In summary

First 6a lead (tough): January 11 at the Cobra Wall
Best hammock: tied for the bungalow hammock at Danny's, and Jace's hammock on our very own, very wobbly bungalow porch
First 6c lead (tougher): February 6 at the Keep
First hot shower since 2010: February 15
First time driving a motorbike: February 17
First time served chicken feet in this lifetime: February 19
First load of laundry done in a washing machine instead of a sink: February 23
Best non-Thai food in Thailand: the falafel and fish taco cart in Chiang Mai
Time it took for someone to try to scam me in India: Less than two hours
First bucket shower ever: March 3
First Indian yoga class: March 3
Most unlikely place for French lessons: an ayurvedic restaurant on the banks of the Ganges
Number of times scammed by street kids: twice, but only once that really mattered
Number of train ticket purchases required to actually get a berth on the train to Dehli: three
Days abroad: 96
Hours spent in travel to get home: 38
First hug from my mom since last year: April 6, 3:30pm Mountain Time

Date this blog was launched: December 29

To date:
27,610 words published (And there’s still so much I couldn't seem to fit in... )
1,590 page views from readers in the United States, Austria, Thailand, India, Germany, South Korea, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Malaysia

Thanks, all of you, for following along, and for your comments, emails, etc.

On foot

“Does your mother have land?” Jango asked. “Does she keep animals?”

He doesn’t mean her cat and my cat and dog.

Jango is my guide on a four-day trek through the lower Himalayas that wanders through valleys, up and down hill sides, passing through villages shrugged onto the shoulders of those hills, and will end with a push up toward snowline. After a day of walking upstream alongside cattle and small herds of goats, we were headed steeply uphill to a mountain temple that has a place we can sleep for the night, and stopped for a break halfway up. I snacked on tea biscuits while Jango grilled me about my family. No, I said, we don’t have much land. And we don’t keep animals.

He had already asked about my family. I described our pieces—the step parents, half-sister, and step-siblings. He tried to line it all up from my father’s perspective—a former and a current wife, two daughters, one from each, then shook his head, muttering, “My God…”

That night, when he called his wife and children, he put me on the phone with his wife to say hello. It turns out, “Hello. How are you?” is all she could say. She never went to school, he explained.

Over the four days we spent walking through villages and valleys together, he explained a good deal to me I might never have spotted or been able to ask without a guide at hand to quiz. He explained that the women in their saris squatting on a hillside were gathering mud to plaster on the walls of their houses, and that the shaved heads of two children we find making their own sleds to ride down a grass knoll means that someone has recently died.

Someone else must have declared by now that if you truly want to know a place, you have to see it from the view granted by your own feet. You have to slow down and take a path that meanders. Ours went in and out of valleys cut by streams that whisper of centuries of monsoon seasons, the boulders all rolled to smooth edges and polished nearly white. The houses we walked by were mostly plaster walls, some painted blue or yellow, but most off-white or gray. Their metal roofs looked to be held down by rocks, their laundry and the occasional satellite dish the only ornamentation. When we started uphill, I could look down on the villages below us in tableau. Those stacked houses, built up the steep ramp of the valley, and the women and children busy with work and play across them looked like one of those sets for a play that shows a multi-storied house in cross section. Scenes play out with the characters moving around, above and below one another, blissfully inattentive to each other while the audience looks on, seeing all.

The landscape rotated from one hillside to the next, some pine forests with carpets of tan pine needles on the ground, looking as dry as some of the forests in Colorado. The next hillside would see us walking through a carpet of blooming rhododendrons, everything green with those pink and red blossoms for punctuation.

But it’s the faces of the people that were, of course, the most truly surprising. The excited, staring school children at first, and that gave way to even more wide-eyed village children. Families coming down at night to perform puja, to pray and make an offering, at a temple—the temple being the spring that provides clean water for the village. They kicked off their shoes, thanked the gods for providing, then sat in the cool evening air by the stream, looking out over the valley.


