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!