It was 81F in the house yesterday afternoon?! Today I even turned on the air for half an hour or so. Everything’s in bloom and leafed out, and the yard is really lovely and nice. Spring in this town is glorious.

My sleep schedule’s all backwards but I’m not having insomnia, thank fuck, it’s just clock creep. I’m staying up and getting up very late and have been for the past week or so. So far it’s been fine because the earliest I work is noon, but tomorrow (er, later this morning, it’s past midnight already) I have to be at work for a meeting at 9 o’clock. It’ll probably suck (lol) but I’ll probably survive.

Trap has become extremely vocal over the past two weeks. She’s still a very polite cat but holy shit she’ll just start yelling and keep yelling and yelling, for a straight half hour or more (stopping only for very brief scritches), until you get up out of bed and throw her out. And in the past couple days she’s started to talk-talk-talk at me when I’m on the patio couch, too? I suspect she’s decided we’re big dumb kittens she needs to herd around? She’s also been grooming my bare feet, which is fine until she tries to chew on my toe nails. Weird animal.

The day before yesterday I was, foolishly, in my living room in the afternoon when the sun shines directly in, and holy shit do I need to move my couch and clean the floor under there! There’s an insane amount of dust; looks like a quarter inch deep, swear to God. How.

Haven’t been doing any hobbies lately, so haven’t put the film mentioned in my last post into any of my cameras, or even managed to keep up with my journal. But I have been reading at my usual pace, which is a novel every couple days on average. A library card, Libby, and a Kindle are so great for voracious readers!

Right now I’m watching finally getting around to watching the second season of ‘Pokerface.’ I like this show a lot. After this episode I’ll try to put myself to bed, but since I slept so late I’ll probably end up reading.

I follow a bunch of photography folk on bsky, because not only are cameras cool, posts about enjoying analog hobbies are much more nourishing than the goddamn inescapable political doomscroll. (At this point, if I could not know about DOGE or P25 or this idiotic venal disgusting fucking war, or, indeed, about 98% of anything the current administration is doing or saying, it’d fucking great, even if lacking in civic responsibility.)

So anyway, the photog group I interact with most is called Shitty Camera Challenge. (A shitty camera is one that’s instant, disposable, Soviet commie, rangefinder, fixed focus, low res digital, or in general mass produced and mediocre: basically my whole camera collection.) Every so often a challenge is announced and then people post pics that meet the parameters, which are generally along the lines of ‘use a shitty camera to shoot instant’ or ‘use a shitty camera to shoot black & white’ and it’s really very nice.

Anyway, a member—who lives in Hong Kong, and knows the Camera Film Photo people who released it—decided he wanted to help create some buzz around a film called Kikipan, so he bought a bunch and did a giveaway!

Four cameras on the kitchen table.

Kikipan, named after a Kiki the cat, is a grainy black & white film that comes in a box covered in cat graphics (so naturally people take a lot of pictures of cats with this film). The only string attached was that recipients were asked to agree to post at least one photo taken with the film, and even I should be able to produce at least one good shot off of three rolls!

After chatting with another woman who received this film, I think I’ll shoot a roll through each of my 35mm cameras: the brick, the Yashica my dad repaired for me last year, and the Minolta from my uncle Gale.

Just a cool thing.

I haven’t purged my closet in so long I can’t remember, and have far too many clothes I don’t fit or wear. So far I’m about a third of the way through a thorough sort, and am looking forward to being able to find things again. I’ve already found four items I hadn’t seen in so long I’d forgotten they even existed (but which still fit and are still wanted), which is functionally like getting something new, and dumped a whole bagful of stuff I haven’t worn since we’ve lived in this house.

It will be particularly useful to get rid of all the non-viable socks and underwear stuffed into the drawers. Some socks I’ll mend, but most aren’t worth the effort, so there’s no damn reason to keep them. The last couple times I went to grab a pair of socks I couldn’t find anything because it’s all shit that needs thrown away.

Went to Home Depot today and got tomato and herb starts! Whoo!

When I got hired, I said I’d be happy to work Saturdays for as long as needed, but not forever.

Well, now it’s basically been forever and I’m still scheduled every Saturday; the only way to get one off is to schedule it. I picked today at random.

I was hoping to maybe do something fun with a long weekend. Go for a drive, spend a night out of town maybe. Instead I slept for fourteen hours. Didn’t get up until two thirty! Must have been tired. Can’t really summon the energy it would take to either drive off on my own or convince what’s-his-face to actually do something out of the house.

Gonna cook and eat, meditate, make myself go for a walk. Maybe find a movie and watch it the old-fashioned way: without my phone in my hand.

