Firing Into The Sun..

There is one particular joy about life in Australia which is hard to adequately explain to someone who hasn't been raising there kids in a place like Banaras. If you've always had access to it then like a lot of things you probably don't realise just how unbelievably amazing it is, but if like many of my expat friends who hail from the distant shores of America, Europe and Africa and are raising their kids in North India, well, they know precisely what I'm talking about... Parks!!

Oh the heavenly riches of having safe places where your kids can run around, be entertained and play without the throngs of BHU boys (the local university students) who have already commandeered the broken down Seesaw (which functions like a guillotine more often than not) and the Slippery Dip (which are always broken half way down and end in a series of sharp jagged spears that spell nothing but impending doom), as well as not having to be constantly set at Defcon 1 to prevent the very common occurrence of someone picking up your child and starting to walk off with them because hey, they just wanted to take a photo or to show their family who live 3 streets away the cute white child they found (in our first year in India this happened to us A LOT!).

Just the mere fact that there are child friendly parks is a completely new experience for us. I can really only think of one park in Banaras that's good for little ones but sadly it's about an hour from our place, all other "parks" (of which there are not many) are covered in drying clothes, rubbish, snoozing homeless folk, young lovers trying to sneak a kiss, packs of dogs and a million games of cricket (often it's this and more). Yet where we're living in Sydney at the moment, I have an amazing park at the end of my street where all these photos were taken and another 5 brilliant parks within walking distance. And in our family there's no way you'll ever miss noticing that you've gone past a park due to our park detector, ie; Little Feather, who squeals with delight from the back seat each and every time she sees a park and begin to wax lyrical about how wonderful the park looked and how we should stop whatever we're doing to go play there.. Every. Single. Time!

 
There are so many wonderful things about raising our kids in India but the lack of outdoor places for the kid to play in our city is something I truly lament! Small as it may seem, the simple pleasure of being outdoors with my kids and seeing them excitedly charge from one set of play equipment to the next brings such warmth to this Papa Bear's heart, thus parks are definitely something simple yet special we've been indulging a lot in since being back in Australia. It kind of makes you realise some of the smaller things in life that are worth being grateful for; something I'm actively trying to be more conscious of at the moment. It's so easy, in fact I think it's our species' default, to overlook and undervalue many of the exceptionally wonderful gifts we have and to instead waste our time being frustrated that we don't have more/better/newer/etc. so why not join me in taking a moment to give yourself some freedom and search out with fresh eyes those glimpses of beauty in your life which you've gradually become accustomed to no longer seeing.

As a final thought, someone once told me that you should always take photographs with your back to the sun.. I must wholeheartedly disagree! My love for photography really burst into flames last year and the last few months I've really enjoyed working through an online photography course in an attempt to grow my measly skills into something a little more robust. I've loved that its been challenging me to be more creative with my shots and so when it comes to firing into the sun.. well, is there anything quite so magical?!

Monkey Battles, Garlic Thieves & The Spoils Of War..

December 2013

 
During a recent conversation with my good friend Ragnar about my garden back in Banaras, it occurred to me that I had never posted the final update from the last few months of work in the Resurrection Garden. Somewhere in amongst our relocating back to Australia for 6 months this post quite understandably just got lost in amongst the hubbub of life. So without further a do, I'd like to offer you an insight into some of my monkey troubles, garlic thieves and the spoils of war!   

December 2013

In late December I had broken the back of the manual labor and was mostly in maintenance mode with the Garden so most visits were just about some spot weeding, enjoying a chai on my favourite garden seat and the daily task of removing the neighbour's rubbish (and semi-regular bags off poo). I had already planted out all the beds with the seedlings I'd been growing in my house in the previous months and things were coming along nicely but as things always go in Banaras, an increase in production results in an increase in interest, and not the positive kind.

For a number of months we'd been frequently commenting how great the absence of Bundar (monkeys) had been and how well our gardens were able to get established in their absence. But wherever they had been they had obviously decided it was enough and back to our homes they came, and brought with them plenty of reinforcements. Almost daily I'd be racing up the to gardens, slingshot and warhammer in hand (ok.. so maybe it was just a large stick) to chase them away but ultimately it was a war of attrition and both sides were amply supplied. Oodbilav is a crack shot with our hunting slingshots and would regularly send them scurrying back to higher grounds with their tails between their legs (though usually after they had filled their belly's from our gardens). And even our neurotic landlord went and bought a high powered air riffle and would regularly patrol the property with his young sons taking shots at them. One day he even confessed to trying to shoot one in it's bottom but missed and hit it in the heart! He said that it died soon after and so he wrapped it in a mala made of marigolds and that night, under the cover of darkness, launched it off his roof top and sent it splashing down into the Ganga (Ganges River) 3 stories below.. Ooh how the madness never let up!

