Thursday, December 20, 2007

It rained last night and into this morning.  Just a light rain, but it made everything different, as rain always does in thirsty places.  I could hear it in the birdsong at dawn: before I consciously realized it was raining, the birds sounded happier to my ears.  And then, as I found myself swatting at a higher number of mosquitoes than normal, I understood why!  “The rain,” Horst said, when we came for chai and breakfast a couple hours later, “is the midwife of life.”  Insects hatch out, birds feast, and people look happy and refreshed as well.  Horst, whom one would not normally describe this way, was downright cheery because of the rain, because it will feed his trees.  But before I can talk about that, I have to go backward and explain who Horst is and what this place is.

Horst is the caretaker of the island on which we are staying, a smallish (30-40 acres?) island in the Tungabhadra River, just outside the town of Hampi.  Hampi is in southern India, roughly between Bangalore and Goa, in a region known as Karnataka.  For India, this is a very lightly populated area.  Hampi is famous with pilgrims and tourists alike.  Locals believe that the Tungabhadra is southern India’s equivalent of the Ganges, and they say that Hampi is the site of a marriage between a god, whose name I can’t currently remember, and a mortal woman named Pampa.  Pampa was the daughter of a renowned sage and a devotee of this god, and she yearned so much for union with him that she undertook a long practice of penance, of purification.  Impressed by her determination and aspiration as well as her beauty, the god agreed to marry her, and their nuptials were celebrated here.  Tourists come because Hampi was also the capital city of the Vijayanagara empire (mid-14th century-mid 16th century).  During the empire’s heyday, the city’s population was roughly equal to that of Rome’s, and it was an amazingly cosmopolitan place, a center for trade and the arts.   Europeans who left records of their visits here said that Hampi was unrivaled for beauty, wealthy, and artistry.   One can glimpse its majesty in the ruins of temples, baths, water tanks, elephant stables, and royal dwellings that cover roughly 70 square kilometers here.  Many have been defaced, yet the mastery and devotion involved in carving all this out of granite is evident and moving.

Ah yes, granite.  How could I write even one paragraph about Hampi without talking about the rocks?  The landscape is dominated by enormous granite boulders—hills of them, outcroppings of them, the whole river valley formed of them—ranging in color from warm sand to dusky rose to grey-black. 

What kind of geological event or events could have led to this deposition? India has never been glaciated.  I am sure that I could Google Hampi or look it up on Wikipedia and find a scientific answer to this question, but (especially since there is only a dial-up connection here, too slow for words, worse than Sovernet!) for the moment, it is more fun and seems completely reasonable to imagine that this place was some kind of play- or battleground for gods or giants.  

The Tungabhadra flows through these rocks, sometimes visibly, sometimes far below ground.  You can be walking on boulders high up in the air, twenty or thirty feet, dry and hot, and suddenly realize that if you lie down and grow quiet, you can hear the river running a hundred feet or so below.  The rocks in the river valley are carved into the most fantastic shapes.  Some have great vertical hollows where water has fallen downward over countless centuries.   Many more are marked by deep holes where smaller rocks lodged in hollows and were swirled around, scouring the granite into deep circles and fantastic whorls, shapes within shapes.  And there are innumerable caves here.

The caves have long been home to meditators—one of the other names for this place is Rishikesh, home of the Rishis – ancient wise yogis of the Vedas..  The combination of the raw power of the landscape and the cultivated power of sustained human awareness make this landscape hum.  It is both very silent, underneath the conversations of the birds and the running of the water, and tremendously active.  It seems to call one to meditative practice, to deep internal listening.

This brings me, at last, back to Horst.  Horst is a passionate meditator of East German origin who has lived in India and Nepal for many, many years.  Because he cannot attain Indian citizenship, he cannot and does not own this land.  Instead he has formed a partnership with some local landowners who share his vision for this fantastic island.  I’m not totally clear on exactly how the ownership is organized, but I believe that they have basically organized a cooperative and Horst appears as the manager.  But the whole enterprise is driven by his vision and hard work.

Horst envisions this place as a combination meditation retreat, nature refuge, and seed of a sustainable community.  Already people come here to do long-term retreats in the caves, and Horst provides them with food.   The nature refuge aspect is also taking root.  (For more about Horst's project and the island itself, click http://ecodaya.com ) Horst has only been here for six and a half years, but simply from prohibiting grazing by cattle and especially goats and planting some trees, the wildlife here has taken off.  There are innumerable birds—sorry birdwatching friends, there is no bird guide here so I can’t tell you what any of them are—in an array of spectacular tropical colors.  There are giant fruit bats with wingspans so large you feel you should take cover when they fly over you and smaller brown bats, there are leopards and sloth bears, mongoose and civet cats and monkeys.