On foot, I can see that in India, anything can become holy. A rock, a tree, a watersource. What has become sacred is then marked with tridents and ribbons, paintings of gods and goddesses on tiles affixed to nearby rocks.
I can taste the generosity of the people—the prasad, blessed food from that water temple puja, a crumbly, bright yellow sweet, which is shared with Jango and me because we are there watching. For a steep kilometer, I listened to shouting over the valley, the kind of calling is asking for only an echo as the answer. I looked up, expecting children and preparing to dodge the rocks that would be thrown to test gravity—because while you’re testing a science like echoes, why not also check gravity’s pull? But at the top, we found not children, but three women, perched on an outcropping and looking out over the villages and valleys we had just traversed. They fell quiet as we sat near them, no longer bold enough to shout just to hear their voices echo. We sat and rested, and while we were resting, they got up, collected bundles of sticks three times as big around as they were, helping one another get off the ground once they’ve slid the straps to these bundles over their shoulders, and started walking down the trail. Though we rested only a few minutes more, we never caught up to them on the trail.

Jango wore track pants, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and started the first day in steel-toed workboots, which he later traded for blue plastic sandals. It made my fastidious attention to having the right kind of socks feel a little ridiculous. And of course, then we were passed by women in beaded and sequined saris—they herd their cattle in these saris, crouch to do laundry in the stream in these saris, and walk the paths we’re “trekking” on with baskets of pinecones and bundles of sticks balanced on their heads in these saris, sandals on their feet.

Again, my attention to my own gear seemed all too finicky.

He cooked a lunch of rice and curry that’s part peas, part peppers, and part wild vegetables he picked as we walked. Jango has been guiding treks in the area for over 20 years. He pointed out walnut trees, lemon trees, mint and nettles as we hike. And he waits patiently while I snap photos.

“How many photos you take?” he asked.

“I’m only at 40-some,” I replied.

Our first river crossing was on a bridge built in 1963 that should have been retired well before its 40th anniversary. The first half was sheet metal covered in a layer of asphalt. The metal had rusted through in sections. The second half provided more solid footing, but tipped severely downstream. Jango stepped up to it, looked back at me, and said “One at a time.”

After he was past the midway point, a huge boulder that provided the center stabilization for the bridge, he signaled me across, and waited patiently as I snapped photos of this myth of a bridge.

We spent a night at his sister’s house. She fixed dinner sitting cross-legged at her kitchen hearth, though there’s a pair of gas burners on the counter. Her son, Rishu, fetched flour and milk for her as she needed them, rinsed and stirred the rice cooked over a gas burner, then squeezed in next to me on a blanket near the fire. She made dal in a pot that had been simmering at the back of the hearth since we walked in the door, made chapatis on a skillet over the fire then finished them off by rolling them in the ash at the edge of this small, square fireplace. They puffed up when they got near the embers, and she pulled them out with bare fingers, slapped them against the plaster hearth, and put them in a round, plastic dish lined with a dishtowel, a lid on to keep them warm. I studied this wondering if it would be possible to duplicate it at home with only an oven for toasting.

The next morning we hiked along a ridge though rhododendrons that eventually give way to massive pines. We stopped for chai when the first rainstorm hit, but were camped out, fixing lunch, when it began to snow. Rishu, who is in training to become a guide, kept a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and huddled near the fire when he wasn’t running errands for Jango. I crouched next to the flames when it became too cold to keep writing. Jango put on a fleece jacket and seemed impervious to the biting wind, the tumbling flakes, even the very idea of hypothermia.

After the storm broke, we fetched water from the stream there because there was no water where we were headed. We arrived at Triund, a set of English-built cabins on a ridge of high alpine meadow. Auxiliary tea stalls sat in the meadow, and busy with day-hikers. We stopped long enough for a cup of chai with the caretaker of the forest rest houses, dropped our heavy bags there, and then headed up toward tree line. Rishu came empty-handed; I brought a camera and a bottle of water; Jango carried his radio, playing hill music, he said, the whole way up. When we reached the snow, he sat down and waited while Rishu and I ran up a ridgeline, then skated back down.

