An Ode to Breakfast

As part of our journey, Grace and I write (at least) one poem a day.  I'd like to share a poem I wrote about the poori, my most favorite deep fried breakfast item.  A poori is a round golden puff of dough both crispy and chewy to be eaten with a vegetable accompaniment.  In addition to commemorating the poori, this poem also integrates some of the teachings I have received on putting others before oneself as an important part of the path to happiness.

You are my guruji, pooriji
The way you puff so fluffily
And let me eat you so selflessly
Thinking less of yourself and more of me

Pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya

    Here Siddartha, prince of Kapilavastu, aka the Buddha, sat beneath a bodhi (peepul) tree and attained something mysteriously called enlightenment.  When the demons of illusion raged at him and questioned his daring, he called upon the earth to witness his right to claim his newfound freedom from suffering. A descendant of the original tree still stands in the center of the grand MahaBodhi temple complex.
    Bodh Gaya is in Bihar, the poorest state in India with dust for fields and known for its bandits and miscreants. We arrived in Bodh Gaya during a cold wave that killed 40 people a night, passing through mist from which emerged occasional villages and berobed fire-huddlers. Today, in the wintertime, Bodh Gaya is a small slice of big Indian chaos. The main street is flooded with exhaust and a sea of maroon robed Tibetans with rosy cheeks and gently laughing eyes,  dotted here and there with saffron colored Thai or Burmese monks, and the occasional triangular straw-hatted Vietnamese.
         The journey from the south took us two full nights and two full days.  During the boredom of train delays we made our biggest mistake.  If you think sprouted garbanzo bean salad on a train in India is too good to be true, IT IS.  Much of our time in Bodh Gaya was spent in bed huddling for warmth or in the bathroom.  5 years before I had arrived in Bodh Gaya during March, a much more peaceful time there, and also became sick upon arrival, so I tried to make myself feel better by chalking it up to the power of this place burning karma.
     All the big names of Tibetan Buddhism visit Bodh Gaya during the winter months.  The Dalai Lama and the Karmapa were both there just before us, and we had the blessing to receive teachings from the reincarnation of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the main honchos of the Nyingmapa lineage.  He is 20 this current lifetime, a sweet serious youth.  His topic was bodhicitta.  The main thing that distinguishes the Mahayana (great vehicle) Buddhism of Tibet and the various Zen traditions from Theravada (classic school and best known for it's Vipassana and Insight traditions) is the concept of bodhicitta.  This means the motivation that all practice be rooted in the motivation to free all beings from suffering, and to stay in the cycle of life- without peacing out into nirvana- until every single creature in the multi-dimensional cosmos is enlightened.
      It was a bit of a mind fuck to receive this teaching in a place where tiny, barefoot, wild-haired, hungry-eyed five year olds carrying infants in their one blanket cried to me for food and money every time I left my guest house. And yet more questions of integration, for which I have no answer, was raised.  What is the relationship between practice and engagement?  How do I confront the world with open eyes, without the despair driving me either to escape or to burn myself too far down?  How do I care completely and not care at all?

