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.