We were just getting back to the rest houses, looking down on a cricket game being played in that high alpine field (India had won the Cricket World Cup the previous night), when the sun broke through the clouds at last.

The peaks I had been looking at under a banner of gray all day were at last dressed with sunlight. It carved out the planes of their rocky faces and illuminated the patches of snow. I scanned for a clean line up, and saw nothing promising on their broken sides. They’re jagged and fierce. I sat on a rock, Rishu next to me, where I could watch the clouds peel back from them.

A long list of lessons

The Tibet Museum is often empty, or at the very least, mostly empty. Empty enough that the haunting soundtrack of the looped video in the first floor’s exhibits echoes through the whole museum—all roughly 4,000 square feet of its white-washed and stone-floored space. In just that few thousand square feet, the museum’s curators have attempted to say everything you can about Tibet’s history: Tibet before Chinese rule, the Chinese invasion, the Tibetan resistance, political prisoners’ experience, destruction of human rights in Tibet, “Sinicization”—the process of making Tibetans less Tibetan and more Chinese, how Tibetans escape now, and what the hopes are for the future. They’ve pulled together little pieces of evidence to indicate that Tibet was an autonomous country when the Chinese army marched onto the roof of the world in 1949. They had coin and paper currency, stamps, passports that had been marked with visas for countries all over the world. In a 1934 cover story, “Flags of the World,” Tibet’s flag featured on the cover. See, they say. We were a real country before we were just a part of China.

One of the few exhibits where artifacts extend beyond photos or video is that on the prisoners’ experience, which includes a blood-spattered shirt worn by a prisoner, a scarf worn to gray, handcuffs, an electric shock device, smoke bombs, knives, and hand-woven necklaces, scarves and bracelets, all done in a design to bring good luck.

People wander through, read over the posted information, look at photos of men, women and children walking through the snow to cross the Himalayas from Tibet to India, dolls in traditional dress, a few coins tarnished to illegible dark circles. The afternoon showing of “Undercover in Tibet,” a documentary that tries to answer why Tibetans risk everything to escape to India, draws a bit of a crowd, and then people filter out again.

It’s not that they’re not interested. It’s that they’re busy.

Dharamsala is a volunteer’s town. Posters and flyers and newsletters and pamphlets and people on the street take volunteers who come to stay for a week or a month or a few months. The Rogpa Café, which always smells of tantalizing pastries and freshly baked, homemade muesli, is staffed entirely by volunteers. An Australian and a Korean woman struggle through translations to sort out who plans to do the dishes, then sit for dinner together at the end of the bar.

Every week day, the Tibet Hope Center opens its doors, or rather, its courtyard, for English language speakers to volunteer an hour and a half to talk to English language learners in informal conversation classes. Monday, I walked into the Hope Center, gave its director and founder (and the man who generally runs the show from morning to night), Kunsang Tenzin, my name and said yes, I’d volunteer at the drop-in English classes. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting with Choku, a Tibetan monk, and Shinee, a Mongolian accountant, holding the day’s prompt for discussions: freedom. We talk about its various expressions—Choku left Tibet so he could study Buddhism, so what he talked about is freedom of education and freedom of religion. Shinee says she sees freedom in everyday choices, your clothes, your job, your food, your whole lifestyle.

I’ve gone back to talk with Tibetans, and repeatedly with Shinee, about love, sources of happiness, and ways of nonviolence.

Shinee, who is learning English so she can move up from her job as an accountant to work in international finance in Mongolia, astounds me daily. Six months ago, she says, she could barely understand English and what she could speak in English left her partners in conversation saying only, “What? What? Repeat, please?”