Across a line only the gods can see

         Across a line only the gods can see, the outer landscape shifts and the inner landscape adjusts to the new dance.  Tongues curl around sounds in a different picture.  Green and lush becomes red and dust. Slowly there is less concrete and fewer cars and more barren earth, bullock carts, and tin-bamboo shacks held together  by woven leaves and hope.  Here the roots of the banyan tree tangle with the invisible roots of humanities antiquity.  Rice cooked over cow dung fires reminds me exactly how much we can loose.  The clear, curious eyes that greet me remind me happiness is not dependent on what I think I cannot live without.
         Pondicherry- the decay of colonial France meets seaside India.  We made one pilgrimage stop to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.  Aurobindo was a pre-Gandhi Indian freedom fighter turned spiritual teacher who synthesized the wisdom of the world's spiritual traditions, and threw in modern science (especially psychology) for good measure.  Thus he is one of the fathers of transpersonal psychology and the spiritual lineage holder of my school.
         At the ashram, I spoke the smiling white haired man whose job it is to herd the faithful hordes.  We  were about to leave and I was feeling a little less enlightened than I was hoping to.  The Lonely Bible (our name for the Lonely Planet guidebook) says there is meditation and yoga at the ashram so I ask.
         "No," he tells me. I stand there like a lost puppy until he says, "And I'm going to tell you something else.  Don't trust people who tell you they can teach you to meditate.  They tell you concentrate on this, concentrate on that, your breath, an image, a mantra.  But when you concentrate and your mind is crazy with thoughts, who can control your thoughts?"
         Not sure if this was a rhetorical question, but always wanting to be the good student I answer, "Yourself?"
         "Yes. So you see, don't go to someone else to meditate, just go to yourself."
        As I grapple with this, he continues. "Here, you come, you sit by the Mother's samadhi.  You know, Mother said 'I am near and I am far.'  When you sit next to her, and you are not open, she is far.  When you are 10,000 miles away and you are open to her, she is within you."  I sense the conversation is over and we leave.
        I leave content to add another piece of wisdom to my growing pile and contemplating the paradox.  The truth is within and yet so often we need a teacher, or something else that is external to show us this truth.  India does not seem willing to give me any easy answers, no teacher to tap on my shoulder and enlighten me with his gaze.  Hearing that the answer within me is scary, for it requires self-discipline and the will to say I know what is right for myself.  Perhaps in Tiruvanamalai, where Shiva is worshipped as the element of fire, I will find a flame to ignite that kind of powerful self-will.

pray the fire be gentle

from the space
    between my ribs:
                                 FLAMES
i begin to burn
pray the fire be gentle

    psychedelic heat
          distorts
              engulfs
                  melts precious western personal space requirements

sacred temple rises through layers of existence to reality's center
sacred toothless beggars squat crooked in sacred cowpies
sacred lingams for sale only 250 rupees
   ("okay, okay, i give for 200 best price")
sacred yellow rickshaws honking sacred Disney dee-diddly-dee-BOOP-boop honks
   filling lungs with sacred exhaust
sacred monkeys scamper sacred temple powerlines snicker

  at me
    compressed sidewaysbackforward
        molded to 1000 anxious pilgrims
            born through the breathless canal
        not knowing if direction is life or death

fire rises
    skin drips

glimpse so brief
    god of all things hot
        coal black
              marigold wreathed

bell strikes dissonance

ashes refuse gossip

pray the fire be gentle

Ashram days

      I stumbled sleepy-eyed down the pink steps of the pink high rise growing out of the coconut silhouetted backwaters.  Stairs wide enough for two, I believe, I am shocked when an older woman dressed all in white with a shaved head (and therefore obviously much holier than I) refuses to share the passage with me.   She budges not an inch, puts her hand to my shoulder, and pushes me up the stairs to the platform where she can pass me without having to make the slight sideways motion passing on the stairs would have required.  She mutters an "Om Namah Shivaya" as she does this, a little-known translation of which means "get the fuck out of my way."     
     Flashback to arriving at the ashram several days before and being ushered to the soft sand under the gently water-colored sky.  I think I am in heaven.  The sun sets over the Arabian Sea as Amma is asked the question, "what do you do when people at the ashram are getting on your nerves?"  She spends the next few satsangs- talks given by a spiritual teacher- on this question.  She asks us what we think, she laughs when the answers sound too spiritual, she tells us stories.  She is much sillier than I ever remember her being in the San Ramon ashram.  She tells us that we would not blame someone with a physical handicap for their handicap, so why should we take someone who has an anger problem seriously?
     Amma tells a story of a man with a handicap that makes him talk in a nasally manner.  He goes into a store where, unbeknownst to him, the man behind the counter has the very same impediment.  He gets angry because he think the other guy is making fun of him.  He gives him a peice of his mind, and when the man working at the store hears him speaking in the same nasally tone, he thinks he is the one who is being made a joke.  It goes on like this, tempers escalating, until things are about to get physical.  At this point, the store owner comes out.  He listens for a moment, and realizes what is going on.  Amma says we are like this when we fight with someone, instead of having the distance from our own reaction to realize that the other person is suffering.
     Tensions are high at the ashram.  As it nears Christmas, crowds swell.  It's like a flash flood.  Getting anywhere requires jumping into a roaring river of people, navigating down eddies and rapids, then catching the current that takes you to your destination.  Everyone just wants to be close to Amma, who just wants us to know that we are each Amma.
    Like the pigeon mother in our room who warms eggs on the ledge above our steel cots, I begin to nurture a question, still in it's shell, still in need of a soft nest and warm attention.
    People can rise daily at 4:30am to chant the 1008 names of the goddess, they can wear all white and live on sprouts, but what really changes someone's life?  What makes someone a happier person, more able to make the world a little bit happier and more peaceful of a place?  How is the spiritual path integrated into this world?
    With this question in mind, I begin the next step of my pilgrimage: to the master of integration, the spiritual head of the school I just graduated from, to Sri Aurobindo's ashram in the little ex-French colony of Pondichery on the shores of the Bay of Bengal.

