It's (Really Not )Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas..

* It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

Everywhere you go

Take a look at Manikarnika Ghat

Babbas on their mats

With sacred fires and cremation pyres aglow

It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

 Winter coats on every goat

But the prettiest sight to see

Is the Paan stains that will be, on your own front wall

 

Some dhal and rice and a kite that flies

Is the wish of Padmabandhu Tiwari and Shri Priyanvad Raj Kumar

 

And Bangles of all colours that they'll throw at their brothers

 Is the hope of Saraswati and Somalakshmi Deepika Rai Vidya Kapoor

And Sadhu Ji could hardly wait to get back to sleep again

It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

Monkey Caps on every child

And the ladies drying out the poo, which they'll burn to cook their food

Have less now because it's also on my shoe

It's beginning to look a lot like a Varanasi Christmas

Every man in a sparkling vest

But what will fill your heart with glee

Is the Paan stains that will be... on your own front wall

Have a Wonderful Christmas! 

Dedicated to our beloved Halfcocks Pariwar who the whole city is missing this Christmas!

*To the tune of Bing Crosby's 'It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas'

Fire Weed..

Six guys, a bottle of highly flammable liquid, a box of matches and something that needs destroying.. a winning combination!

Sitting just outside one of the entrances to the Resurrection Garden is a horrid weed which has proved to be the bane of my barefoot existence! It's thick and bushy with razor sharp spikes and it hates me. I have no doubt in my mind that it spends the majority of it's days just dreaming up new ways of slinging it's spikes deep into the souls of my feet. We hack it back to ground level every few months but sadly this has only served to encourage it, and so it simply grows back bigger and more obnoxious each time. Other attempts to kill it have all failed dismally and so the only option left was to dig it out from the roots, an effort that proved more fun than initially expected.

We had some sweet traveler cats come along to our Community Gardening afternoon here at the River Ashram who were keen to get their hands dirty. They're both pretty interesting characters; one a Mohawk wielding media designer from Finland, the other a French law student who is taking a break from his studies so he can do what all law students do on their break and ride a bicycle across North India then all the way back to France! (So far he's clocked up an impressive 2633kms!!)

They had been hard at work for a couple of hours with Byron (our 6'5" Aussie brother whose a part of our community) when I arrived home from a Christmas party and got on the scene. This was the first time I really got a clear picture of what we were up against. The root ball was massive (about as thick as my upper leg) and bunkered down very deep. They had already dug down a couple of feet through some super tough soil and the base of the root was nowhere to be seen. This was partly because it was still well below the surface, but also because they were busy stuffing paper and sticks and other flammable objects around the base of the root with the plan of burning it out.

I have to admit, I probably would have just kept digging - but being a guy, the thought of setting something ablaze is an option too hard to pass up. Thus Oodbliav went and grabbed a bottle of the most flammable liquid he had on hand and we went to work creating a fire ball worthy of a couple of quick photos.

We ended up keeping the flame going till well after dark and it will be interesting to see what's left of it in the morning. Part of me is concerned of what ghastly abomination it might transform into if we haven't succeeded in destroying it this time round, potentially some sort of flora poltergeist out for revenge, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

 

It's been an interesting experience crafting this post along with these photos as the more time I spend looking at them the more anthropomorphic they become. It's a bit like cloud gazing, the longer you look the more you end up seeing. So give yourself a couple of minutes to set your peepers on the above image and tell me you don't see a woman with her hands behind her back walking up a step! Or the fourth image from the top; the tall dude wearing the low rider pants and miming at firing an arrow into the air. Or the third image from the top; a baby elephant with his trunk raised high in the air with a parrot perched atop it. Or the fifth image from the top; a statue taken from Lisa McCunes' stock pile of Gold Logies (that was probably being used to prop up a kitty litter tray or serving some other similarly noble purpose). 

So unless I'm just loosing it (which is a definitely possibility - I do have 2 kids under the age of 3 and live in Varanasi) I'm keen to hear what you see when you look deep into the flames!

A Word About Poo..