Starting to worry about stuff. Like: it never got particularly cold this winter but my utility bill was still a lot bigger than it was last winter. How will I afford air conditioning season if the prices keep going up? Like: should I be hoarding coffee? It’s 30% more than it was a year ago, the market is idiotic, the administration is a joke. Will coffee soon be for rich people? Like: should I just let the entire lawn die instead of watering it? Can I afford to water the goddamned lawn? There’s no snow pack. Half of the country’s already in drought (my county is in ‘extreme drought’) and it’s fucking March! Like: should I be hoarding food? With the war situation gas, which moves everything, is going up. Everything will get more and more expensive, right? I know a lot of members (of what’s left of) the upper middle class are doing so; I see people online talking about buying up stuff they expect to go up in price soon, like appliances and toilet paper.

On the other hand, there’s nothing I can do about any of it. The powers that be are venal fucks and I have no influence over them or their ridiculous AI or their wars or their racist cops; if the shit does hit the fan I certainly don’t have enough wealth to hoard enough to make more than a few weeks’ difference in outcome. If water rationing is necessary I’ll follow local expert advice. Best I can do is be a good person who isn’t a wasteful shithead. Compost, recycle, eat the stuff in the fridge before it goes off, manage the sun this summer with blinds and drapes as well as I can, etc. Worry doesn’t solve anything, it just makes one unhappy.

Reports show that today’s No Kings is possibly the biggest protest in U.S. history, more than 8 million people at more than 3,300 events. People are pissed about a lot of things: book bans, the death of science, that Kennedy idiot, DOGE, abortion care, vaccine policy, inflation, Iraq, the Supreme Court, propaganda, concentration camps, the death of due process, the takeover of the Fourth Estate, oligarchy in general. Things are a mess. It seems so obvious to me that instead of funding war and racism we could just, you know, fund health care and housing instead? But that’s not what the people in power do, they just double down on causing unnecessary human suffering. You really do wonder what the fuck is wrong with those people.

There’s a tulip in bloom in the backyard! Must be just about Easter!

Okay, like basically everyone on earth, I’ve heard of scones with clotted cream, but I’ve never had it because I’m American and the only time I’ve ever set foot in a fancy tea room was as a performer and not a patron.

Last week one of my co-workers told me there was some expired heavy cream if I wanted some, so I brought home a half gallon of heavy cream and stuck it in my fridge.

It occurred to me to make clotted cream, so I read up on how and did it: a dish full of cream in a 170F oven for twelve hours.

after nine hours

It was still fully liquid when I took it out of the oven and put it in the fridge, and I thought it hadn’t worked, but it set up as it cooled. The next day there were solids floating in the top half of the dish!

I started with slightly over half the half-gallon container of heavy cream, and ended up with a pint of clotted cream.

one pint half and half, one pint clotted cream

The leftover “whey” is fine in coffee. I read so many recipes I don’t remember now where I learned that, but I’m glad I did or I might have just poured out the non-clotted stuff!

I spent my entire weekend sick in bed, which sucked, but at least leaving something in the oven and then in the fridge was the right speed.

Today I made scones. I read a bunch of recipes, finally picked one I liked, and did it. Made a big old mess of the kitchen counter, and didn’t get the height I wanted, but they taste nice.

a scone! with clotted cream!

The point, I now believe, of clotted cream is that fat is filling and keeps your otherwise completely silly tea sandwich from making you hangry in half an hour after all the sugars burn off.

It’s also delicious! I ate two!

Friday there was some sneezing. Apparently that’s the tell now: if I sneeze more than once in a day I’ve probably been  exposed to germs.

Saturday afternoon at work I started to feel pretty rotty, and by the time I got home I was definitely Coming Down With Something.

Now it’s Monday and I still feel gross and I’m mad at whoever it was that decided to come into my workplace and FUCKING BREATHE AROUND ME. I don’t want to be sick! This is my weekend, I want to get chores out of the way and feel good and read library books and drink adult beverages! I do not want to sit on the couch like a zombie staring at the television! I do not want to spend sixty percent of my weekend asleep! God damn it!

Just the usual crud: congestion, cough, aches. I haven’t even taken a Covid test, because at this point I don’t really want to know that the people who make up the society I live in don’t “believe in” vaccines and are basically out there spreading disease more or less on purpose.

Going to work when you’re sick is stupid. Being sick is uncomfortable at best, and can kill you at worst. To stop from spreading most disease, just stay the fuck home when you’re sick, or if you must go out, wear a goddamned mask!

Some bastard got me sick and I hope they have a permanent itch somewhere for the rest of their life.

First you have to soak the chickpeas and make the bread, so best be starting the day before. Because we’ve got executive function, oh yes we do, so it only took, what, three weeks of thinking about it before we did it.

Anyway, I made some super high hydration dough and prepared it as if it were ciabatta, but it basically just came out like all my bread does. Which is fine, it’s still good. (I thought about making actual pita bread but by the time I did I no longer cared enough to get the flour back out.)

homemade bread

So the problem is that, aside from a food truck I once heard about five years ago and which may or may not still exist, there’s no falafel around here. None. Zero. So I have to make my own.

falafel balls!

