While I made several wonderful new friends in Tiru, it’s the street dogs that I’m most driven to write about. (This is also because they don’t mind me airing their personal business on a public-facing blog.) Here’s where things stood with them at the point that I left town. Rorschach The day I posted that last story about the dogs also happened to be the night of the full full moon. This is when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over India come for girivalam and walk barefoot around the holy mountain Arunachala, a 14km trip, which is said…
Tag:
tiruvannamalai
It’s finally happened. After four months without leaving the orbit of Arunachala, I have broken free of the gravitational pull of the mountain and made it to Chennai as planned. I really did expect to do some short trips outside Tiruvannamalai at some point in my visit. It just never happened. For the first two months, I felt no desire to go anywhere else; then by the time I was starting to get restless, I either had weekend plans, too much work during the weekdays, or was having enough intermittent issues with my digestion that the idea of a long…
What is happening to time?! I’ve got barely two weeks left in India, and still feeling like there’s not enough time to do all the things (including doing nothing). And including blogging – I’ve still got three of the five senses left to write about, dammit. I’ve got a followup post in mind about Missy and Rorschach that would read like a soap opera. And yet another week goes by, vroom. It’s been a weird few weeks, actually. I had some kind of unpleasant digestive stuff going on – not food poisoning, but obviously something had thrown my system out…
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…
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…
- 1
- 2