I've had a bunch of comments now from lovely folk saying that they've expected/wanted/surprised I haven't already done a post about Poo.. Yes, I'm serious. And it's true that when you live in India it doesn't take long before the quality of your bowel movements becomes a fairly acceptable topic of conversation around the dinner table. Someone you know always has diarrhea or is blocked up and it's a safe bet that how someone's poo was, is also a good indication of how they're doing in general.

So I thought I'd quench those thirsts and offer a Poo Blog (but it's probably not quite what you're thinking).

A bag of human faeces caught in our Guava Tree

I've written on more than one occasion about how much rubbish finds its way over our fence and into our gardens and the process I go through in coming to terms with it. It's something that doesn't have a foreseeable solution so I just keep up my daily routine of picking up my neighbour's rubbish from my garden and tossing it into our bin.

But look, it's one thing to be picking up your neighbour's chip packets, broken plastic bangles or even used up batteries; of course it's a waste of my time and a pain to my heart, but it becomes a different ball game all together when you find yourself picking up bags full of crap!

3 in 1 day..  rough night..

Only recently I wandered up to the Resurrection Garden with Little Feather and Wild Foot and was greeted by the sight of a plastic bag, full of human poo, that had been launched over our fence and had come to rest on what was now a crushed tomato seedling (that I had planted only days earlier!). My wife and both kids had been sick and so it'd been an exhausting week and so to be honest, I wasn't in my finest form, but the sight of my dying tomato seedling underneath a poo filled plastic bag proved to be the straw that broke this camels back.

I began hurling out my tirade of frustration to the world in the best Hindi that I could manage under such circumstances. Many of my neighbours were on their balconies and roofs and the shouting of a hairy foreigner in his Pajamas quickly attracted the attention of all within ear shot. I felt a surge of conviction that this was the moment to let my neighbours know exactly what I thought of them! And so in a strong and ridiculous accent of an Australian trying to sound North Indian, I conjured up the best Hindi I could and managed to sputter out "I'm not happy!"

Look, it wasn't quite as profound as a Jed Bartlett speech.. In fact, I'm sure it was rather humorous for my neighbours to see me flustered and thus completely unable to string a simple sentence together, but I did manage to ham it up a bit and get across the frustration of my vegetable garden being used as their toilet. 

I proceeded to ask who was creator of my latest inheritance, and it was like a scene from a movie with every finger confidentially pointing towards every other house but their own, and so this offender remains at large (though I suspect all my neighbours have been guilty of this at some point). 

Wild Flower often tells me that I should just return it via airmail (ie; straight in through the lounge room windows) but we're all to aware that in any war involving flying bags of faeces, well, no one really comes out victorious do they (especially when they command all the high ground!).

But it does underscore a more serious issue that's wide spread here in India, and that is that 2.5 billion people on our planet currently lack access to a toilet or basic sanitation. Only the other day a friends whose lived here for many years told me that Germany had given Varanasi a 100 million dollar grant to provide adequate sewage infrastructure to the city, yet where has this money gone? Primarily into the back pockets of high ranking city officials, who I guess are kind of like the contents of a sewage pipe when you consider that their greed and corruption continues to deny meeting the basic needs of those living in extreme poverty.

So now I'm trying to reorient my mind. To see that inherent within each plastic bag of poo that's crushing a new seedling in my garden is the out workings of the corruption and evil that results in basic human needs not being met. And look, I'm happy to admit that I'm not there yet. It's not easy, in fact it's still soul crushing to see so much hard work being shat on (literally) by the very people I'm eager to share my harvests with, especially when they can clearly see where it's going and knowing that there are other disposal options, but trying to see the bigger picture and is helping me reconcile some of the heart ache I go through each and every time I discover a fresh deposit. 

While doing some reading about this issue of sanitation, I came across the above clip which encouraged me (and gave me a good laugh) that work is being done to address the issue of inadequate sanitation, and even if I can't imagine the process being even close to completed in my lifetime, it's good to know that bringing an end to the war of flying bags of poo is on the agenda!

Acoustic At Night..