Well, I mean, there’s a Greek place in Walla Walla, but they make a style I really don’t like, called revithokeftedes, which is basically falafel only with terrible texture.

I don’t have a food processor—well, I have a little tiny one, but I only use it for olive salad—so I have to make my falafel in the blender, which is a pain in the ass, but I pretty much have it dialed in now.

I used the old oil that’s been sitting in my fryer for God knows how long; it’s probably a little rancid but not bad enough to stink or anything. Just made the falafels taste more professional, honestly.

Here’s some tabbouleh, my favorite salad of all time:

tabbouleh

I don’t like the fine bulgur so I always use the more rustic stuff. It feels unbelievably wholesome, somehow.

The hummus is from a can and it’s fucking wonderful.

ziyad hot spicy hummus

It took me years, but I finally figured out that the best way to make tahini sauce is to use hot water. It really comes together much more easily that way, with, I think, possibly better texture somehow.

Anyway, after baking bread and getting the blender dirty and chopping all that parsley and opening a can and making tahini and deep frying all those little balls, after all that, the food was fucking wonderful!

YUM

Tahini always reminds me now of eating in a falafel place in Brooklyn (which apparently still exists); there were squeeze bottles of tahini on every table (the same style as those old mustard and ketchup ones, only bigger, and white rather than yellow or red) and how much I loved just having that much fucking tahini to pour all over my falafel and rice.

In unrelated news, I bought a necklace and emailed with my aunt. Pretty sure it’s been over a dozen days since I last showered. Later this month two other aunts will be in town visiting, and the whole family will be going out to Sunday dinner. Also I learned how to remove and replace the back wheel on my bike the month before last, which was actually pretty cool and of course much easier than I’d expected.

Recently my brother gave me a speaker he found in the road because I’d complained all my speakers were crap. I guess he actually saw a vehicle drive over it before he stopped and picked it up. Well, it’s fine, it kicks ass, and it’s tiny.

a li’l speaker guy

It’s a Clip 5. You can clip it to shit! It’s waterproof. IT WAS TOTALLY FREE. It sounds astonishingly good for its size. Right now I have it playing bhajans.

Friday night I went to the Milton-Freewater Downtown Alliance Chamber awards dinner. My boss gives me a free ticket, and this is my third year attending.

The food was great, the wine was great, and the awards themselves are really nice because they remind you that a lot of people are actually quite humble and wonderful, and operate under the assumption that their duty is to care and help and give back, so they just go around fixing shit and funding things and quietly making life better. Which is something we need to see from time to time, lest we get all jaded and bitchy reading about politics and living and working with men, as we do.

One of the fun parts of the dinner is that there’s a table decorating contest, so not only does the place look nice for the event but no matter where you’re seated you get local business-provided swag because you get to keep whatever’s on your table. (The people who sat at the cheese factory-sponsored table this year got cheese, cream, butter, and tiny Jersey cows!)

awards dinner

My table this year had a giant tagine for a centerpiece and abundant chocolates; I didn’t want the tagine but I did get the little rug it was sitting on, which turned out to be probably a bath rug:

new li’l rug guy, on the living room floor next to a cushion and another li’l rug; this is where i sit to meditate

I wanted it as a meditation asana, and it’s perfect for that! It’s extremely soft, even if I’m not a fan of the fake-distressed rug designs, and fine to sit on.

I also got a half dozen rocks glasses, and nearly all the candy on the table, because nobody else wanted it. Whoo!

Work’s the same, I mostly enjoy it because it’s not fucking Comcast or Home Depot, but I’ll have been there seven years in July and the new has definitely worn off. I still love what we’re doing there, and I love the humanity of the place (you don’t get fired for being nineteen seconds back from a break, for example), but I’ve never been promoted and haven’t gotten a raise in years. Doing dishes and cleaning grills isn’t exactly stimulating, and I sorta thought that by now I’d be in charge of a department or would be doing fun admin shit, maybe in design & editing, or HACCP or documentation & training or whatever, but the place is still run exactly as it was when I started: more or less like a hobby.

Which is fine, but there’s no path for advancement and without a promotion into an admin job that doesn’t exist I’ll never get to sit down! And I’m pushing 60 and would very much like to sit down, if I’m honest, please.

I sometimes think about getting a ‘real’ job, but I have no idea if I’m qualified for anything grown-up anymore. (I’ve been out of IT forever and it’d probably take me a week to set up Active Directory services properly! Heh.) And while it’s true the idea of a commute sucks, it’s also true that my IRA only has four grand in it. I figure something will fall into my lap eventually, because it’s usually who you know more than what. Or not! We’ll see.