Now, she can talk for most of the hour, barely faltering. The once she didn’t manage to nail her pronunciation of “lawyer” and we had to talk it through to figure out what she was trying to say, she covered her mouth in this apologetic embarrassment, as if after six months she should have the Oxford English Dictionary memorized. Actually, I’d give her another 12 months and she could have the dictionary down—but maybe Webster’s Collegiate, not the OED. She studies from breakfast until bed, which comes at 1am or 2am, memorizing 10 or 20 new words every day.

She’s given up Mongolian music and movies for music and movies in English, and searches lyrics for American songs on the Internet, and then transcribes them into a notebook. In four or five days, she’ll have a new song memorized and will be singing along with Jennifer Lopez, Avril Lavigne, James Blunt, Timbaland, or Kelly Clarkson. She flipped through the notebook with me, reading off the song titles and looking to me to see if I know them. If I don’t immediately nod, and sometimes even if I do, she sings a few bars. We sang together, “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you tore it apart. This year, to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special.” (Thank you, pop radio, for enabling me to have this experience.)

I’ve talked to a Tibetan artist whose family sent him, their only son, out of Tibet so he could study religious painting in India; to a woman who left Tibet when she was eight months pregnant. She was lucky enough to get a flight out with her husband; her sister, who is also here, walked for a month to get out of Tibet. I’ve talked to a man with stories from days in the Chinese army, and a man who says he’s not smart, can’t study Buddhism, but has the intricacies of passport and visa regulations between China, Nepal and Tibet memorized.

They all say they want to learn English because it will bring them more opportunities—for work, for studying, for travel.

It’s a quiet thing, an unobtrusive way of spending some time, hoping that you’re helping people out. Hoping that this little bit more of practice brings them a little closer to those opportunities they’re reaching for.

Volunteering for Contact, a Tibetan newsletter, was every bit as easy, though finding the editor was not. I looked for him in his office, only to be told he was at the café he manages. I went to the café, a charming nook of a place with an enthralling collection of books, only to be told he had run to the market. Not a problem in a place with bookshelves stocked like that. I was deep in a memoir of a daughter of Chinese immigrants when Lobsang returned. I said I was willing to volunteer some time copy editing the newsletter, and without so much as asking my experience or training, he set up a time to meet at his offices to work on the next edition.

I found him at his desk in an office frequented by a small flock of swallows. They sailed up and down the hallway outside his open door, then one or two would swoop in and perch on a pipe or the top of the door. He seemed entirely accustomed to them, able to ignore them completely, though they chirped so loudly I could barely hear him talking. I took a seat, and turned my attention to editing stories on the gatherings that recognized the anniversary of Uprising Day, when Tibetans fought back, and a monk who self-immolated in March.

It’s all part of the strange education this trip has been.

Tuesday evening, Learning and Ideas for Tibet, which is squeezed into a tiny, barely-marked basement room, hosted a former political prisoner. People squeezed in, sitting cross-legged on the floor, the knees of one person against the back of the next, to a room that quickly became too hot with body heat. A window was cracked, and the door left open, so when the translator, Dhundup, stood to relay the former prisoner’s story, he was silhouetted against the night sky, which occasionally flashed purple with broad streaks of lightning. Soepa, the former prisoner, talked of his home in Chamdo, a land of fruit and flowers he called one of the most beautiful places in Tibet. He was a monk there, studying Buddhism.

Soepa was imprisoned for five years for recognizing the Panchen Lama, who is meant to provide spiritual guidance for Tibet in tandem with the Dalai Lama. (The Panchen Lama has been missing since 1996 and Tibetans call him the world’s youngest political prisoner—he was about seven years old when he disappeared.)

He was carried from his home in eastern Tibet across all five prisons in Tibet to Drapchi Prison. What he withstood in prison, he said, you could not imagine. But he has never been the same, physically or psychologically, since then.

“Before I protested the Chinese government, I made up my mind, whether I’m going to be imprisoned or not, I’m going to protest the Chinese government because we need our freedom,” he said. “Whether my body is going to be kept by China, they cannot keep my mind.”