February 2014

As it got later into December and the cold really set in, you could see the difference in growth as things really began to slow down in the Garden. Crops that weren't already well established either died off or essentially their growth ground to a halt and as this dramatically effects the flavour of most crops, some of them were forcibly relocated to their new home in the compost pile. To fill in the spaces of those crops that weren't performing well I chanced upon a small gardening store in town that had a new pile of seedling strewn across their counter and I managed to pick up a couple of different types of veggies that went straight into the ground. They didn't perform quite as well as I'd hoped but when you're handed a pile of seedlings that have their roots completely exposed and are wrapped in nothing but strips of wet newspaper, well, you only have moderate expectation (and for AU$0.43 I didn't loose much sleep over it).

The Organic Hairy Canadian

Considering that the River Ashram is a Jesus Ashram, it probably comes as no surprise that Christmas day ends up being one of our busiest days of the year. Each year we hold a huge celebration on Christmas day and invite travelers and friends to join us in all our festivities. In the past 3 years we've had anywhere between 80 and 120 people rock along (last year we had a turn out of people from 26 different countries) and we always put on an incredible feast. Fresh salad is a rare commodity around Varanasi - and a fresh Organic Salad, well, that's an even rarer find - so I'd been holding off harvesting my salad greens for a while as I wanted to share them as part of the Christmas celebrations. And as you can see in the above pic, between Shookdedy Ba-Boooom's garden and mine, come Christmas morning we had a fantastic time in the Gardens harvesting an amazing collection including 8 different types of fresh, crisp, gorgeous organic lettuce which was devoured in no time.

January 2014

 
In January, the cold in Varanasi was at its peak and so as per our tradition we skipped town and heading for the warmer climates of north Thailand to have a couple of weeks holiday, be a part of a conference and catch up with some truly sweet friends who run a community similar to ours in the northern town of Pai. Knowing that I wouldn't be around I used up a great deal of the 80kgs of straw that I had bought months earlier and went to town heavily mulching everything.

Mulch is one of those wondrous things! It's brilliant for water conservation as it keeps the sun from blazing down on the bare earth and drying out your top soil, thus keeping the soil moist and reduces your need for watering by around 60%. It helps keep your soil temperature constant which reduces shock and stress on your plants (particularly helpful for me during these cold months). It helps keep the weeds down and prevents a lot of the weed's seeds from germinating (which is a massive ongoing fight I'm having in the Resurrection Garden) and less weeds means less competition for the nutrients and water that you want going to your dedicated food crops and not away from them. And if you're using an organic mulch such as Straw, Pea Straw, Cane, Bean, Lucerne, etc. as they break down they release organic matter back into the soil which improves drainage and soil structure as well as encouraging earthworms and microbial activity. So if you're new to Gardening then let it be known; Mulch is your friend!

 

December 2013

 
I've tried on a couple of occasions to explain why I put straw onto my garden to my neighbours and Mali ('groundskeeper') but with little success. My Hindis not great so obviously that's a pretty big hurdle, but in Banaras there is really only 2 options when it comes to most things; the way it's always been done and the wrong way - and putting what cow's eat for lunch on top of your garden is quite simply not the way things are done! Shookdedy Ba-Boooom tells the story of her early days gardening at the Ashram when she first tilled the soil, watered and mulched, went inside only to come back later that afternoon to find that the Mali had raked up all the mulch and set it on fire. As I said, mulching your garden is quite simply Not.The.Way.Things.Are.Done!

January 2014

The tomato plants had been growing like a dream and I was keen to built a trellis to help support them grow upwards instead of into the giant tomato thicket they were currently in the process of creating. My neighbours sell bamboo and twine is super cheap around these parts and so with these resources and a bit of research I ended up creating a trellis of horizontal double layers of twine, essentially supporting growth by twisting the tomato branches through each double line of twine for each foot of vertical growth. The trellis was something I'd been wanting to do for a long time but time restraints meant that I just never got around to it. Once the trellis was up I began threading the branches up through it and the finished product worked a treat! The only down side was that in the process I sadly damaged a number of the branches whilst unraveling the colossal mess that their branches were in, so the lesson of doing things before they really need to be done is one which I'll commit to learning.. sometime in the future.. perhaps.. ergh, knowing me probably not.. But once it was done the tomato plants really did continue to grow wonderfully and soon after began putting out hundred of clusters of young fruits which if they were lucky enough to avoid the Bundar charged on to maturity.