I want my backyard to not look like shit, but I also want to not have to go out there in gloves and boots and pull a bunch of milkweed out of the gravel myself. I’m going to ask if the lawn guys will do it this month, before mowing gears up in full and they get too busy to help lazy people with stupid projects.

I also want to go back to Amritapuri again this year, but maybe not during peak monsoon season. I’m sure work would let me off again but I’ll have to see if I can afford it.

Trap, the feral ditch cat, recovered perfectly from her spay surgery, stayed five days in the guest room and was a perfect guest, and now hangs out with me all the time. I get the impression she thinks I’m an extremely stupid and lazy cat, but I keep ‘finding’ food so she’s willing to tolerate my lack of running around the neighborhood at night eating birds or whatever.

Sometimes she tries to boss us around by marching up to one of us or into a room and yelling, but since we don’t know what the hell she’s saying it never works. Most of the time she naps inside or on the patio couch. Yesterday evening I caught her playing, actually playing, with some dry leaves. I’d never seen her play before, not even when she had kittens.

So, yeah, I’ve been adopted by a fucking cat. I did not want a cat. I don’t even like cats. They’re an invasive species, they walk in litter boxes and then on your kitchen counters, they’re assholes. Fuck cats. I’ve seen this particular cat torture half-dead rodents, and I once listened to her eat an entire bird, skull and beak and feathers and feet and all! Disgusting! The cat is a terrible species, awful, just nasty. Buuuut I just feel responsible for her now and she purrs and is soft, and she’s happy to see me when I get home from work, so yeah, I love her.

What I should do is get a fucking goat, to eat all the weeds in the back yard!

BLOGGING ON THIS WEBSITE

Most nights, I slept with my windows wide open and could hear the surf. It was glorious.

the sea at sunset

If I left the hall early at night, I could hear the bhajans slightly while lying in bed, and sometimes in the early mornings I could hear the archana. There was always traffic during the day, and some at night, and everybody honks while driving in India. Sometimes the horns sound like elephants.

The last week or so I’d figured out that if I kept the windows closed, the ceiling fan on, and the bathroom door closed (it had permanent openings and was always humid), my clothes would get slightly drier. I only bathed once a week because even though it’s the tropics and there are two taps, there’s no hot water. And no towels; I used a sheet or a dupatta. It’s cold to shower and it’s impossible to get dry.

The power goes out frequently, but rarely for more than ten seconds at a time. This is why not bringing a laptop was a good decision, apparently unshielded they get fried all the time.

(I started this the day I wrote the previous post, then saved it to come back to later.)

~+~+~+~

It turns out that after coming back to this post to finish it, I don’t want to finish it! Overall, the trip was utterly transformative: I thought thoughts, I had experiences, my spirituality deepened in ways that would sound ridiculous if put into language, so I won’t try.

Everything that exists is a metaphor for finding your real self, which is closer than close, and all the effort you do to ‘become’ whatever it is that your intellect thinks is enlightenment is more or less running around in circles, and only true Love can get any of us anywhere near understanding that, and that’s what my Sadguru gave me when I went to visit Her.

Plus I drank a cocktail with ice in it at the Delhi airport, which of course gave me Delhi Belly, which I suffered after I got all the way home, and it sucked REAL bad. So bad I even tried to go to the doctor about it after about five days, but gave up when the nearest clinic wouldn’t take my insurance. Nevertheless, I survived!

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for most of a month now, because I wasn’t sure how, since it wasn’t really a touristy trip. I went to see my Sadguru, an enlightened person, an avatar, for spiritual purposes, and most of what I have to observe was the ways my mind does what it does and how I reacted to that. It’s not like I went to any restaurants or shows or on any hikes or cruises.

view from the footbridge facing toward the Amritapuri ashram

The trip was Walla Walla to Seattle to Vancouver to Delhi to Trivandrum. I never left the airports, and it took a couple days each way. Absolutely exhausting. The shape of the trip was dictated primarily by politics; from what I’ve been told (by a Keralan living in Canada I met on a return flight) you’d typically rather go through Dubai.

The way over I was exhausted in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. My relationship has its struggles, I’ve been in the same entry-level job for six years with no promotions or recent raises, I’m older and fatter than I’ve ever been, and I live a life of, essentially, laziness and dissipation. I read a lot, I sleep a lot, I drink too much, I don’t bother to have a social life, and while I know the shape of my life would be perfect for sadhana I just don’t do as much as I wish. I was unhappy in every quarter. Which is why I wanted to go see Amma so bad. Get my priorities straight. You spend a lot of your evolution believing in doing things, but then comes the realization you’re not doing anything, you’re not the doer, and yet you have to do things to achieve states, and it’s all some bullshit Buddhist koan, and you need your guru.