That decision and the mental training he received as a Buddhist, he said, were what kept him from succumbing to the attempts at “reforming” his mind while he was in prison.

After he was released, he said, he went home to Chamdo. But his mind had started to move, and it moved toward India. In 2002, he left Tibet illegally. He’s spent years recovering, he said, and now works with the Tibetan Political Prisoner’s Association.

Dhundup, the translator, thanked people for coming and listening, then he charged them with a task.

“You have to say to your friends, to your government, there is no peace in Tibet,” he said. “There is not enough food in Tibet. You have to say this to your friends and colleagues.”

And so I’m saying it to you.

Another kind of holy city

Rishikesh became a holy city because that valley has been used for spiritual retreats for thousands of years. The two bridges (which have subsequently dubbed their associated neighborhoods), Ram Jhula and Lakshman Jhula (“jhula” means “bridge”), are named for Ram and Lakshman, two heros of the Indian epic poem, the Ramayana. They spent 14 years in spiritual retreat near where the town of Rishikesh is now located, but in a timeframe so long ago it puts them and their story more in the proximity of Zeus. So Rishikesh itself isn’t holy land; but it’s holy now becaust it has been meditated in and prayed over for so many thousands of years.

McLeod-Ganj isn’t holy because the land itself is sacred. But it’s got the feeling of a holy place because here is where the Dalai Lama came to land after fleeing Tibet. It’s the southern edge of the Himalayas, as if he would go no farther than was absolutely necessary, but only the entirety of those mountains could provide an effective defense from China’s fingers. From town, just the tips of the lower Himalayas are visible. But that’s enough for this peak-starved wanderer.

Mountains. Mountains. Mountains. Mon dieu, it’s good to see mountains again. They’re still frosted in snow, and today wore caps of clouds. I looked up from town this morning, picked a ridge, and walked up the road, a path and finally bushwhacked to get to the top of it. From there, I could look down on villages scattered through the foothills, their rice terraces full green already. White flecks of sheep wandered the slopes. A rocky summit rose in front of me, couloirs thick with white but the faces otherwise scrubbed clean. It was heavenly.

Of course, getting here was hell. The overnight bus I’d bought a seat on was billed as “deluxe,” but the word I’d apply to it was closer to “dirty.” Decrepit would suffice, as well. The seats sat in a jumble of half-upright, half-down, half-reclined fully to their “semi-sleeper” state and it turned out that how you found it was likely the way it was going to stay. Mine was stuck in a half-reclined position neither conducive for sleeping nor convenient for sitting up right, and the cushion was so worn through the metal crossbar might just have been covered in a sheet of fabric. The windows could only be forcefully, gradually coaxed partway open to provide some relief from the heat since the air conditioning was non-existent and most of the fans broken, and they were partially shielded in curtains now so sun-bleached and coated in dirty they hold on only to a rumor of having once been some color other than gray.

But, on we went. By 1am, we were heading steeply uphill on a road whose every turn sent the bus passengers rocking from side to side. If the road was paved the whole way, which I doubt, it had itself been jostled to the point of bearing deep ruts and a perpetual stream of potholes. So the passengers bounded up and down as well.


I spent the night fidgeting against the bar in my back and the hard plastic seatback against my shins, half the time stretching out, then half curling into a ball, facing the window and feeling the night breeze on my face. I listened to music, an audiobook, and podcasts from The Moth and Risk!—anything to keep my brain distracted. Just before sunrise, too tired to do anything else, I fell asleep, despite the discomfort. We arrived in McLeod-Ganj (I’d booked a ticket to Dharamsala, but these are just details, right? They’re only a couple kilometers apart) at 9am, just three hours behind schedule, and I emerged with the right side of my clothes coated in grime from rubbing against the side of the bus all night.

This, ladies and gentlemen, will be the last time I fall for the lure of the overnight bus. It’ll be trains from here out, even if they’re cog rail (I’ve heard a rumor that the closest rail connection from here is just such a mechanical wonder).


