voices from the people

photos i took of archem the lanky russian walking across the wooden bridge with a bundle of dried scythed rice balanced on his head.  black and white photos, showing the rice fields in the early morning sun which peeps above the hills.  it is rice cutting and morning stretches rolled into one - knelling, crouching, squatting, sitting almost on ankles with knees bent or standing up legs straight upper body bent over.  everyone tackles a different part of the field and the enthusiasm of each person to cut their part of the field mingles with the group enthusiasm of getting the whole field cut before breakfast and creates an exponential rice cutting enthusiasm.  i feel like tolstoy's landowner levin who dedicated his day to working with the peasants and there felt the happiness of working the land simply by hand and bringing in the harvest.
real lived experiences offered first by literature.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

i hear julia asking jaggernaut - a german who is spending some weeks here on retreat - how he finds the rice cutting.  i hear him smiling and responding: "it feels very good.  i think i must have lived in india in a past life".

i think it is appropriate that he said that

i ask deoraj to get a photo of me with a bundle of rice on my head and he smiles his characteristic smile of indulgent respect: "not like in your country, heh...all done by machines there?"  yes...well in europe it was done by hand maybe one hundred, two hundred years ago, but not since the industrial mechanisation.  deoraj has a farm with his family nearby, and has been coming to work for the hare krishna farm for 17 years.  i told him his name sounded symbolically rich to my ears; deo sounds like latin for god and raj sounds like hindi raja for king.
krishna is also there. 20 year old krishna with his handsome smile, a bundle of rice also on his head.  his family also grow rice on nearby land.  i will get a good photo of him one day.

when will i continue with the painting i have begun near the greenhouses? one day follows the next, tattva comes back from town with the jeep loaded with supplies and a surplus of new ideas.  "there is a beautiful spot for bathing down by the river...this house is where the group from swizerland will stay next month.  they come every year, they have their own schedule - they do yoga, meditation.  they don't join in our worship at the temple very much, but they are very respectful... we like having them.  so, if you wanted to sand down this rusty bed and give it a fresh lick of paint.  there are some chairs over here that need to be repaired...i'm gonna get some more nails the next time i go to Udupi.  coat all these wooden beams in polyurathine, and outside there is a lot of new plants i want to plant all around..."

the days are full and as the days have been passing so my desire to travel on to see other places has dissipated.  i have been here for over a month now, and when people ask me "how much longer will you stay here?" i have changed my response from "i don't know" to "probably at least another month".  speaking about other wwoofers, first there was danny - from the US - with whom it became a habit to seek out places to drink chai, who left after a couple of days. then there was jenny - from montreal - who stayed for a few more days, then two young dutch girls who were here over new year.  they were followed by two young german girls, who incidently had been invited to a game of frisbee by the dutch girls on a beach in gokarna, and heard about the farm in beautiful surroundings where you can stay and volunteer.  anyway, they didn't stay more than a few days either.  their smiles were youthful and indefagitable and they accepted everything: the days spent weeding among the palm trees in the sun, the cups of ginger and honey tea which i brought to them.  when asked what they thought about the place, they put their finger right on the mark, "there is a lack of communication between the people who live here and the wwoofers.  there is no community.  but it is a beautiful place.  tattva?  yes, tattva is an interesting guy.  but, i feel that tattva does not really want to listen to me"
then selma and bex arrived.  selma, a burst of confidence and warm smiles, from denmark and bex, from a caravan near leeds, who moved into one of the rooms in what has become the wwoofers house on the hill. she was at first horrified by the size of the the legs of the spider on her wall but she then displayed her excellent capacity to turn around agonising experiences through positive thinking:  she called the spider george, and talked to him every time she entered her room, "ah, so you haven't moved from your space on the wall today george?".  she also gave us a commentary on her new roommate's activities: "george hasn't moved from his space on the wall today".  we began to really feel settled, and after a few evenings changed from sitting on the porch around a candle to lighting a fire and making chai.  it was premidi who first suggested that we make our chai over the fire.  then he showed us how he makes his daily chapattis - mixing the flour and water and rolling it out and baking it on a hot dry flat pan.  for premidi there is no repast greater in simplicity of goodness and nourishment than chapattis lightly salted with ghee followed by spicy hot ginger and jaggery (boiled down sugar cane juice).