After determining that I wanted to go and why, with literally no effort on my part, everything just fell into place. Suddenly there was money to go, and tickets, and a month off work with zero push back, and literally everything I needed was just… provided to me. (Thanks, dad!)

~+~+~

So one morning around three AM we got in the car and went to ALW, which is my favorite airport because you can go from the door all the way through security in literally four minutes. (I hate airport security for its waste, irritation, and ineffectiveness. It’s theatre and its tedious.)

Anyway, flight to Seattle. Few hours layover, I got a coffee but I don’t think I ate. Then flight to Vancouver, which is a really well-done airport. Nice to look at, immigration was a breeze, wifi, all the kiosks worked, nice art.

Flight to Delhi was either fourteen or sixteen hours, I can’t remember which, and by then my extremities were bloated and I was miserable because the seats are for takeoff and landing, not a dozen-plus hours of actual flight, and I’m too old and fat now to get my feet underneath me or curl up. I did sleep but it was terrible quality, weird and jittery.

Airplane food

The food was pretty good, though. They fed and watered us probably four times. I had a window seat and so had to bother my row mates twice to get out, walk, stretch, and pee. The bathrooms were still familiar plane-style weird little closets with toilet paper.

Weirdest part of the whole journey was that it never got dark. You’re just flying over the lid of the world with the sun. So, so many hours of bright daylight.

Then another few hours in Delhi, to get out through immigration and back in through security. The Delhi airport is a fucking people-moving disaster, the signage is either not there or useless, and both times I went through it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going in spite of being in possession of a reasonably high intelligence and a general concept of how to get through an airport. The airport employees I asked were contemptuous (which I do understand, I work customer service too, and being asked the same fucking question over and over does get annoying) and unforthcoming and rude.

The immigration guys were bored, grumpy, gruff, and slow. Yes, I had all my documents ready: passport, boarding pass, visa. Your job sucks, whatever, at least you’re sitting down for it, you huge baby.

Security in India is segregated by sex, so you give your bags to the machine for scanning and then have to hike way over to where the women are being screened, leaving all your belongings utterly unsupervised, to be wanded in private in a cubicle by a female soldier-slash-cop. (These were friendly and pleasant, and one even complimented me on my hair.) Then at peak disorientation, tired in a strange airport where you don’t understand the majority of the languages, you have to remember which carousel has your bags and figure out how to get back sans signage. It’s a trip.

Then a last three-hour flight to the final airport, Trivandrum. Except they kept delaying the flight. By the time we boarded it was something like five hours late. I’d been texting my ashram taxi driver until the wifi pass expired; by then I didn’t have time to go get another password from the kiosk. My Minternational Pass (Mint is my phone carrier, and their roaming was supposed to work in the whole of India) had activated fine but didn’t seem to be working. I figured I’d mess with it later.

Arrived Trivandrum, knowing from an ashram email that there would be no wifi once I exited the airport, and yet somehow I managed to suddenly be exiting the airport?! How the fuck am I already outside?! No wifi means no Whatsapp means no way to communicate with my taxi. Fuck. I nearly cried.

Trivandrum airport’s arrivals area

It was mid-morning, I was burnt the fuck down, I had no local currency, my ankles were three inches wider with fluid, and I had no Google Translate.

Eventually I figured out that I had the taxi driver’s phone number in a Whatsapp chat, so I dialled it and it rang through and he answered and came and picked me up. I had been unable in two different Indian airports to locate either a currency exchange or an ATM, so I asked him to find me an ATM on the way, which he did; a fun little booth where I withdrew six thousand rupees and paid not one but two $2.50 fees (one to the ATM and one to the card itself).

It’s a serious-looking stack of cash but it turns out it’s maybe seventy-two dollars. Disorienting.

Three hour drive to the ashram. I was supposed to be making this drive in the middle of the night, so mid-morning was actually much better. The state of Kerala has decided to put in a giant freeway down its center, and instead of doing it in ten mile increments or something reasonable, they gouged a huge goddamned corridor through the middle of the country, right through countless villages, literally knocking down any parts of buildings or houses that crossed into this area (you could see into these buildings because the roadward sides are just gone, ripped off, leaving the rest of the building intact, it’s incredibly weird) and then having what seemed like only two crews to work this massive scar?

Okay, India, whatever.

~+~+~

Got to Amritapuri. The taxi drove me right up to the International Building, which looks like a British Raj set piece with wooden bank teller windows facing onto a covered veranda. Unbelievably cute. Had to wait a bit until they opened again after lunch break.

the ashram’s International Office

A devotee, an older Western woman resident all in white, checked me in, and in what seemed like a rush of genuine care and good will, offered me a room on the beach, a newly remodeled one, very nice, do I like the sea? Yes, I like the sea, that sounds wonderful. She even called a passer-by, another devotee resident, to lead me to my quarters.