 

February 2014

 
In February we returned from Thailand and to be honest, I was a little heart broken coming back into the Resurrection Garden. In the weeks prior to leaving for Thailand there had been a number of wonderful Community Gardening afternoons and the Garden was in the best shape of it's life and was an absolute delight to be in. Upon returning it was like walking into a different garden altogether. With three weeks of my neighbour's uncollected rubbish scattered everywhere, weeds which had gone unchecked and the telltale signs of the presence of veggie thieves, I found it hard to even want to be in there. One of the biggest disappointments was probably the veggie thieves who had helped themselves to my imported elephant Garlic (which was nowhere near ready for harvesting and thus inedible and a complete waste to steal) as I had such big plans to multiply that Garlic and spread it out amongst my local friends who grow their own food so they could continue growing it at their homes. I'll never know who stole it, and even though the safe money is on my landlords - they now own a gun, so I plan to quietly lick my wounds from the safety of my home and never speak of this again!

It took me a couple of weeks before my heart was ready to really invest itself back into the Garden, but once I was ready, I hit it again with passion. And as you can see in the above image, towards the end things began to once again look and feel magical again.

Heirloom Carrots

One aspect of gardening that I'm becoming increasingly excited by is in the arena of heirloom varieties. Whilst I'm still a complete novice in the field I was particularly excited to track down and trial this variety of Purple Carrots. Even though they still had a while to go before reaching full maturity, I'd previously promised Little Feather that she could help me harvest them and as we were only a week away from heading back to Oz I decided it was time for us to put on our Gum boots, march up to the garden and get our hands dirty pulling up a few different varieties of carrot that we'd been growing. Sure they're cheap as chips and take a long time to grow, but eating carrots fresh from the Garden, really, how can you resist?!
 

Rainbow Silverbeet/Chard, Broccoli, Basil, Lettuce, English Spinach, Carrots, Rocket, Kale, Cos Lettuce, Mini Cos, Black Russian, Gross Lissi & Cherry Tomatoes.

 
With only a couple of days left before leaving I decided it was time to get out into the Garden for one final harvest. As you can see from the above shot, it resulted in a fantastic haul of amazing tasting crops and brought a real sense of accomplishment to all the sweat and tears I'd put into this project in the last two years. I've spent so so so many hours in that space, sometimes feeling a great sense of refreshment, sometimes pulling my hair out; constantly battling the monkeys, the rubbish, the weeds, the neighbours, the termites, the years of soil mistreatment, the elements and so to really experience that joy of dig my hands into the earth and pulling out literally arms full of fresh produce really made my heart feel full. I was able to pass out what would have been baskets full of veggies over the wall to my neighbours (yes.. the same ones who send baskets full of their faeces my way) and whilst showing gratitude in these sorts of situation doesn't seem to be a common cultural trait amongst Banarsi folk, I'm pretty sure that somewhere in there there was a bit of love being handed back and forth too. 

February 2014

As a closing though, if you were keen to visit the Resurrection Garden but the thought of forking out thousands of dollars to make the trip to Varanasi doesn't quite appeal to you, I have something which might just be the next best thing. Whilst this is from back in January and certainly isn't as good as being there in the flesh, you do get the benefit of checking it out from the comfort of your own home (which will certainly save you a few rupees)! So have a click on the following link and take a look around (works best on a tablet or smart phone but using the arrow keys on your keyboard is also good) and as my Little Feather likes to say; "Welcome to be here!!"
 
                                                                            >>> The Resurrection Garden 3D <<<

Confesticles and Wymns Rhydms..

Me & my favourite Jesus lovin' cats

So not too long ago we landed back here in Australia. We decided years back that we'd return to Oz every 2.5-3 years so that we could reconnect with family and friends and our broader Jesus loving community because we deeply value those relationships, and so that's just what we're doing. It's been an interesting re-enty in Australian life and there have been plenty of moments of reverse culture shock that I wasn't quite mentally prepared for (more about that in a later post) but one thing the Wild Flower and I were really keen to do was get away on Confest 2014!

