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The Simple Life

July 14, 2006 · Posted in Uncategorized

Back in India for a few weeks… my first vacation of my adult life (outside of long weekends). Quite an interesting experience. Am visiting my cousin in Auroville. She is here working on some projects helping to reforest India, educating villages and schools on everything from composting to organic farming and medicinal herb planting. Really lovely project and some truly wonderful people.
Life in the forest is quite different from the traveling I have done in the last months: showering from a bucket of cold water, living without toilet paper, but instead with ants, roaches, geckos, frogs, butterflies (and all kinds of other creepy crawlers); sleeping underneath a mosquito net (and getting bit anyway – good thing it’s a low risk Malaria area), eating rice and sambar for lunch every day, and still being able to hook up my computer (which I had originally not planned on even bringing) to a high-speed connection… Consequently, it’s not as much of a vacation as it could have been, although at least I have been doing Yoga nearly every morning – when I was in Chennai, I met my Yoga teacher from LA who happened to be here for a certification process with the Krishnamacharja Yoga Mandiram. Quite inspiring. Saw Krishnamacharja’s son TKV Desikachar speak the other day. Yoga is such an amazing science…
India is definitely a spiritually mind-bending place even though it seems most people here too are more religious than spiritual. Am also planning on visiting the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in the next days, the Krishnamurti center and the Theosophical Society Headquarter in Chennai. Still finishing a second reading of Huxley’s “Perennial Philosophy”, reading a book on the Practice of the Integral Yoga, and just reread Hesse’s Siddartha, which always leaves me elated… We will see how all this will settle by the time I come back to LA. Really curious how this active reprogramming of my mind I have been doing here will manifest going forward. So far, I have been feeling calm, peaceful, and joyous
Am working slowly through the many emails in my inbox marked for follow up (in case you are waiting for an answer from me… mea culpa), and am helping the project by building a website for them. Regardless I have been able to ignore some of the other things I should be doing and letting things sit until I return to LA (which will already be next week – time is running much faster in India than in any other place I have been).
As of August it’s back to lovely LALALand. Am in the process of looking for a new place and already have a new project waiting for me. Look forward to eating Sushi again and being around my lovely friends there. Am already planning some more traveling for later this year, but for now I look forward to being “home” for a while