I’d changed into lightweight, all-cotton Indian clothes in Delhi because it was so humid (even indoors! with the air conditioning!) that my chic black polyester airport outfit was like wearing a ziplock baggie. The humidity walking across the ashram was mind-blowing. It was probably 75%, and the temperature in the high 70’s. I was so tired, and my body hurt, and she led me off of the paved area in front of the Kali temple onto literal sand? With my wheelie suitcase? Okay.

We crossed a busy little road (note to self: look right then left, not left then right, the cars are on the other side!) and passed through a gate and there it was: the sea. Right there! Maybe a couple hundred yards away, and my building, three stories, with a columned porch and big, old, wooden doors, right on the beach!

porch of the building I stayed in for three weeks (featuring a napping feral dog and my luggage) with the Arabian sea visible just beyond

We went in. No lighting (well, there are lights, but they’re rarely on). Up three flights of stairs I could only manage through sheer force of will, hauling my luggage, my shoes cutting into my feet and leaving wounds, everything hurting and buzzing and swollen and tired, so tired. We turned down an unlit but marble-tiled hallway. She unlocked my door and gave me the key (the doors are secured with padlocks) and explained that my room was very, extremely nice. Really nice. One of the nicest. As in, aren’t you lucky nice.

It had white marble floor, white walls and ceiling, a counter with a sink, windows, and a weird Indian bathroom. The furniture consisted of nothing but a hard single bed on a wooden frame, and a plastic lawn chair. I later found a couple little rugs in a cupboard.

After she left I figured out how to turn the ceiling fan on high (thank God) because the electrical switches are all upside down, so on is down and off is up, made the bed (they give you two sheets and a pillowcase when you check in), and unzipped my suitcase where it lay on the floor. I think I looked at the welcome brochure for the ashram schedule, then took a nap that was shocking in its brevity; I would have expected to sleep for eight or more hours, but I was up an hour and a half later. I put my few things where you put them: tiffin by the sink, shampoo in the bathroom, wrap on the bed like a blanket.

all my crap on the counter by the sink after I’d been there awhile

Every morning, without an alarm, I woke and walked across the ashram to attend group meditation in the Kali temple, where I meditated for an hour. Without an alarm. If you know me at all, you know that that in itself constitutes a clear and inarguable miracle. By the time I finally slept too late for group meditation, I’d already booked my return taxi.

Afterwards, I’d eat, usually a tasty vegetable omelet with hash browns and a ‘milk coffee’ from the coffee wallah. I’d also write in my journal during breakfast, using a lightweight, battery-powered Bluetooth keyboard with Obsidian on my phone. Many people found this setup to be pretty great, and indeed it worked much better than hauling a laptop.

You bring your own dishes to get food. There are dish washing stations on both sides of the big central hall (a 30,000 square foot open-sided building where bhajans are held and food is eaten and in which there are very nearly always people doing one thing or another) where you clean your cup, fork, and plate. You always carry dishes, and you always carry an umbrella, and you always wear a dupatta.

a dupatta—also called chunni, chunari, chundari, lugda, rao/rawo, gandhi, pothi, orna, or odhni—is a long shawl-like scarf traditionally worn by women in the Indian subcontinent

Plus you’re hauling your asana (a small rug for sitting on, since all the floors are stone), whatever you’re reading or whatever you’ve purchased, and water. Maybe a sweater if it’s night. I bought a back pack for all this. You walk everywhere and carry all your stuff with you.

I did not wear shoes, however, for days, because in the humidity my puffy feet would stick to any shoes I tried, and the skin would tear, and scabs would form, and it hurt too bad. I bought two or three pairs of used and/or cheap shoes my first week there, none of which failed to hurt like hell, but then finally ended up with a pair of too-large Croc knockoffs that have LIFE IS WONDERFUL molded into the sides of the soles. I donated all the shoes before I left, because I will never need pink plastic foam slides!

After eating, I’d go do seva. My seva ended up being dishes. Fucking dishes. DISHES. Luckily it lasted maybe an hour a day, but it was still dishes. Wash the dishes from the kitchen, bowls and whisks, pans and pitchers, dry them by hand, and return them to their places in the kitchen for the staff to make the next meal. Not onerous, and a job for which I am utterly qualified, but still: dishes.

(This is only funny if you know how many times I have complained about dishes, in both my job and my own home, and how I joked that when I signed up for seva in Amritapuri “it would probably be dishes.” One function of ashram life, or indeed life in general, is to give us opportunities to transcend our likes and dislikes.)

During one of my dish sevas I stood next to a kid who spoke three languages and was studying physics and he told me about white holes. For the rest of my stay there if we happened to cross paths he’d nod at me.