At the crest of the ridge I hiked to today, I found a cluster of prayer flags and stone cairns. Some of the strings of flags were wrapped around bushes or trees, some bleached from so long in a bold, high altitude sun. Then string after string was tied in rows between trees at a flat, relatively clear space at the top, many of them still brightly colored. Fire rings below them were still stacked with charcoal. As the breeze picked up, they lifted in the wind. All of them flapping together in the wind blowing north, toward Tibet, made a sound like sighing. And the breeze, perhaps, carries that sound and all those wind-blown prayers over the hills and mountains and valleys to Tibet, to the thousands of Tibetans there, waiting for freedom.

Over the Rainbow

Hippies think they invented free love, but they were, at best, revivalists. Anthropologists have established that sexual monogamy developed about the time property ownership did, when it started to matter whose son that was because it determined who would inherit the farm. Cave men had no use for monogamy.


And so, at a Rainbow Gathering, an international conglomerate of free-loving, nature-hugging, communally eating neo-Hippies that cropped up last month on the banks of the Ganga, what I see are not so much pilgrims on a path to a new world. They’re more… historical revisionists, regressing to the way we lived 10,000 years ago and adding a strong dose of “speaking with intention.” It’s like a visit to the BC world, complete with a tribal chief, tribe mothers, hunters, warriors, and gatherers.

Sasha and I packed a few things and walked out of town like gypsies one afternoon, catching a ride in a half-full jeep just as far as the second waterfall (what a destination to give your driver). Then we walked down a road, down a streambed, and along a path beside the river until we came out at a beach spotted with tents, lean-tos, and bedrolls. It was late afternoon, and people were sprawled out in small groups around the beaches and on the boulders that form half the beach to the Ganga.

We changed, and took a dip in the river, washing off all those sins and guaranteeing centuries of human lifetimes in which to walk the slow road toward enlightenment. The dip, however, was a quick one; the waters are frigid.

As the sun went down, a huddle of women made salad in a vast tin bowl, tearing the leaves with their hands. Vegetables were chopped on a tin plate. Pasta boiled and salted, chickpeas cooked. They called “food circle” and people came in from the hillsides—men collecting firewood with only sarongs wrapped around their hips, or meditating on far boulders, or swimming in the shallow pool by the camp, and women from their other corners, their quiet conversations and clusters of guitar-jamming sessions. Everyone joined hands and sang—about family and unity, about being happy, about rising up, then “Thank you for the food. It’s healing, it’s healing, it’s healing me.”

Food was brought around and dished out to each outstretched tin bowl or cup, everyone’s fingers and utensils getting into everything. (I’d just been reading a book on infectious diseases—guess what was on my mind.) We ate, sitting in the sand, broke to wash dishes in the Ganga, then reassembled in small circles to play games, play guitars, play real-world conversations.

The guitars gave way and conversation silenced when a man brought out a didgeridoo and started to play it the way I imagine that instrument was meant to be played. It was the second didgeridoo of the night, and the first instrument at all to not get talked over or sung around. The circle formed to a full circle again, instead of a chain of small rings, and his audience sat spellbound as he pulsed out a sound like the heartbeat of humanity, raw and primeval, broken by percussive flair.

Sasha and I crept to our alcove while he was still playing, wrapped in our blankets and laid down under the stars and the scant branches of a bush, and fell asleep listening to that pulse.

Holy Holi

Holi celebrates Rama’s victory over… somebody, but it was a symbolic victory of good over evil, light over dark. And it’s celebrated now by smearing colorful powders on the faces of the people you meet. If this is a warm, consentual celebration, it’s a finger or three dipped in a bag of colored powder, a nice smear across the forehead and cheeks, a hug, and a “Happy Holi.” The good in the world triumphs again in the form of color, light and friendship.

