merry christmas and happy new year!

Greetings,

I hope you all had wonderful holidays. Full of warmth and love and caring and laughter, and GOOD FOOD!!

Christmas is not celebrated in India, but because we are a bunch of Westerners here, we celebrated a little on Christmas Eve. It was the strangest Christmas ever.

We had curry for Christmas dinner and then we sort of had a campfire chant and singalong mixture of devotional Hindu chants and German Christmas carols (of all things) replete with tablas (the beautiful Indian drums that are my favourite) and a harmonium. But we had a christmas tree and chocolate, so it was all done well in my books.

We celebrated my birthday in similar fashion but with even more fanfare (and fewer German Christmas Carols).

Fanfare is an old term, it means HOOPLA! In my mind fanfare always involves musical instruments and ceremonies, but i don't know what the offical defination would be.

Birthdays are celebrated around here beautifully with a real "out with the old, in with the new" theme. I don't know how much of this was ashram custom or Indian custom or a blend but anyhow, it was all a welcom relief from the cold austerity of day to day life at the ashram in December. They designed a flower, coloured sand and candle mandala design on the dining room floor and the birthday girl lights the first and last (of the 35!) candles. All the other guests light the ones in between. The significance being out with the old, in with the new, and letting your inner light shine.

and then each guest is given a handful (an armful in some people's cases) of flowers, fresh flowers gathered from the garden, and flower petals: roses, marigolds, and a couple others, which they each take turns pouring on my head, as flowers of blessings and well wishes for myself as well as for them, all the while we are all singing. Lots of singing. It was beautiful and i can't tell you i didn't cry, more than once.

more singing, more tablas. very special.

well, that's it for now.

hope the new year is finding you all refreshed and relaxed. and if not? ask yourself: why

december 7th, an early birthday present

You understand India so much more when you see her elephants.

This morning a miracle happened.

A wild Indian elephant, fully tusked, passed saunteringly through the forest in our backyard!

What a creature.

I tripped on a tree root in my thongs running out to see him and flew to the ground. I ripped the skin off my left big toe. A happy reminder of this blessed day. He was beautiful. I've never seen any creature as big and powerful in the wild in my life. There is something about an animal wild that is pure magic. The same animal in captivity does not carry the same energy, the same....sheer wildness and beauty.

He was pursued by running hollering excited schoolboys but he hadn't a care in the world. They were like pesky flies to him, he was moving so slowly, yet they were running. I couldn't get over how incredibly slow he seemed to move his massive body forward. Each columnular leg lifting so leisurely to be placed in the next step, like in slow motion. Even when he stopped to turn around and look at them to see if they were still on him, he turned around so slowly. I guess when you're as big as an elephant, your movements look relatively slow, because you are so huge.

Tears were streaming down my face for the wonder of it all. It was early morning, around 6:30, and the air was all misty and magical like. He then stepped into the river and crossed through the shallow water to the other side as we and about 40 other people watched on in true wonder and amazement.

He stopped once on his way across to suck water up in his long trunk and spray it off to the side almost to show off to us "hey, ya, i'm an elephant, see, what the big deal?".. and tail a swaying, his rear end disappeared into the mist on the other side of the river.

wow.

I guess when you're that big, you don't need to run, you are bigger and stronger than ANYTHING! and yet elephants are supposed to be very sensitive and intelligent creatures, and aren't violent unless threatened or unhappy (i guess that's like any animal almost).

i was awestruck!

It has been 7 or 8 years, they tell me, since an elephant has passed through here in the forest between the river and the ashram. They used to come alot, in the old days, through the village, until civilization and noise and development became too much and they stopped coming.

So it was quite an event that it happened, since it has been so long since the last time.

and it may be the last time for a very long time.

Gosh they're beautiful.

i'm working on getting a picture of it from my friend Sylvie who had the presence of mind to run back for her camera. I was too dumbfounded and frozen in place to move. He should be showing up soon here any day, Mr. Elephant.

indian ATM moon launchers

hello!

i'm back, finally.

i guess we have a lot of catching up to do. don't worry. i haven't forgotten about you. I did some writing in my journals over the past month that i will share with you.

Northern India is marvelously quiet and cool in the winter.

I have been at Santosh Puri Ashram since November 9th. I took a clinical yoga and ayurveda course for the first 20 days, then some other studies of chakras and the ancient text the Bhagavad Gita and 10 days cooking course of Indian and ayurvedic cooking, which was marvelous. I also spent the month of December observing silence. So everyone had to put up with me not talking. What am i saying, they probably enjoyed it. ha ha

I learned many many things from this ancient spiritual exercise.

The ashram is situated on the river Ganga, halfway between Rishikesh and the holy city of Haridwar. The village is a place lost in time where a foreigner still draws a crowd just by the simple act of stopping to buy a toque. At times, this is magical, that the place is so untouched by tourism, by mass consumerism, by worldly concerns. At other times it is maddening, if you are looking for something or just would like to have a simple..... what am i saying, there is nothing "simple" here. Nothing that i take for granted at home is simple here. It is like a different planet altogether. When I go out for a walk, there is nothing to buy. The biggest indulgences i can find in the village are a bag of stale chips or a papaya or Indian sweets made from boiled milk which I acquired a taste for, out of necessity. The rest is all eggplants and zucchinis, lentils and sugar.

I attempted to take money out of the one bank machine in town. The fact that the screen was DUCT TAPED should have been my first clue of what would happen next. One of my worst fears travelling overseas is that some Indian ATM will suck up my bank card and it will be gone forever and ever, along with every penny in my name, leaving me to selling fresh roasted papadams on the roadside for my living.

Anyhow, on with the tail....

The ATM took my card and its sweet time counting out the equivalent of $500 CAD in rupees.. The screen said (yes, the duct taped one) "please take your cash" ok, easy enough, but i must have stood there 4 or 5 minutes while the machine clunked and croaked and made sounds like it was readying itself for a moon launch. All the time i'm sweating about my card being deep in the belly of the beast. Finally all sounds stopped and it regretted to inform me that my request had been declined, like an RSVP to a summer garden party. I deduced that this was probably due to the fact that the amount that i had requested was more than what the average Indian spends in 6 months (according to the India Times the average Indian lives on about one dollar a day!)

I doubted whether the machine was even stocked with that much currency as no tourists frequent this bank, only local villagers, and all the time spent clunking was probably it trying to count and extract non-existent bills. No harm, no foul, i was just glad that it was so gracious as to spit my card back at me at the end. phew!

more stories to come