After seva, shopping! There are many stores and shops in the ashram itself, because the ashram has around three thousand permanent residents and people need soap and flip flops and instant soup and cookies. And guests like me need spiritual books and jewelry and idols and clothes and swimming dresses (there’s a pool in the ashram but you can’t wear Western swimsuits) and malas and umbrellas and water bottles. There are drinking water stations all over, so everyone carries a bottle and fills it as needed. I came to assume that some, or many, of the buildings the renunciates lived in did not have either running or filtered water, because you’d see them walking along carrying four or six gallons of water, and nobody drinks that much water so it had to be for laundry or bathing.

I’d brought a bottle with me so didn’t need to buy one. I’d also bought a tiffin, but I got a new one (and donated the one I’d brought) because whenever I held mine out for curry, whoever was serving would make a little moue because my dish wasn’t easily wide enough for the ladle.

If not shopping, a nap. If not a nap, then a wander around the ashram. Go sit in the Kali temple. Go see the kalari, or Lakshmi the elephant, or Amma’s childhood house, or the cows in the cow shed, or the sea. Sit and people watch. Meditate. Read Vedanta. Update my journal.

the front entrance of the Kali temple, lit up for a Karthika puja

I never did get online. My phone service provided SMS texts and calls, but no data. I made huge efforts to troubleshoot this, or buy a SIM or find a place to get online, a cafe or something, but they didn’t work out. The internet diet was wonderful. Social media is absolutely fucking terrible for you.

~+~+~

A week later my mind was screaming with complaints. It didn’t like the humidity, it didn’t like seva, it didn’t like the food availability (the food was tasty but there were three distinct mealtimes and if you missed out, you didn’t eat). It didn’t like the bed, it didn’t like the restrooms, it didn’t like this it didn’t like that it didn’t like. I just watched it like you’d watch an annoying and bitchy older relative at Thanksgiving: with a dull sense of burden. It would not shut the fuck up.

There was a concurrent tremendous, terrifying, and wholly unexpected crisis of faith. Okay, yes, Amma herself experiences an exalted state, I not only believe this but would defend it because I know it to be true and can list my reasons why. But where is the evidence that any form of effort can result in any of us experiencing such a state? I mean, have you made any sincere effort to fucking control your mind? It’s INSANE, is what it is, and it’s also completely OBVIOUS that all suffering actually does originate in this uncontrollable motherfucker, and how is anybody ever going to do that much sadhana, the amounts the saints do? There’s no way. It’s unpossible.

All these monks and nuns, these renunciates who have lived here for three, four decades, they all seem like normal people, and they’re around Her all the time. I have spent barely a fraction of that much time in Her presence; what hope is there for me, if, indeed, the goal even exists? Maybe it’s all bullshit. Maybe it’s a rare and generous form of insanity that occasionally plagues someone, and so they tell us about God and bliss and spend their lives giving; maybe Amma and Ramakrishna and Babaji and all of them aren’t what I’ve always understood them to be. Maybe I’m a gullible goddamned idiot who will know nothing but suffering until I die.

It was fucking excruciating. Awful, sickening, the absolute worst. I watched it, I considered it, I did not like it because it hurt, but in spite of it I eventually concluded that I would… continue anyway. With my religion. I mean, so what if I never get enlightened, I know that my Guru is good and does good things—I mean, the charity work alone, without even mentioning my own experiences—I know I feel better when I meditate regularly and make genuine efforts to regulate things like anger or gluttony, and that’s enough. Anything else is gravy. Whatever. Fuck it. I made a firm choice to let the crisis do what it would, as it would; I would continue on my path anyway. Worst case scenario, there’s suffering, which is pretty much guaranteed. Best case scenario, this choice is correct and there’s less suffering. I prayed daily for help because it sucked so, so bad.

Each evening, there are bhajans in the big hall. Amma comes, the whole band sets up, and there’s two hours of devotional singing. I cannot explain the power of this. It absolutely destroyed me every single night. I could probably explain it to a devotee with a mind and a path and an experience like mine, but to anybody who does not have a Satguru, it’s gibberish. Every song was chosen by Amma specifically to tell me something, right then, something I absolutely had been questioning and required an answer to, about the mind, about discrimination or dispassion or devotion, or fiddly questions about vedantic doctrine. Every song, every night, the entire time I was there, in order, answered my questions and relieved my doubts and filled me with love and understanding, humility, and strength.

There were on average at least a thousand other people at bhajans each night, all of them devotees of Amma’s, most if not all of them also having similarly profound inner experiences. I do not know how it works, only that it does. Sometimes I have long experiences that there are, in fact, only two consciousnesses in the manifest, phenomenological universe, and one is God, manifest as everything, and the other is me.

After bhajans, darshan. As a short-term guest, I had darshan four times while I was there. Basically you get darshan when you’re newly arrived, again when departing, and otherwise every five days.

