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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

the lezzies

My brother Christopher had a couple of female golden retrievers he called The Lezzies. That always cracked me up, and confirmed the fact that my brother really did have a sense of humor. It had dried up a lot. Sometimes I wonder if he died in part because of a lack of direction or sense of humor in life. Here's to you, bro, a fun-loving yin/yang couple of Lezzies who live at the Guest House and pretty much have fun all day long.

Here's Sugar



And here's Coco. She likes hanging around people more, but they're both pretty gregarious.


Hey! Check out the banyan! I was walking along with a new guest, Kathy, and she offered to take my picture. She's been traveling a lot and like many people I've met since landing in India, is also going through some major transitions in her life. Oooh sorry, no picture of Kathy.


Wow, that's crazy, I just checked my gmail email account and heard from an old acquaintance who could be a great good friend whose name is Chris. Hey Chris, if you stop by! Hi and it's great to hear from you, I'm writing you a note.

I miss friends at home, and home is still Eugene, even though I feel a great sense of general rootlessness, restlesness, aimlessness.....gah. Part of me wants to just book a flight back, but I don't think it's really the time yet.

And nothing really makes much sense, which could, I think, be a premium source of and springboard for freedom. Damn, that was nearly a Sri Aurobindo sentence. He's a guy, we'd call a sort of terrorist (freedom fighter), Indian, educated in Great Britain, famous yogi, friend of The Mother who founded the city of Auroville. He wrote this big-ass book (well a few of them) called The Synthesis of Yoga, which I read aloud for that german fellow a couple weeks ago - read to tape, so he could play it back and listen to the great words of wisdom and also learn how to speak better english since I know how to pronounce rather obscure 'oxford english' words. Well ANYway, Sir Sri Aurobindo's sentences are circuitous, litanic, intellectual, and LONG. Like, a paragraph's worth of length, with lots of asides and subtangents and couched phrases...gah.

People here, in India and in Auroville, keep saying that anything is possible. There is this sense of great seriousness but also this playfulness that I see, catch glimpses of. That seem to encourage one to ask for what one wants, and it will be produced magically in some glancing way. I've seen it. I've experienced it. You really can and do create your reality but here, now, it seems much more palpable. I'm not sure why.

Last night Angela showed up at the kitchen area with these rad Audrey Hepburn type sunglasses on. I told her I love the sunglasses! She said, They're not sunglasses, they're (*)&daasd;fl something Italy. I thought, okay, I still need to polish my english language skills. I asked her to explain. The glasses are made of plastic, and the dark 'lenses' are actually punctuated with small holes at very regular intervals. They're pinhole glasses, and she found them on the shelf for really cheap in Italy. What?!

Well, at the ashram in Pondy you can go for these eye classes - they give you exercises to help you regain your eyesight. This is not a load of shit. I tried the glasses on and I'll be damned, I could see better. Like, Clemens' expression across the kitchen area, and reading the whiteboard....what?!

You'd need to de-graduate your spectacle prescription as your eyesight grows stronger, but if you do this while in India, you can just go buy lenses right off the shelf too, really inexpensively.

Anything. Is. Possible.

I read a couple of things recently that I really recognize, from travelers and also traveling to India -- that unfamiliar surroundings make a body awkward and forgetting how to do simple things, and coming here makes you learn english all over again. I felt comforted, knowing I'm not alone in my fumbling around all the time.

Here's a short video, one that I tried posting yesterday, some birds singing in the morning. I'm not sure how well the sound carries through, so try turning it up.




Stopped at our grocery store, Pour Tous, for a few nibbly things and bananas for breakfast. Someone had written with a blue ballpoint pen, 'for special people' underneath Pour Tous, which is French meaning 'For All'. Yeah. Ummm....wow I feel weird being a white person here with what is a gross amount of money to most indigenous people. You can shop at Pour Tous if you have a guest account (or are a full-on Aurovillian) through Auroville -- since it's supposed to be a 'cashless system'. You still put cash in your account though. It's just debited from each place you do business, instead of you handing each business the cash. Hmm. Sometimes I buy at Pour Tous, for the nostalgia of shopping in places like The Kiva and Sundance at home (natural food stores with crowded aisles where everyone knows your name); sometimes I buy direct from the villagers, which I enjoy.

However, I did buy a bottle of cold fizzy kombucha and rose petal (for cooling the body), for about fifty cents, which I just can't wrap my head around. It's nice, don't get me wrong! And a little thing of spirulina that would be about six bucks in the States is about a sixth of the price here. I stopped off at a local snackery for some samosas (yeah, the place we camped out at the other day, talking all sorts of philosophical shit about perfection...it was good shit! don't get me wrong! it's all valid! heh heh)....they ran a bit on the spendy side, at Rs12 for two. Funny how things shift, yeah? I just about bought a kilo of lemons at Pour Tous, but they wanted about thirty rupees. I said No way, man, I can buy them for less in the village. And I did - two rupees a piece (which is still expensive! because in the village at the workshop near Vellore, we bought them for a rupee each, and our cooks said that we should have been charged a half rupee - fifty paise - each! hee hoo!).

Went for a bike ride around the 'hood this afternoon, here are some signs on places:

This outside a cashew orchard. What?!

And this on the gate to a....brain gym! What??!! Huuzzah!



Holy crap I'm stinky. I've never lived in such humidity. I need to get off this hotbox and go shower. Laters!

2 comments:

ellipsisigh said...

I love the bird sound that keeps repeating...boop...boop...boop...throughout the video...8^)

Victoria Koldewyn said...

hee hee...yeah isn't that great? there is a lower-pitched one as well, and another mid-range with boop boops that are closer together.

boop boop be-doop :)