I have never seen monkeys in the wild before, and could not have imagined the pleasure their presence would give me.  There are two kinds here, the langurs, which are larger, with silvery-gray fur on their backs, golden chests, black faces and incredibly long tails, and a smaller brown monkey.  So far we have mostly seen and heard the langurs.  Around dawn, they begin their hooting conversations in the banana plantation just to the east of the house where we are staying.  Then you hear them crashing through the trees as they progress towards us.  Often they come leaping and clambering up the rocks just across from us, where we have a wonderful view of them from our terrace.  Sometimes they stop right in our backyard, where there is a tree adorned with long seedpods that they seem to relish.  This tree is just above the water tap where we wash our clothes and brush our teeth and the langurs seem utterly unconcerned about us, often passing as close as a few yards.  

They just delight me.  Their movements are a feast for my Feldenkrais trained eye and my mirror neurons—I can feel the wild, joyous abandon of their leaps between rocks and from rock to tree.  And it is obvious that they delight in this, too.   Just as we do, they seek out the climbs that give them good views—almost inevitably, once we’ve clambered up or down to somewhere that has a panorama of the landscape or a sweet opening on a waterfall, we find monkey shit there, just in the place that we, too, find nicest to sit.  

The natives, Horst included, are not so delighted with the monkeys, because they eat the bananas and coconuts and cashews and mangoes and passionfruits they cultivate on the farm here.  There is one worker whose entire job appears to be to chase the monkey out of the stands of fruit trees—an utterly futile task, as far as I can see, but probably a better job than many available here.  It seems to us that he simply chases them in the direction that they are already going—up the slope away from the lower grove in the morning, and back down and through them in the evening.  And it also seems that the monkeys regard this primarily as a game.  It makes keeping deer out of our gardens look like a rather straightforward task!  As a gardener, of course I sympathize with Horst.  In my heart, though, I cannot help but cheer for the monkeys.

Friday 21 December 2007

Winter solstice doesn’t have much meaning here, at 12 degrees latitude: the days grow only a few minutes shorter or longer through the whole turning of the year.  Still it is a special day in my heart.  I am thinking about the intensity of the darkness at home, the hope and joy that always arise on the winter solstice there, and all my friends who will be rejoicing at the return of the light today.  It was a pleasure to come to breakfast this morning and have Ailmut, a young German woman who is staying here, remark upon the solstice and comment that it is a big holiday for her family, “like Christmas.”  She went on to say that the dreams we dream in the next 13 days are important.  Peter had a hard time understanding what she was saying because her English isn’t that great, but I understood her intuitively, and her face lit up when she heard me explain to him that the dreams of this time are important because it is the time when the new life is being born and taking root inside us.  

I will celebrate this day by going off into one of the caves and spending the day alone there, meditating, doing yoga, sleeping and gazing out over the river and the hills.  Wake up at dawn tomorrow and welcome the sun with prayers for all my relations, but especially my friends and relations back home, holding the space and the light for me to come home to toward the end of this season.

But before I go, I want to finish up my introduction to Horst and his project here.  Horst is as passionate about sustainable agriculture as anyone I know in Vermont.  The first morning we were here we launched into a lively discussion about the loss of traditional farming practices and knowledge during the “Green Revolution” of the 1960’s, the attempts of agribusiness corporations today to monopolize seed supplies and the resulting loss of biodiversity and security for individual farmers and the food supply as a whole.  I felt completely at home!  A little later, I glanced down at a magazine lying on the little glass table where we take our meals and saw that it was a sort of South Asian version of The Small Farmers Journal.  This issue was devoted to grassroots efforts of farmers all over South Asia to maintain or regain control over their seed supplies by forming seed cooperatives and libraries.  

So Horst is trying to establish a sustainable, permaculture kind of agriculture here on the island, agriculture which can provide a stable source of income to help fund the retreat center as well as those who live and visit here.  The island is producing rice, wheat, corn, peanuts and some vegetables, but trees are the mainstay of this effort.  They grow much more easily than vegetables do, and they provide myriad benefits: quick-growing timber which can be sold for a profit, shade for other crops, a buffer against soil erosion and help with soil creation, improvement in availability and quality of ground water, medicine, and, of course, food for wildlife as well as humans.  Horst and his employees (about ten full-time, year round workers, with up to 50 employed at high-demand times like planting and harvest) are experimenting with many different kinds of trees: casurina (an odd, soft-needled pine tree), mango, fig, cashew, passionfruit, guava, a couple of kinds of acacias, and red sandalwood.  In addition to planting these trees on the island, Horst hopes to make the cooperative a nursery source for other folks in the area.  He is selling baby trees at much less than the usual going price in order to create a good relationship with buyers and encourage others to engage in reforestation and forest gardening efforts.