But like Halloween and its evolution from whatever All Hallow’s Day signified to a night of costume-wearing and candy-hunting, Holi is kind of just about the paint. And the kids and young men, who have taken up this holiday with relish, have embellished that painted embrace with water balloons, squirt guns loaded with paint, even just jars of watered down paint. But good luck getting any of them to be good enough to stop spraying you now that you’re fully soaked and fully covered in paint.

I’d hoped to be safe at least getting to my yoga class at 8am—who would be playing with paint so early in the day? But the man who makes my morning chai was already bedecked in colors, and as I sat there sipping, other people would pass by and smear his face and hug him, wishing him a happy Holi.

“Will you play Holi?” he asked me. “Play” is exactly the right verb.

I made it nearly all the way to class before stumbling up on a group of kids, mid-paint war, their hands and faces covered in pink. They opened fire with hot pink, and I had to run, laughing, to get away, but was too late. David, one of my classmates, sent me back to the bathroom to scrub my neck again before laying down on a yoga mat, and I still dripped a bit of pink on it.

Through class, we could hear children shouting and screaming as they “played” Holi on the streets, running through the maze of tight corridors and narrow spaces between tall walls in that section of Ram Jhula, then out into the open fields and orchards. Music played. Even on the fourth floor of a building above and away, it was like you could feel the joviality of the day, and get infected by them and their happy play. Kamal, the yoga teacher, lost track of the limbs we were on more often than usual, and people tumbled out of asanas laughing.

At the end of class, when we were seated and had just finished our final oms, Kamal said, “OK, now everybody, laugh as loud as you can for two minutes.”

We’d just spent two hours doing what he said, so all right. We laughed. And then laughed at the way we were laughing, and then laughed because we were laughing, and then laughed some more.

It was just a warm-up to get us in a good mood. Sunil, who’s teaching a teacher training class with Kamal at the moment, was waiting outside with a tray of colors, and he smeared everyone’s faces as they left class, and the favor was promptly returned. Face smear. Hug. Ear smear. Hug. Hair dusting. Hug.

On neighboring rooftops, families were having their own celebrations, dumping buckets of paint one another. Boys were teaming up to make water balloons with a bucket of colored water and a straw—I’m still not sure how the physics works there.

After our private paint fight, I was marked and men would stop their motorbikes just to cover my face in another dose of paint and say, “Happy Holi.” Packs of men and boys roamed the streets, so I stayed beside David and John from my class, who could do little to deflect the attention drawn by a white woman in the streets on Holi. Just in the half hour it took for us to cross Ram Jhula, searching for a place to have breakfast (the restaurants and shops were, wisely, closed), my face disappeared under green, purple and blue powder.

By the time we did find that meal, at last, at the thali ashram, I could tip my head forward and watch powder fly out of my hair. Even wrinkling my forehead made for a snow of color.

In this condition, I sat down to eat. Indians would look at me and say “Happy Holi…” like, “Oh, my, did you get Holi’d…”

We headed to the Ganges to rinse some of it away, which, it turns out, is the thing to do on Holi. David and John stripped down and submerged themselves, David straightaway, in a slow-motion chatturanga—a reverse push-up—and John in this gradual easing, drifting routine into the cold water. Wading in up to my knees, I cupped my hands and set to scrubbing my face. Every splash of water came away brownish-purple, the muddle of all those colors. My hands filled with that stain, then rinsed clean.

An Indian mother came down with a flock of kids in tow, a young one whose hands stayed pink every after an hour of scrubbing and playing in the water, and a group of girls, mostly in their early teens. When the mother waded into the river, the water ran pink and purple around her. She washed her body and her hair, and rinsed her sari, then peeled its hopelessly stained pieces off, one by one throwing them into the Ganges, covering herself as she did with a peach sarong. Then the sarong was replaced with an orange sari, which was assembled over and around it right there on the riverbank.

The flock of girls chattered around her, washing their faces, hair and arms with a bar of soap and checking their progress with a mirror they had brought. I’d had no such help, and so had turned to David again, who had shaken his head and sent me back to work on my hairline and behind my ears.