One truly great thing about the international, long term traveler crowd, is that there is a disproportionately high number of amazingly talented and creative folk. It makes sense though; those in business and commerce work hard to pay off their li'l boxes on the hillside and so by and large, any time for creative pursuits and travel are relegated to those few measly portions of time known as annual leave. Compare that to many musicians, artists, dancers, storytellers or performers, whose ambitions and dreams could not sit further afield, where the other side of the horizon is the next real destination and the contents of a well worn suitcase the only worldly possession, freeing those who pursue it the time, space and heart to cultivate their craft.

Every once in a while, we at the River Ashram throw open our doors to host a night of celebration of creativity, community and the arts. On the first pages of our sacred Scriptures we see God breathing beauty into existence through all of his creative acts, and as his children we wish to reflect back and celebrate that creativity and beauty and so we invite people to come and bless each other through the sharing of their talents and skills.

Some people chose to perform their craft as an individual, others lead the circle in something communal, but considering the caliber of those present often it takes just one person to light the spark that sets the entire night of fire. So often the vast diversity of backgrounds and nationalities means that the performances are a real sharing of unique cultures while the jam sessions are this insane fusion of east and west and everything in between. Just off the top of my head I can think of Guitars, Sitars, Sarods, Dulcimers, Bansuri, Glockenspiels, Tibetan throat singing, Harmoniums, Ukuleles, Harmonicas, Ouds, Dholaks, Didgeridoos, Djembes, Tabla, Banjos and most importantly Triangles, all getting a work out around the circle at one time or another.

 
One of my truly favourite memories from an Acoustic Night was late last year when I was leading a Yeshu Bhajan called Satchit Ananda Eh Namo Namah. It's a deep and moody Bhajan that works as a call and response and so I was singing and playing my guitar accompanied by 20 or so other folk who were singing and playing a collection of the previously mentioned instruments. We were all singing our hearts out when from out of the darkness came the booming reverberations of a tattoo covered Japanese hippy brother playing a Didgeridoo. It was one of those beautiful moments that felt like it captured so much of the color of my life in just one special moment.

The most recent Acoustic Night was only in the previous week and it was without a doubt the most unique one we've hosted so far. The night began rather slowly but as chai started flowing and the crowd began warming up, the vibe began heading in a direction that I could never have predicted. In the past there have always been lots of original songs, many performances on traditional Indian instruments, plenty of covers and even the occasional poem, belly dance or fire twirl. But never before have I witnessed the entire circle requesting, belting out and dancing along with old Bluegrass and Gospel Spirituals that continued into the wee hours of the morning. The night was even capped off with an a cappella song done in a round! Truly the most bizarre yet incredibly beautiful ending to an Acoustic night that I've ever been a part of.

So if you're a performer of any kind and you're heading through Banaras be sure to hit us up and join us for our next night, especially if your heart is warmed by the company of a bunch of sweet hippies from the 4 corners of the globe, dancing round a campfire and singing them ole Gospel Spirituals. Sure sounds like a party to me!

Compost; A Love Story..

So by now you've probably worked out that I really like compost. I know it's a weird thing to say, it's a bit like admitting that you're a fan of collecting toe nails, but if you've never dug your bare hands down into a pile of thick, dark, well decomposed, sweet smelling compost, well, you simply haven't lived!

Below is a fairly recent pic I took of the 2 compost bins we've been using here on the property for a number of years. We have a solid supply of good quality ingredients to add to the piles but as I've spoken about before in my post about experimenting with the Berkley Method Of Hot Composting, they just weren't making the grade. The stone slabs look beautiful but they don't allow for air to enter via the sides and air is crucial for the decomposing process. If oxygen cannot penetrate the pile then it becomes anaerobic (meaning that the microorganisms responsible for decomposition process can't survive and thus decomposition grinds to a halt) and unless you want to engage in anaerobic composting (which is possible but not desirable given our circumstances) then the stone slabs simply weren't the ideal way to go.