Of course what is astounding to a northern New Englander like me is the speed with which trees grow here.   While Horst was giving us his tour of the farm, he put his hands on a giant casuerina—almost two feet in diameter and 30 feet tall—and said, “Now here’s a big old one.  This tree is probably six or seven years old.”  I just had to laugh.  At that rate, one can begin cutting a stand of casherina for timber after only two or three years.  Much building here is done with thin pole framing, and the casherinas, which grow remarkably straight, are perfect for this use, and plenty big enough after such a short time.

Many techniques that are familiar to me are in use here, too—for instance, the deployment of green mulch crops to enrich soil and choke out undesirable and tenacious weeds.  And composting, of course, is absolutely critical to these depleted soils, just as it is for our glacier-scoured soils at home.  Horst employs vermiculture, worm assisted composting.  They have constructed three huge vermiculture tanks, each one probably four feet wide and 30 or 35 feet long.  In just the few years since they have started making their own compost, Horst says, the whole project has come to seem viable.  Before, when they were buying compost, it seemed impossible—what they could buy was of poor quality, and the cost made any crop too expensive from the beginning.

Still, there are formidable problems.  First of all, there are no roads onto the island.  Anything that needs to come on or off must be ferried across the river, usually in a traditional round boat called a coracle (it looks rather like a big basket) and then carried up and down steep banks of granite boulders.  Imagine looking at twenty tons of rice packed in 75 kilo (165 lb) burlap sacks and knowing that all of them must be transported that way—before they can reach a road and a truck to take them to a mill!

Horst was growing a lot of basmati rice, but there were no mills in this part of India which would take it.  Southern Indians don’t love basmati rice—most of what is consumed here is consumed in the north.  To find a mill there, transport the rice there, send someone with it to make sure it gets from mill to the buyer—all of this eats up whatever meager profit one might make on the crop.  This is the kind of difficulty that is familiar to small farmers everywhere.  But then there are the problems which are peculiar to India, problems that those of us accustomed to the systematized business environment of the U.S. can’t even imagine.  Yesterday Horst got a phone call from Lokesh, the guy who manages the day-to-day operations of the farm, telling him that when that twenty tons of rice arrived at the buyer’s, the buyer refused to give him the price on which they had formerly agreed.  What to do?  You can either take the new, lower price, or eat the expense of shipping the rice back home and starting over.  But this is normal here—no deal is ever really done until the money is in your hand.   Seems utterly crazy-making to me!

Despite all this, Horst is very optimistic.  After several years of hard struggle, during which he has poured most of the capital he had into the farm, he believes that it will become self-supporting this year.  When he talks about this, and about this cooperative becoming a seed for a larger truly sustainable community (there is talk of starting a community school on an adjacent piece of land, for example), his joy is infectious and inspiring.  This is the kind of thing that makes traveling worthwhile for this homegirl—to see, to feel for myself, directly, in my body, that the momentum for change I feel in my bones but which we rarely see reflected in the media, is real.  It gives me a lot of courage and optimism which I can bring to my efforts in my home field.  


We have been on the island for a week today—we spent the first five days away from home in transit—and are beginning to really drop into the rhythm of retreat.  What incredible luxury it is to live life not so much by the clock (although there are appointed hours for meals, and for singing/chanting before dinner) as by the desire of the body/mind/soul in relation to the natural world.  To sleep after lunch simply because it is hot and one was up a lot in the night, listening to the singing of unfamiliar frogs and insects and mulling over strange dreams.  To walk in the rocks until one is hot and tired, and then take a swim in the river and come back home for lunch.  It is amazing how sweet time becomes, and how little one needs, when one lives so quietly and simply.  I find myself eating about a third as much food as usual—partly because food supplies are rather modest and must be shared with at least four other people, partly because it’s hot rather than cold, but also because I have no need to use food to ground myself or to buffer myself from the excessive stimulus which most days at home bring.  

Of course one cannot live on retreat.  But retreat offers a wonderful opportunity to remember what really satisfies, what makes human life vivid and joyful and rich, and to ask how one can bring that back into so-called normal life.  It is so apparent, from this perspective, how abnormal, how radically unhealthy, even my “normal” life is—and my life is much less harried, much more balanced, and much quieter than the life of the average American.  Occasionally, when my thoughts turn in this direction, I despair—I have worked so hard to make my life as slow and quiet as it is, and it is still not nearly slow and quiet enough.  What more can one do, in the brutal economy of the U.S.?