The girls bent forward, dipping their hair into the water and dripping pink into the river, they rinsed and soaped and rinsed again, wrung their hair out like a skirt and then wrapped it into a bun at the front of their heads. Occasionally, one or two of them would float into the current, which will pick you up and sweep you away, then clamber out downstream and come rushing back, not hardly looking at the boys taking turns floating down that same stretch of river. The girls went between that play and the seriousness of studying their faces in the mirror for hours.


We sat watching them, dipping ourselves, and waiting for the afternoon hours to pass on. The paint war of Holi is supposed to end at 2pm, but I gave it until closer to 4pm before I braved the bazaar, which had been a squeeze of people earlier in the day, and the walk all the way back to my guest house.

My clothes, of course, were wrecked, and so was the bag I was carrying. Washing and soaking them overnight only lightened the stains without fully removing them. My shoulders and chest had run to that brown shade, making my skin look filthy. Green and purple had seeped into the built-in bra in my tank top, so I was stained even on skin that never saw the light of day. Over my back, what looked like a sunburn washed off. One ear was dark blue and the other pink, and my hair had green in the back and pink up front.

The streets were splattered with pink the morning after Holi. In yoga class, the girls who had light brown or blonde hair still have patches of pink, green, and purple in their hair. One of them leaned over just to let me know there was still a bit of pink in one ear.

Hungry in the stomach. Hungry in the mind. Hungry in the heart.

I cannot get enough Indian food. I cannot believe that two or four hours of yoga a day leaves me more hungry than climbing all day did, but there it is.

I mentioned this to another yoga student. A few days ago, her teacher opened the floor to questions at the end of class, she said, and one girl had mentioned that she’s really hungry after class. The teacher answered her with a question, “Are you hungry in the stomach? Or are you hungry in the heart? Or hungry in the mind?”

I’ve been hungry for curries, mostly. The hunt for the perfect Indian meal has had me ordering eggplant curry for breakfast… Not the best idea. I felt like was searching for that one perfect dish, that life-changing meal, that chance to sink my chapatti into something really extraordinary.

And yes, OK, I’ve had other kinds of hunger.

Yoga as westerners know it is just a physical workout. Advanced stretching. But yoga means far more than that in its traditional sense. The word itself means “union.” To be specific, “hatha” yoga represents the union of the “ha” and “tha” energies, the polarities of hot and cold, masculine and feminine, light and dark. These energies are said to spiral through channels that run up the spine, and when you practice yoga, you better allow them to flow from sacrum to skull. The more energy that can flow through your brain, the more energy available to focus on the divine when you meditate. At least, that’s my rudimentary understanding of these things.

Yoga is also, in a practical sense, a series of exercises that keep your back strong and your hips open so that you can sit cross-legged for hours to meditate and manage to think about something more meaningful than, “Damn, this is uncomfortable.”

But yoga and meditation isn’t the whole practice, either. The proper diet for the soul includes chanting and study of spiritual texts as well, according to the texts, like the Yoga Sutras, from which yoga was drawn.


So over the week or so after I arrived, I fished around for those experiences, attending arati, which is like Catholic evensong, and keeping an eye out for meditation classes, lectures, and satsangs, the equivalent of sermons. The arati at one ashram is more show than substance—and they know it. They’ve got the video cameras on hand to record it. At another, the chanting was this lackluster, out-of-rhythm musical chaos. Even when singing about victory for Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who conquers obstacles, they drug the thing into a dirge. There’s next to nothing in the way of meditation classes, unless you day a seven or 10-day retreat.

In between all this poster-reading and religious ceremony sampling, I was eating everything I could get my hands on, because the one thing I have successfully locked into is a good ashtanga class that kicks my butt for two hours every morning. Oh, and then if that weren’t enough, I go to the Sivananda class in the afternoon.

But even when I was full, I didn’t feel full. I still felt like I wanted something more. