Dreaming of a what Christmas? All of December, I kept being confused by friends’ posts on Facebooks showing off their Xmas trees and talking about holiday plans, and inside I kept reacting with “already?!” There have been zero cues here for anything that sets off any kind of holiday spirit for me. For starters, it’s been pleasant and warm here, around 25-28 C most days, lows around 17-19 at night. Nobody’s decorating for anything – at least not for anything I understand: for the last week I’ve noticed most houses have decorated their front entrances not only with the usual…
Category:
Travel
Tiruvannamalai attracts all types, from serious Indian pilgrims who will go for days without sleep to walk around a holy mountain, to ecstatic Western hippies with their chakras vibrating perhaps a little too high on the Richter scale. It’s a stunning array of characters, many of whom could inspire entire whole new definitions in the DSM. I think this week we may have met a reincarnation of Rasputin. Matthew had been invited to some guy’s satsang (spiritual gathering) by a French woman he’d chatted with, and she hadn’t said much more than “he helps you get rid of your beliefs about…
I don’t have a lot of time this week for a nice fat blog post, as these project deadlines are getting down to the wire and I’m trying to stay off the computer when I’m not working. But I’ve got a few odds and ends I’ve been meaning to share. The image above is a fairly typical Indian lightswitch panel, and it is to me one of the deep and meaningful mysteries of the East. There may be a few of these in each room. Generally, maybe half the switches on any given panel will appear to work as you…
Before I get you caught up on India, a side note: you’ve probably heard by now that Mount Agung in Bali finally erupted over a week ago, after two months of rumblings and tremors and steam that caused the evacuation of many locals, and a lot of travel concern. I almost didn’t go to Bali in October because of the volcano threat, but it turned out to be fine. And, at this point, it is actually still pretty safe there for tourists. Flights were cancelled for a few days, which would have been a major inconvenience and stress, but the…
The first few days of living outside the Sri Ramanasramam at our new apartment felt a bit like I’d been pushed out of the nest or kicked out of heaven and rudely thrown back into regular life despite my wishes. Immediately on reconnecting to my clients I learned that two of my projects had gone into a bit of a crisis mode that’ll keep me working heavily at the computer through most of December, cutting back drastically on my available time for meditation, self-inquiry, blogging, and exploring Tiruvannamalai. And nice and new as our apartment is, a new construction site…