Last year we left the bays filled with a variety of good things for almost 6 months and came to the end of that period only to discover that they had become so compacted that the majority of the ingredients simply failed to decompose at all. Now one incredibly simple way to counteract this is simply to get in there with a pitch fork and turn the pile a couple of times a week so as to allows air to reenter in amongst all the ingredients, however we have the problem of being a rather small and therefore time-poor community; meaning that we have plenty of responsibilities and not much spare time, let alone enough to dedicate to turning a compost pile every other day. So I began to dream of different ways that we could improve our set up that would give us better results without having to invest more time into it on a regular basis and ended up stumbling into an incredibly simple, extremely cheap and super effective method that could be reproduced anywhere by anyone.

The above photo is the area we're dealing with. The existing stone Compost bays are straight a head, there are piles of broken bricks and stone slabs everywhere, and even though it's all but invisable in the picture, much of the ground is actually paved with smaller stone pieces which have become buried under years of dirt and leaves. We spent a couple of hours clearing the space (which required some serious heavy lifting) and then drove four metal poles into the ground, roughly 1.5m wide and 1.8m long, which would act as the front corners of the new Compost bays. 

I chose to use a reasonably thick gauge wire for the frame as this would have the strength to support the weight of everything we would want to throw into it whilst still having plenty of space to allow as much air as possible to penetrate in from the sides. We drilled this into the brick wall at the rear and linked it with strips of wire to the post at the front and at that point had a very simple compost bay setup.

One thing to consider is that I could have chosen to use only 3 posts for the front so that the middle wire would have acted as a central dividing wall for both bays, but getting air into the pile was the main objective and so using 4 post means that there is a 30cm gap between both piles and thus plenty of room for air to have access.

Next up my dear Aussie brother Nelson and I spent a long and hot summer afternoon drilling hundreds of holes in lengths of PVC pipe. I had given lots of thought about how to try and increase air flow to the center of the pile (the most likely place to become starved of oxygen) and had decided that one option would be to run a couple of lengths of pipe from the outside, straight through the center of the pile. This way oxygen can always be moving through those hard to reach places and keep those microorganisms partying. We lined the pipes up and attached them in a roughly even fashion so as to get air flow through the four quarters of the piles, but my advice today would be to scrap having any pipes up high and instead have them all in the lower half of the pile as that's where it will become the most compacted and the natural airflow will be the most restricted.

I had intended to attach another wire section to the front of each bay, but the guy at the store who sold me the wire did the dirty and charged me for 10m but only gave me 8m, so I didn't have enough wire to complete it on that day and figured I would get back into it soon. However, as time got further and further away from me, I found that it hasn't really been necessary to have a front as we haven't had enough going into the piles for them to spill out onto the path in front but instead they've easily grown higher and higher without having any problems.

We initially set up these new Compost Bays in late August 2013, it's now 3 months later and as you can see the new bays are doing pretty darn well. Some of the pipes broke during this time due to a problem which I doubt many of you will experience (ie; Monkeys jumping up and down on them!), but it is worth trying to make sure that the pipes are resting on the compost in the center without significant gaps beneath them so that they're not trying to support the weight of all that is above it as I suspect this would also cause them to break.

 

To the best of my knowledge, not once during these past three months have either of the piles been turned or aerated by any other means than that which we initially designed. Just this week I finished building my final Vegie Plot in the Resurrection Garden and was keen to pump it full of compost so I pulled out the pipes through the sides of the 2nd bay, racked back the top layer of leaves and other recently added ingredients and was blown away with what lay beneath.

Only 3 months after first building these new bays, the rear one gave out 10+ wheelbarrow loads of gorgeous, gregarious, glorious Compost! All of which went straight into our organic Vegetable Gardens and means that the leaves, grass clippings, food scraps, garden waste, etc. etc. etc. which would otherwise go onto the side of the road, the incinerator or the Ganges, is now enriching the earth, helping feed humanity with nutritious and healthy food and investing back into nature. I really couldn't be happier with how it's turned out.

So if you have a compost pile somewhere out back and the thought of turning it every other day doesn't seem to appeal to you, would it be worth revamping your existing Composting system with any of these brainlessly simple ideas? When compared with last year's stretch of 6 months composting with virtually nothing to show for it, well, it's as my sweet Winnie Wild Flower likes to say, "The pudding is in the cake!"

Afternoon On The Gunga..

