It is hot--in the eighties or low nineties every day. Jasmine, bougainvillea, and frangiapani blooming all over the place.  Eating locally is really different here, let me tell you--as in, brown rice, cashews (Peter's house here is surrounded by a 50 acre organic cashew plantation), bananas, coconuts, papaya (which I actually don't care for). 

I am doing lots of yoga, and now that I am in Auroville, lots of other cool stuff as well. Tomorrow I am taking a belly dancing workshop, and there is now a Feldenrkais teacher living in this community, so I can take Awareness Through Movement classes three or four times a week if I want to. I DO love it here, rather to my surprise. It is weird, overwhelming, and astoundingly chaotic (you should've seen the bus station in Bangalore--a huge and very sophisticated city--no signs or other indicators of where to find your bus, you just have to wander through this giant parking lot clogged with people and choking with exhaust and ask people where the bus will be. You get an immense variety of answers--the question often sparks disagreements among bystanders--and no guarantee that any of them will be correct. And yet, miraculously, when the bus actually arrives (in a different spot than any of the folks you asked suggested), four people you've never seen before come up to you and tell you that your bus is here. How the hell did they even know you were waiting for the bus to Pondicherry? It feels a bit like being in a magical realism film.  

There is garbage EVERYWHERE, and dogs, pigs, goats, and sometimes people scavenging in it...and yet, it is really relaxed and fun, too. This place is good for a control freak like me--life is so clearly and utterly out of control here, and on a scale that boggles the mind, so I just surrender and enjoy it for what it is. If only I can remember that life at home is equally out of control, it just looks different, I might have a lot more fun a lot more of the time!