Confest is essentially a volunteer driven festival that takes place in the bush about an hour outside of Deniliquin (only a lazy 11 hour drive from Sydney) and I'd say that in the 9 years we've been going its probably attracted a turn out of a few thousand people each year. The motto of Confest used to be something along the lines of "the gathering and sharing of ideas of what it means to be a happy and whole being" and so it relies on people voluntarily running workshops on whatever makes their heart sing the most.

 

Essentially, if you play an instrument/have a deep knowledge of something sacred/are skilled at celestial twerking (yes that really was a workshop this year!)/ etc. etc. etc. and one morning you wake up and feel like running a workshop, you make your way to the central meeting area, write it up on the workshop board and you might get nobody turning up, or you might strike gold and get five thousand people turning up.

 
I've always been excited to get away for these few days in the bush with thousands of other people who are interested in digging into the deeper things of life, of meaning and of spirituality. For those who know me, I'm pretty open about my favourite conversation topic being based around 'what do you believe about spirituality and why,' and so a festival that's designed for people to share their thoughts and beliefs on precisely this topic means a lot of the time I'm feeling like a kid in a candy shop.

 

I also feel pretty blessed by the crew that go along with year by year. In the past I've always known pretty much everyone I was going with pretty well before Confest, but this year there was bunch of amazingly wonderful cats I got to meet for the first time and had some sweet moments getting to know them and building some new relationships. Being my first time on Confest with kids meant that getting to spend as much time with people as I would have liked proved to be a more challenging experience than before, but I'll take what I can get, and what I got was certainly nothing worth complaining about.

 

Like most Confesters, our crew really loves the Confest magic and we always strive to invest our love and skills into making it a greater festival experience for everyone (and I feel I can say this without compromising because in general all of the creative energy and greatness comes from others in our crew and not from me! I just get the joy of riding on the back of some truly fantastic coattails!). Over the years we've put on parades, Jesus Easter Gatherings, bush sculpture workshops, meditation sessions, classic 80's pop rock jam sessions, acrobatic classes, Javanese inspired back lit puppetry shows, all of which have been amazing, but without a doubt one of my favourite highlights each year has got to be the Chai High Tea.

For weeks in advance we're baking treats, hoarding Chai ingredients and raiding op shops for the most garish and outrageous outfits possible. We decided this years theme was 'Oscar Wild goes to a Rave' so a bunch of us went storming throughout Confest singing and dancing and inviting people to join in the festivities which saw about 50 or more people rocking up to join in the good vibes.

 

There's always this moment at the start of the Chai High Tea (just after this blessing was offered from up on high) when the cloth covering the baked goods is pulled back and the place explodes into a cosmic free for all. With live music, platters of amazing food, pots of hot chai and a forest full of crazy shenanigans, really, how could it be anything less than amazing?

One especially great element is thats everyone's "welcome at the Chai High Tea, where the Chai is hot and the love is free!" Even if you're a dirty feral, or a high flying corporate, we don't mind, bring in the lame, bring in the blind, even bring in this sleazy bearded homeless lady on her way from a Phd graduation ceremony, everyone's welcome!

And if you ever get a chance, you should most definitely do what we did and get yourself into the same space as these fine creatures in the above image! We've known these cats for more than a decade now and suffice to say they're some of our favourite people on this green planet! Reverend Rainbird, Lady Wildwood and their lil ones live (& kind of run?!) the Homelands community up in Bellingen on the midnorth coast of NSW so if you're WWOOFing or looking for an amazing place in Oz to be, these are most assuredly the people for you!

A friend I was talking to about Confest yesterday was asking me a bunch of questions about my time and we had a great moment when he looked me in the eye and said "Let me get this straight, you spent 5 days at a Clothes Optional Hippy Festival in the middle of the bush and you don't have any crazy stories to tell?!" And I think that's kinda true (Banaras what have you done to me?!?). I had an amazing time and feel greatly encouraged, but "crazy" stories, not so much this time round. Upon reflection, I guess naked bike riders, dog whisperers, tantric energetics, polyamorous communities and packs of naked mud people running around pretending to be cavemen have all become a more normal feature in my life than I first realised.

 
It was however, very sweet wandering around and running into people we hadn't seen in a number of years, especially when those relationships felt like they just picked up exactly where they had left off. We first went on Confest in 2004 and have gone every year since (except for 2012-13 when we were overseas), and so you make a lot of "Confest friends" who because they live in Melbourne of somewhere outside of Sydney, you really only connect each year when you're back on site, but it is interesting how much Wild Flower and I value some of those relationships, even if we only spend a very small percentage of time together each year! We even got to catch up with a good friend we met in Varanasi!