now bex and semla have moved on and sara from portugal has arrived.  all it took was one look into her open curious serene eyes for our eyes to linger there.  her voice floats lazily among the old carved wooden posts we are painting near the mudhut. a rich unhurried late-night voice even though it is early afternoon intoning and teaching me the song from brazil:

"eu acho que estou feliz e triste
tudo o que tenho cabe na minha mao
e eu te do   de coracao
e du te do   de coracao

eu nao preciso de nada
o mundo e minha casa
o ceu e minha camisa
estrelas vestam meus pes"

(i think i am happy and sad
all that i have fits in my hand
and i give it to you   from my heart
and i give it to you   from my heart

i require nothing
the world is my home
the sky is my shirt
stars adorn my feet)

...but what does it actually mean, "the sky is my shirt"?     ah, of course, it is poetry...

evenings round the fire is a very comfortable space. premidi comes almost every night now and we boil ginger and jaggery and play chess, which premidi mostly wins and which i mostly learn astounded by the cunningness and pitilessness of his dogged pursuit of my king, who, when he spies an opening, he checks without cease.  i am particularly impressed by his killer move of checking the king then immediately after gobbling up a neighbouring piece which i have left unprotected.

one night premidi expounds his dark vision of the witless age in which we are living, controlled by a group unprincipalled individuals whose goal is the dominion and servitude of the rest of the world:  "they are intelligent, they all have degrees, they all work in collusion, they are present in all the organisations which control and shape our society - education, the media, multinational corporations, banks, the CIA...they are so knowledgeable about how to subtly control human thought - so much research is done about how our minds work.  they will put chips in our hands soon to control our movements, but they will make it like it is the people who want it.  all this obsession with security...these terrorist attacks are all carefully planned...do you think those planes really went into the twin towers?  they were just added onto the video later.   they never put any man on the moon, it was all a hoax!  on the video you can see the flag flapping in the breeze...there is no breeze on the moon!  do you know they have opened a restaurant in canada they call it a 'breastaurant' where men go inside and get served by girls in skimpy dresses!  their goal is the debasement of society.  they want us to remain unaware of our true spiritual essence.  the centre of our Being is an eternal well of unchanging peace and stillness.  they want to mask this spiritual truth by making the people identify themselves only with their minds and their bodies, believing that the purpose of this life is soley to satisfy the desires of our bodies and minds.

when i listen to somebody else closely enough, when i make the effort to try and see the world the way they see the world, after a while it becomes unsettling, an experience of uprooting, or an uncomfortable stretching of my own previously stable self-contented vision of how things are, to include these new foreign ideas.

premidi reveals the path of detachment which he conducts through a hostile human world:  "you have to be in this world, but not of this world.  you have to neither like or dislike society - become detached from it.  it is the only way - otherwise you will be full of dislike.  instead, focus on your own interior well-being.  be well inside - only then can you give anything positive to anybody else.  you can't change anybody else. you can only give your own life as an example.  they must change themselves"

>> only voices from the people filtered through my own memory and understanding, remembering the things which struck me as interesting.

i am perched atop of the concrete water tank at the top of the hill.  i don't know why the ragged trees, rising from the forest, silhouetted against a pink evening sky attract my eyes so.  they arrest my gaze.  the darkness comes so quickly.  i let my foot fall and find the metal rung.  if i was distracted or if i grew sleepy and lost my full consciousness i could have missed that rung and let my whole body fall until it met the ground.  a prayer of gratitude.  i am cognisant of my consciousness which allows me to safely manoeuver my way through the trees.  a bird cries (shrilly) from some other part of the wood.  his cry would be shrill if it were close but it is far and so it sounds wild and distant and lonesome.  my heart feels the wild and the lonesome.
i feel, my heart feels...
"who am i?  you could say that i am called sunnli, that i am sitting in this cave, but what does this 'i' refer to?  is it my body? is it my mind? but it is possible for 'me' to observe my mind... are you complete?? why have you come to india? what is it you are looking for?  there is a deeper greater reality beyond the body and the mind - - - pure consciousness - - - i am that.   i am that.  undying, unborn, pure consciousness.  i am not bound by my body nor mind.   the material flux of living bodies is but a kaleidoscopic dance performed by the playful imagination of the Godhead.  your body will rise and fall but the spirit within you will always be.  "will always be" is not the right term for there is no past or future.   time only exists in the mind.  all you can really truthfully say is:  I AM.  i am everywhere at once.  i am present everywhere.  i am omnipresent.  i am, in fact, God.   God is me.   i am you.  we both have exactly the same inner nature.  we are pure spirit.  do you see that bag of coffee? if you were not here, would it still be here? nothing exists without me existing and nothing exists without you existing.  the existence of every part of the universe is contingent on the existence of every other part."