Last week we were blessed enough to have a few friends from Australia breeze into town and spend sometime with us here in Varanasi. This just so happened to coincide with my entire family coming down sick with various illnesses which, of course, made for an extremely long and difficult week and meant that we spent most of our time running off to see Doctors and staying awake throughout the nights tending to our sick little ones.

Thankfully the day before they left my tribe was all feeling much better and so we were able to join them on one of the staples of visiting Varanasi; a boat ride on the Gunga.

The city is such a memorizing place from the water and there is something so special about the feeling of stepping outside of it and peering back upon it as you float down the river. We've been on the water at sunrise, sunset and night, in the hot season and the cold, and each time I find that it's such a different experience than the last with differing colours, water levels, Pujas and atmospheres along the shore line which means that even though it's hugely touristy, it's also amazing.

I won't say too much more, instead I'll post a few of my favourite photos from this most recent trip down the Gunga and let the images do the talking for me.

Building Eden..

  

Towards the end of February 2013 Wild Flower, Little Feather and I packed our bags to leave Varanasi and make our way south. My boy was due to be born in mid March in Kerala (the most southern State of India) and because you shouldn't fly during your last trimester and the thought of spending 4 days on an Indian train with a 2 year old and a heavily pregnant wife didn't appeal to any of us, we decided to split the trip up into a few different stretches and spend some time with our sister community in Goa (around half way). 

Obviously this meant that between February and April nothing much happened in the Gardens except for our friends harvesting and enjoying the last of the produce that was still growing. When we returned home in April with our newest and cutest little guy in tow, the temperature during the days was already beginning to claw its way above 40 degree Celcuis (that's 105F) so as you can imagine, this sort of temperature (coupled with a brand new baby boy) meant that there was no way I was going to get anything done in the gardens for quite some time.

The Resurrection Garden; August, 2013

Now fast forward to August, it's still unbearably hot (still in the high 30's and 40's) but now the first monsoon rains have started to fall which means the humidity is skyrocketing and thus much of the time feels even hotter than before. The previous months had seen small clumps of weeds sprouting all over the Resurrection Garden but because the soil had dried out so thoroughly in the heat they weren't doing a great deal. But after the first rains, all the weed seeds that had been laying dormant for all those months in amongst the soil that I'd been working so hard to enrich, seized upon the opportunity to germinate..   And. Went. Ballistic.

As you can see in the above pic, the weeds took over in a matter of weeks and rendered the garden completely inaccessible. The front wall disappeared under a halo of green, parts of it had weeds as high as my shoulders and everywhere you looked you could see weeds bolting to seed ensuring that I was going to have an ongoing battle of epic proportions.

Initial Resurrection Garden Design Plans

During the hot season you spend A LOT of time indoors and so in amongst adjusting to being a family of 4, I began planning what I wanted to do with the Garden and how to go about sourcing materials to get it up and running once the temperatures came down. I was keen to radically redesign the layout based on a little side project I've been working on that's experimenting with applying principals of farming and agriculture from our Sacred Scriptures (more details about that at a later date) and so I wanted a minimum of 7 separate beds to be working with. Because of the overall size of the space I'm working with and the fact that the average person can't reach more than 75cm, I designed each bed to be 1.50m wide so that I would be able to reach the center of each plot without having to step into it, and thus the space allowed for 8 new beds as well as one long but narrow bed running against the wall which I will use as a trellis for various climbing vegetables.

My default was to think in terms of wood for constructing the raised edges of the Garden beds but a little investigating uncovered that wood here is crazy expensive, that because termites are everywhere (including inside the basketball sized termite mound in the top cupboard in my bedroom.. seriously) so the wood would need to be treated (with all sorts of charming chemicals that would joyfully leech out into my soil) and so I began looking into other options. I spent a bit of time thinking about it and decided that in keeping with the aesthetic of the space, buying a load of bricks would be the best option as they are cheap, easy to use and won't get chewed through by Demuk (termites). I had all the dimensions of the garden and the plans for what sizes I wanted to make the beds and so one day, after crunching the numbers, I went out and bought 350 bricks (with free delivery via Bicycle Trolly Rickshaw) at the outrageous price of AU$0.11 per brick!