 

We begin each morning at our campsite with a time of connection. It's such a beautiful way to begin each day; praying together, meditating on the Scriptures, someone sharing a reflection or teaching, speaking the love of Jesus into each others lives and getting into plenty of great music and singing.

I had two gorgeous moments during our morning times of devotion this year; the first was playing along to some Yeshu Bhajans (Jesus Devotion Music in Hindi) with Wild Flower who played her harmonium in front of other people for the very first time. I've played with countless people, countless times throughout my life, but sitting side by side with my gorgeous wife, our backs warming in the morning sun, singing and making music together, aaah, it'll be a sweet memory I'll hold with me for a long time to come. The other was sharing a Bluegrass song I wrote last year and hearing it sung by a group of people for the first time. Around eighteen months back I was going through a real Bluegrass Gospel phase and set myself a goal of writing a song in the genre, so to then have 25 people all stomping their feet and belting out a tune I'd written was a pretty surreal moment.

Prayers, Scriptures, Devotional Songs, This Crowd = Bliss.

Lastly, I have a small confession to make. I have a guilty pleasure that I indulge each year after Confest. On the trip home, it's not unusual need to stop for petrol in the first could of hours after leaving the site and it's par for the course that many Petrol stations will be adjacent to a McDonalds. Now in general I don't eat McDonalds (I think I went 15 years without touching the stuff) and I don't crave eating it while driving home from Confest, but I do LOVE trying to make eye contact with other dirty footed confesters while they're sheepishly running to their cars with bags full of maccas. I think people must feel like they're committing the ultimate betrayal; 4 days of mostly organic, vegetarian, local grown foods at a Hippy Festival, followed swiftly by Micky Dees! Truthfully I really don't mind what people eat, but the look of horror on people's faces when they see they've been caught out with a mouth full of cheeseburger is just too priceless to pass up! So if you're one of those people I've seen over the years then I must convey a giant thank you for making my drive home just that much more enjoyable!

More realistic..

So finally, if you find yourself wandering around Bliss or Tranquility one day and you come across this campsite, make sure you stop in and enjoy the hospitality of some of the finest & furriest Jesus lovin' folk this side of the Jordan.. he's the cat on the right.

Paint The Town Paan..

Step out your front door, it'll be there. Take a boat ride down the Ganga ('Ganges River'), it'll be there. Walk into a fancy looking Government office, you'd better believe it'll be there! Paan, otherwise known as betel nut, is as ubiquitous in Banaras as the holy cow! And no matter where you go you can be well assured that it won't be long before your eyes (and probably your feet) will stumble across a smattering of someone's most recent chewing session.

Paan is a chewing stimulant native to India and Pakistan and derives it's name from the Sanskrit word for 'leaf' or 'feather.' Due to it's psychoactive properties (most often tobacco) it's popular amongst hard working bicycle rickshaw wallas, auto rickshaw drivers, day laborers, taxi drivers, fruit sellers, tailers, fishermen, chai wallas, salesmen, water buffalo herders, businessmen, old ladies, ok, so it's pretty much popular amongst everyone. There's a pretty broad variety of Paan from the innexpensive to the slighty more pricey, but at its cheapest and nastiest it sells for only a couple of rupees (AU$0.08) per packet and once you've let it linger in your mouth for as long as you care to, it seems you can spit it out wherever the bloomin' hell you want.

I remember the first time I walked into my faculty building at Banaras Hindu University. The building is old and not particularly well cared for, but it's a university building and so it still looks big and official. As I walked inside the front doors, through the lobby area and began climbing the flights of stairs it was quite the shock to see that even inside a place as prestigious as BHU, the corners of every stair well, the end of every hallway and at the base of every window sill, the tell tail signature of someone offloading their Paan payload was still waiting there for the world to see.  

Sure it's gross, sure it's unhygienic, and sure it'll give you cancer, but the splatter often has a quiet charm about it if you're willing to accept it. It took me sometime to begin noticing but eventually I pulled out the camera and went for a walk to photograph some of the local "street art." This series represents just one 40 minute walk around my neighbourhood photographing the Paan stains in my local gullies. What this collection represents to me is that as long as there is Paan to be sold, there will be photographs to be taken.