i ask krishna mai what is the meaning of the mantra they chant most meal times.  one person serves, and chants, while everyone sits, and repeats the chant.  i would like to know what it means.  it begins maha prashada govinde... sung in a sing-song mantra.  krishna mai unfolds her Views on Life, and i choose to sit and listen:  Krishna gives us everything, you know, the water the fruits the wind the wood.  it is like if i came to your garden and ate your fruit without saying anything, it is better to thank krishna for it, nah?  many people are thinking only about material things but they do not find real happiness there.  real happiness comes only from devoting your life to god.  thinking about god in all moments.  reading the vedic scriptures will tell you how you should live your life - they provide all information you need. krishna has given us rules for life - like if you drive a car on the road, you have to obey the government road rules, nah? - its like that with life, simple rules, rules for a good life - no smoking, no drinking, no illicit mingling with the opposite sex, and no eating onion and garlic (i had enquired about that particular rule)...if you sin, if you do bad to anybody, it will all come back to you in the next life, all your sins will be added up and given back to you.  you may be born as a dog and have to beg for your food, everyone tell you to go away.  do you want to be born again as a dog?  better to take the chance of this human life to recognise krishna and go back live with him after your death.  better nah?   better than spending all your life travelling around.  what do you see when you travel?  every place is the same...after a while its boring

i feel young again. i am full of the ravishing voluptuous Mystery of Life.  i am bobbing on a vast ocean of rolling swell.  who knows what is beyond the horizon?  who can give a satisfactory response to the questions: where did we come from and where are we going? 

globular tablets

then it was Christmas, for which i travelled to the town in tamil nadu called thiruvannamalai.  my plan was to participate in the giruvalam - the 14km circumambulation of the holy hill Arunachala, performed by thousands of pilgrims every full moon as an act of devotion to Shiva.  somebody i met at sadhana was there for the last full moon and told me that every circumambulator found their own pace and the feeling was that of a molecule of water moving glibly among a river of humans.  my other plan was to meet up with friend Sam and also a couchsurfer in bangalore, who i first contacted before i left scotland two months ago, and who i had been planning to meet for some time.  my plan to walk under the moon did not come to pass because my estimation of the date of the full moon was three nights too early.  my plans to rendez-vous did not bear fruition either.  instead i spent the day walking about town from time to time fruitlessly using the public one rupee phone boxes and otherwise observing

observing the bus-strewn views to the temple

observing these pigs ambulating around the woods 

i also took an interest in the flowing geometric shapes chalked onto the pavements outside everybody's front door in the little lanes.  i was sketching one of these rather ineptly into my notebook when a young girl saw me and called her mother to come and do a better sketch for me.  i asked her why those patterns were chalked onto the pavement like that.  i had the feeling that the purpose was devotional; i had seen that the patterns were more elaborate and decorated with flowers on religious festivals.  after humming for a while, she responded simply, "it is our culture"

i spent some time online researching Arunachala and read this 14th century description of the Shiva's holy hill, quoted in a wikipedia article: "Arunachala is truly the holy place. Of all holy places it is the most sacred! Know that it is the heart of the world. It is truly Siva himself! It is his heart-abode, a secret kshetra. In that place the Lord ever abides the hill of light named Arunachala."

and also:  "Words spoken there are holy scripture, and to fall asleep there is to be absorbed in samadhi, beyond the mind's delusion. Could there be any other place which is its equal?" 