 

End Of First Day of Clearing

Last year I really learned a valuable lesson by not trying to do all the work myself. I love being in the Garden and originally wanted to do all the work myself, but I've had to come face to face with the reality that it's a big space, it requires an insane amount of work just to maintain it and keep it clear of weeds and debris, I have a tonne of other responsibilities and don't get to spend anywhere as much time in the Garden as what I would like too. So hiring day labourers to do parts of the initial work means that they get an above average wage for a days work and I get done in one day what would literally take me weeks to do by myself. I brought in 3 guys who worked 7 hours a day, for 2 full days, just clearing out weeds!! I can't imagine how long it would have taken me alone to do it, hiring these cats was definitely the right way to go!
 

Nearing The End Of Day 2 Of Weed Removal

Once the space had been cleared, I went to work laying bricks. I started by measuring out all the paths and the individual plots and sculpted their outlines by connecting string between corner markers. This was a great moment as for the first time I caught a real glimpse of what had been in my minds eye for so many months and finally seeing it come together was filling me with excitement. I then got to work laying bricks along the string lines. Long term I hope to get some mortar between the brings so that it will be a permanent setup, but this time round I decided instead to bury each brick a third of it's height in the ground so it would be held in place and will hopefully get to it next year. It would have been a substantially bigger job if I'd cemented them all this time round and I figured if unforeseeable things came up or I change my mind on how I want things laid out I would still have the freedom to change the setup which I wouldn't have if I cement them now. 

One of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about as I was laying the bricks was how the space would function as a whole. Sure I want it to produce a harvest of rich organic crops, and sure I want it to look beautiful, but I also want it to feel beautiful! I began noticing that when I was kneeling on the back path that runs parallel to the back wall, the angle between my neighbours and I was so steep that they couldn't see me from their windows and roofs; the feeling of not having the entire neighbourhood's eyes on you is bliss! This got me thinking about creating somewhere where you could just sit and enjoy this sensation of being in the garden without being the center of everyone's attention. I also wasn't enjoying all the right angles that I was making on each Vegie plot. I made the front wall of my garden form a curving design because it fit better with the overall vibe of the area and I really didn't want to have a boring ole flat fronted garden, yet here I was making something completely practical, yet completely lacking in love. I want to draw people into the space, for their eyes to enjoy it, and so I began mucking around with different design ideas and finally settled on a rejig of what I'd initially planned.

Revamped Garden Designs

I love the idea that by making the paths that divide the plots only come two thirds of the way to the front you have to enter right into the garden space to move about between the individual beds. This draws you in and helps you discover the secret places against the wall where I'll build some benches so you can sit and enjoy it all. Also, having less points of entrance and exit means that once you're in, you're naturally more inclined to walk about and explore each little area.

Laying Out The Initial Plots Design

Once I'd laid most of the brick work and had half of the plots completed, I got to work tilling the soil and bring in some wheelbarrows full of compost that Shoonksworth and I had been cooking up over the previous months. I also bought 80kgs of straw for mulch, had it delivered, and solidified in my neighbour's minds that I'm insane because I put what their cow's eat for dinner on my vegetable garden!

Little Feather Helping Till The Freshly Laid Compost

Those months proved to be difficult for my little family. My little man is gorgeous and smiley, but he's not been fond of sleeping and so I'm sure it's not hard to imagine what unrelenting heat coupled with sleep deprivation was doing to us. Because the days are so hot it was really only possible to do work in the cool before sundown (between 3:30-5:30pm) and so if I got out there twice a week, it was a good week! But I kept on going as much as I was able and by early October I had 5 out of the 7 beds completely set up and ready for sowing.

Resurrection Garden; October, 2013

There is still plenty of work to be done; rubbish to be extracted, stones to be cleared, weeds to be pulled, soil to be tilled, but the bulk of the shape is largely finished and the seedlings are already putting on leaves and climbing their way towards the sun. So my question to you then, is when are you going to join me for a late afternoon Chai in the Resurrection garden?