I have seen yet. When I asked if they were actually occupied homes, Riyas, the totally awesome guy who drove us for the day, said that refugees from the fighting in Sri Lanka actually lived there. Ah, Tamils in Sri Lanka were originally from Tamil Nadu in India. Now, generations later, some of them had returned to this government land on the border of their ancestral home to escape the fighting.

And from that dip into human suffering, the focus shifted to the more frivolous matter of scouting for elephants. Well, scouting from the car on the main road through the park. As we started the hunt, Riyas announced that his group had seen 16 elephants the day before. "Oh shit," I immediately thought to myself (no swearing aloud here, please). That much luck the day before would surely mean no luck for us. And, I was pretty much right, at least in terms of elephants. But Riyas was pretty damned dedicated, jumping out of the jeep suddenly a number of times to bolt up the hills to look for elephants. The first time he did this, I was following a long distance behind him, and suddenly he motioned for me to hurry. It was about 6 AM at this point, and despite the relative poetry of the morning, A) I never run, B) It was 6 AM, C) I hadn't had my coffee yet, D) Despite the daily yoga, I've had no cardio exercise in 4 months, and E) (so I don't sound pathetic) we were at a fairly high elevation. So, I reached Riyas just in time to see the back of a mommy elephant walking away, more quickly that I would have thought possible. That was my one elephant in the wild sighting. Though I wanted more, it was good enough for me. And that was to be the one and only elephant our group ran across.

(We now move into the abbreviated version of my narrative, as writing at this pace will indeed take several hours. Here we go...)

Next, monkeys! We stopped under a towering banyan tree, heard news, turned around, and rather far in the distance saw a group of monkeys in the mist jumping tree to tree. The next bang for our buck was flying squirrels. These critters were the largest squirrels I have ever seen, and actually had colored faces and yellow underbellies. And actually, the ones we were staring at for a stupidly long time, urging them under our breath to "Fly! Come on, Fly!" were actually giant squirrels, not flying squirrels. Oops. I think Riyas was laughing at us, wondering how long we would stand there waiting for one of them to jump and spread its wing-like arms.

At some point, Riyas decided to offer the jeep up to one of us 4 women, so I moved from the front left seat to the front right seat. YEAH! First time I have driven in almost 4 months, on tiny curvy, potholed roads with a massive cliff drop to the right. Such fun! I can't believe the driver or my companions let me take the wheel, but it was good fun, I killed and injured no one, and delivered us safely to a little hotel in the middle of the park where we had breakfast.

At this point we entered the jungle portion of our Jungle Safari. The only thing I have to share about this portion of the adventure is this question for you to ponder: how many leeches does it take to make a girl scream? Leeches. Hundreds and hundreds of leeches...little, squirmy, invasive, intrusive, upsetting, incredibly tenacious, disgusting leeches. We saw no wildlife in the jungle. Only leeches. No more need be said about this.

Ah, but there were cinnamon trees. And incense trees. There is such a thing as incense trees? I've been burning that stuff for about 20 years now, and never knew it was actually from tree sap.

We came out of the jungle intact, though mortified, from the leeches. We all retained our blood. And what did we happen upon, but a local Hindu festival. There was drumming, dancing, praying, and ritual self-mortification. We had actually timed our hike through the jungle to watch the festival, as our guide had intrigued us enough with his spotty description of facial piercing that we wanted to see what he was talking about. Most of the people were only attending the event, but there were about 10 people dancing to the music, and working themselves into a trancelike state. Our guide told us there were no drugs involved, but another guide says the dancers do take something for the pain of the piercing. The dancers (almost all women) take turns moving to the front of the crowd, where they are surrounded by a group of men who hold white clothes in a tent around their heads. The men take a small piece of rope, which is actually braided tightly and finely together so that the rope is basically like a tiny spear or a very large toothpick, and pierce it through the flesh of the dancer. This is not a quick process. I saw one woman pierced vertically through the forhead. Another women's tongue was pierced. A few other women's mouths were pierced through from cheek to cheek.

I was wincing throughout, but tried to keep my noisy reactions to myself, until I noticed that the oldest woman in the group was dancing around with strings coming from her back. I then saw that a man was holding all the strongs, pulling them taut, and when I could get close enough through the crowds, I could see that her back was pierced through with 4 large hooks. At this point I was hit with a wave of nausea. At the same time, I was hit with the need to take photos, and made my largest faux-pas yet. I crossed from where I was standing at the front of the crowd, past a line of praying men, and jumped onto an empty square of dirt. It turns out the empty square of dirt was part of the holy space, and I was standing right in the middle of it with my shows on. Dear god. But I got the photos.

I need to research what festival this was exactly...I believe it was very local, and from what I could understand, was a type of symbolic sacrifice of self in thanks for being cured of a prior illness. It was so insanely intense...many of the Indians there were also trying to get close to the dancers so that they could snap photos. For the first time in my life, I literally felt like I was inside a National Geographic special.

This is all for now. I bought a half bottle of Indian red wine (more on that curiousity later) at the fancy hotel restaurant last night, and have it sitting next to me with a bummed cigarette. I'm going to go relax for a bit with those two toxic treats before dinner.