unequalled throwing oneself passionately into being!   - being descriptive - even before reading that description i knew Arunachala was a special place because i had clambored up those rocks the first night and slept nestled among the rocks far above the sound belching town traffic, the rocks that radiate Stillness.   and the Wind that was not still but moving with freshness and eagerness and urgency.   and Jeff Tweedy's song echoing ringing true in my mind: "in a sleeping bag underneath the stars he would lie awake and count them.  and the gray fountain spray of the great milky way would never let him       die alone"

and in the morning the monkeys surrounded me with agility and i knew they were eyeing up my peanuts, then the devotee in the little rustic temple at the top invited me to drink chai - sweet milky chai - the first cup of a day offering it to tourists, pilgrims and all those who ascended the hill.   we sat in silence.  his little devotional mudhut throbbed with rustic get-away-from-it-all charm.  he blew on the flames and allowed the chai to brew for long time.  he threw the first cup against the wall, and there it trickled and glistened.  i offered him some peanuts.  he told me he is the one who keeps the pyre of ghee burning for ten days during the karthigai deepam festival.  tonnes of ghee which devotees haul up to keep that pyre burning and visible for miles around.  that explained to me the sticky substance coating the summit rocks which i clamboured over in the dark the first night i arrived.

the wind whispered urgently, but that didn't detract from its warmth.  the monkeys and the peanuts made a far fetched comparison from yesteryear: a scottish bothy hogmany, losing our way in the snowdrifts before eventually descending upon the holy shelter of shenavall there to shiver round the meek and paltry flickering flame, rotating our sitting positions round the fire to allow everyone his hallowed proximity to the flame's sacred warmth.  we roasted garlic bread and my dad declared it was the best thing he'd ever eaten.

stillness in the rocks,

movement in the wind,

everything bathed in moongleam.  

if the moon wasn't full it well-nigh was.  however, after a couple of nights, instead of staying on for the circumambulation i decided to head back to the hare krishna temple in karnataka and begin the painting projects tattava had given me.

tattva's eyes light up with enthusiasm.  he is adept at engaging others in his projects.  "we got this jeep somebody donated to us which you could paint with a really cool camouflage colours.   you could be real creative...the only thing i would like is a tilak - you know the mark hare krishna devotees wear on their forehead? - on the bonnet.  you could also get a peacock feather, or make it kinda jungly..."

 - what about some streaks of fire? ...make it really wild,  i say

"oh yeah, wild! let's get it looking wild, real distinctive.  everyone in kollur is gonna see this jeep and say "who did that? i want him to paint my jeep like that!"

tattva's enthusiasm really fired me up, and made me elaborate and pursue my artistic vision for several days i got lost.  i talked to myself a lot about one's artistic vision; the necessity of being allowed to pursue one's artistic vision.  even when praveem took the remaining red paint and used it to paint the front gate, i had to relinquish the use of that red paint and recognise that praveem too had to follow his artistic vision.

however, for a couple of days when tattva was away there was some indecision about the appropriateness of me following my artistic vision.  one of the woman looked at me painting one day and said, "too many colours...chaitanya says if you go on big roads and police see this jeep, they always stop you.  nobody ever see jeep like this...  trouble...too  many colours."

praveem's comment, which he made more than once, gleefully, was, "if i ever see a jeep with so many colours, it is in a children's park!   and not even there, with so many colours!"

but tattva returned and said, "nah, those women...more traditional.  they have a different vision of things.  seriously what you've done looks great"  he restored my enthusiasm and heaped encouragment upon me:

(i had told him:  i was beginning to feel discouraged.  he said: "no, don't feel discouraged, feel encouraged!")

"man, i don't know what we are gonna do with this jeep, drive it around, or take it straight to an art exhibition."

i realised how important it can be to have somebody who believes in you, or likes what you do.

people are ambulatory spheres of perceptors - messages-givers and message-receivers  -

who follow their elliptical perambulatory orbits

and when they catch sight of another circulating ball of energy

a chemical reaction is produced.

this person radiates something very smooth and shanti and easy to be with.

that other person's presence did not bring glad tidings; it was only a momentary glance, but all i did was shrug inwardly and murmur inside: he did not smile.

we are all billiard balls buzzing around the gigantic spherical billard table-globe, knocking into each other's energy fields and at times bouncing down cavernous stairwells to knock upon doors we never suspected we would ever knock upon.

nawkt a pawn.  globular tablets.   tabular globlets  lets

lets set sail.   lets hang around.   lets have another round.    lez move on

two people meet, and greet

with or without a peck on the cheek

no, but that woman's energy was too intense, too intrusive, her too gaze piercing with too much passion, it was like boiling water in her company - disquiet - but i had to listen to her out, to meet her gaze.  i couldn't very well tell her dispassionately to pencil off, the way some others might have done. at the same time, those lingering gazes are difficult to sustain... maybe some measure of iciness in my return gaze is necessary to preserve some inner calmness, so as to not let my snow be scattered by the snowblower.  otherwise i'll become like a melted ice-cream lying on the pavement.  and nobody likes a melted ice-cream lying on the pavement.