~+~+~

Another week later, I have lost probably twelve or fifteen pounds. Sure, a lot of water, but not all. I can get up and down all the various buildings’ stairs without agony. (There are so, so many stairs in Amritapuri.) My feet are still scabbed, but pain free and healing. I’m sleeping wonderfully, I meditate frequently. Lots of walking, lots of water, no alcohol, no cigarettes, very little sugar. Clean food (I frequently ate kitchari and sprouted salad for lunch). I have the ashram schedule down. I sign up for a Sanskrit class.

I’m incredibly soft: my feet have been smoothed by walking barefoot on sand and stone, and my skin from all the moisture is like a rose petal.

My mind is much less agitated, I am beginning to really understand the purpose of concentration.

the Arabian sea is a spectacular place to meditate; somehow it seems the tide is always coming in and never going out

I have absolutely no desire to move to Amritapuri full time. This surprised me, when I noticed it. The place is totally, as they say, in my milieu: it’s gorgeous, beautiful, handmade. Definitely something you’d not be wrong to label as a hippy vibe. It’s on the ocean. I’ve dreamed about coming for going on thirty years. There’s a zero waste policy and incredibly thorough recycling. The food is vegetarian. The coffee is great. Everybody there has an understanding of what God is and what the purpose of a human life is. You can, if you want, just move there for as long as your visa lasts: years. If you’re frugal and eat the free food and don’t buy anything, you could do it on a pittance.

There’s a woman there who puts in a full day sitting at a table in the big hall making rudraksha malas by hand. Another who makes clothes for Amma dolls. I met two who knit scrubby loofa sorts of things to sell and then they donate the proceeds to their local ashram in Australia somewhere. There are volunteers doing everything from TV shows to publishing a magazine to working in hospice. And the focus isn’t on worldly things, it’s on getting your mind right, on divine love. Shit I actually care about.

But I guess it took too long for me to get there; I didn’t cry because I couldn’t stay, I didn’t want to stay. I once knew a girl who begged Amma to let her move to Amritapuri, several times if I remember right, and Amma told her she could come if she must but that it wouldn’t be good for her; she grew up to get married and have kids and is a total householder. She probably would not have been suited for ashram life.

I can tell you now I know I would very much rather not have to haul eight gallons of water to my weird little room every week, I’m too much of a desert baby to enjoy being constantly and permanently damp (sleeping on damp sheets and donning damp clothing is ugh), and I love having a washer and dryer. I am in no way too good to wash my clothes by hand in a bucket in the bathroom, I’ve done it, but I’d just rather… not have to? When I have perfectly good appliances in my house? Yeah.

I loved the walkability, the art and beauty, the not having to cook, the wild crows, the amazing monsoon rains, the sea, the Kali temple, the meditation, and seeing Amma every day. I did not love the sand, the damp, the lack of hot running water and cold showers over the toilet, having to hand wash my clothes and hang them in my room to never really get dry, hauling dishes everywhere, or the grand total of zero comfortable furniture anywhere. (I mean, I’m not high maintenance, but I am pushing 60. Nothing to sit on but a hard bed, plastic stacking chairs, and stone floors is kind of a lot of wear and tear.)

Oh, wait, there was a chair. A low, wide wooden seat in Amma’s childhood house, to the right of the front door. That thing was extremely comfortable. I wish I had one.

~+~+~

Anyway, the ashram asks you observe a contemplative attitude and not take pictures while staying in the ashram. So I took very few pictures, and most of them not literally in the ashram.

money money money money

I did, however, get to do something I have, for no good reason, always wanted to do: buy stuff with coins, like you see Brits do in period pieces. You can get a milk coffee for 20 Rs. I did this several times and it amused the shit out of me. Imagine buying a latte at Starbucks with change, it’d be SO MANY COINS. But there are ten and twenty rupee coins!

The plants in India are just normal plants, doing exactly what you’d expect, but if you look closely you realize you’ve never seen anything like whatever it is you’re looking at, and I enjoyed that a lot. Oh, look, a plant in a pot. Oh, look, it’s subtly strange, how fucking cool.

what even is this spiky thing

The utter loneliness was another weird aspect. Surrounded by thousands of people, but I didn’t know anybody there. (I recognized some of the brahmacharis and brahmacharinis from years of Amma’s tours, others from online satsangs and retreats. I saw a few ashram residents I’d seen before over the years, but none I knew by name. One woman, younger than me, that I crossed paths with way back in my Iowa days, who I exchanged nods with when passing.) The only times I spoke with anyone was while buying things or doing dish seva or accidentally bumping into someone on a narrow path. The rest of the time I was alone, wandering around in the monsoon rains with a backpack clanking from steel dishes and no shoes on.

Aloneness is good for a seeker, as it allows one to focus inwardly, but my mind certainly bitched about it.

...TO BE CONTINUED