Hero's Journey- The Ordeals

     I asked our friend, John-from-Cornwall, who has been to India 3 times, what keeps drawing him back.
     "Because India," he said in his English accent, "more than any other country takes you out of your comfort zone and knocks you upside the head."
    I recognized this answer because I have given it myself.  Yet somehow, 5 years of growing older with memory foam beds and unlimited hot water pressure showers had romanticized my memory of the ordeals of India.
    If you only had one sense, say smell, and your nose was given a 30-second whiff of India, it could take days to process the complex effect that the intermingling of incense, exhaust, urine, coconuts, cowpies, fried samosas, and cardamon has on your nasal cavity.  Now add in the (at least) 5 more senses that we routinely use and 24 hours of immersion in the sweltering, sticky, sweaty pulsation of one billion heartbeats, everything unutterably complex and confusing. Eyes assualted by garbage piles in the holiest of places, tongue tortured by the fire of a green mango pickle, red bumps of unknown origin colonizing whole continents of skin.  Every centimeter of every Indian city is lived and breathed.  If not by humans, then by cows, goats, chickens, pigs, cockroaches.  They forage in the garbage piles in this land where waste and life are not falsely separated. 
     Being here is like being an infant all over again.  Nothing makes any sense and there are all kinds of languages, verbal and non, to learn all over again.  There is the language the constant honks, some cartoonish, some insistent. Auto rickshaws operate on a "see no pedestrian, hear no pedestrian, run over no pedestrian" philosophy and as long as they honk loudly enough, they can drive as insanely as they choose.  there is a honk that says "I am here, don't hit me," one that says "I will hit you if you don't get out of my way" and a special holy honk for the holy cows that rule the streets.  Then there is the language and art of the head bobble.  Does a slight diagonal tilt to the lefthand side followed by two to the right mean "yes" "no" "I don't know" or "what a silly foreigner you are"?
     At this point you might be questioning my sanity or wondering if I am a secret masochist.  And why do we throw ourselves, consciously or not, into these trials that strain the very limits of our capacity as beings?  Why do we choose, as John said, to be "knocked upside the head?" Why must the hero's journey include the destruction of all that we know that keeps us safe and sane?  Is it worth it?
   I'll get back to you on that.  In the meantime, in this experiment, I am finding that the more broken open I become, the more my safety and sanity becomes part of a sacred, special core that I carry with me and less and less to do with clean air and comfort and that amazing latte they make at Pizzaiolo. 

Goan Mosaic

wake to wavesound close enough to touch
   verdant villages vegetationally well-endowed
       pig family garbage snuggle pile
bhaji pau spice breakfast
    chai shop slows clock
         manisha, manager of micky's huts- dark hair lush as the jungle
science of yoga sunset
    hints of Bombay belly
         Grace, curry scented
1,001 shops selling same ali baba pants
    kohl and seymour, adopted tumbling kittens
          pirate party
chesire cat moon smile
     salty playful ocean
          making pilgrims of every heart