reach for the sta  hars        climb every mountain higher

reach for the sta  hars        climb every mountain higher

however, lale - the goat - he didn't have a-n-y qualms about trying to headbutt me when i tried to befriend him.  he rejected outright my offer of friendliness.  he wanted to butt me out of his life with his horned head.  the message "pencil off!" was all but tangible on his lips, bleating like a goat.   no greeting me him.

the verb to greet is polysemous for those from the north east of scotland for as well as "to say hello" it can also mean "to cry", (not like the town-crier, nor the boy who cried wolf but the boy who cried himself to sleep) hence its ambiguous poetic validity.

to say hello.   say hello too

i greet you.   you greet i.   i cry.  ice-cream, you scream we all scream.
we greet we.   us greet us, aff the green bus

greet for yourself,   or you greet iself,   then our greet weself.   put wee book back on shelf.

you're just being shelfish with your bookbackputting.

okay, you put the backbook on my shelf, and i'll scratch your...

you're writing drivel

you're drivelling write

you're right about the swivel chair

you've driven right off the map!

might is right

right...might be alright

might as well give up for the night

• who said writing was fun?  writing is for nuns.  profoundly cathartic.  a tiger in the arctic.  in the atavistic circle.  she got off at partick.  he's at it again

sound + meaning = mathematical equation for good writing.   well written.   well read.   well said.   well made.   well held.   well welded.   welded well.   well did well.   disjoin meaning from sound, what is left?
a soundless meaning?

a meaningless sound?
what came first, the meaning or the sound?

a  soundless sleep.

a sleepless sloop slipslop sling bring on the slack.

a groundless foundless cutlass cut less this time; found less that i would have thought at the foundry groundbreaking meaningshaking meaning what? meaning is making ground still shaking breaking and flaking the nonsensical shaking still making me all shivery not willing to stop shaking the shaking say stop to the king.

shay hi for me.   it was about yay high

aye: you know why.

why?

fit?    foo?   fit for a two foot boot, that's hoo.

hello 2013

tattva arrived back late and i asked about the bonfire we had talked about and he said "oh, has nobody gotten any firewood yet?  well, do you want a fire?"

 - everybody was sitting around in the temple -

there was a general nodding of heads.

"aaright, jump in the jeep, less go get some wood!"


it felt somehow thrillsome to see the sacred woods spotlighted in the swinging headlamps. it felt like a very boyish, adolsecent venture to head into the woods at that time.  tattva knew a good place up on the hill where there was lots of wood.  artem and i lugged a big well-nigh trunk back to the jeep between us and tattva gave a whoop and exclaimed, "that one'll burn well!"

if i could get this photo to rotate ninety degrees to the right it would show the bonflame leaping high into the sky; in the background the sun's refulgence also gleaming whitely off the floating round moon rock.

here is the assembled group krishna morari is on the accordian and starts up a round of hare krishna chants which everyone joins and accompanies with clapping hands, and i begin to dance a little bit, and julia dances a little bit too.  krishna morari encourages anyone to sing any song they want.   there is general indecision.  tattva suggests "michael row your boat ashore" (everyone knows that one) then krishna morari suggests that anyone make up any lyrics of their own "come on less go round in a circle"  all that comes to my mind is "goodbye 2012, hello 2013" then tattva suggests that we all recount the time in our lives when we felt most fear.  all that came to my mind was the time when i was about ten years old and i left my grandparent's house in the predawn to climb up east lomond and there near the top my young self unaccustomed to being alone in wild open spaces became warily aware of a malevolent presence lurking behind every dark bush.   i never got to recount that experience, however, because tattva himself set about recounting his own experiences, which very naturally followed each other,       separated by little pauses,      and which largely consisted of meeting deranged individuals while on the road in the US and involved him getting threatened at gunpoint and so on.  then he talked about the time he paraded about india for a year with elephants and a circus entourage and they slept in a different village every night and giave shows and there handed out hare krishna leaflets.
then it was almost midnight and we wondered whose watch to follow before krishna offered the use of his and started us all counting down nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, Happy New Year! yeaaaaah, woooooowow!  then some people gave hugs and pizzas were distributed (bought specially for the occassion) and homemade samosas, then we let off some fireworks and then everyone went to bed.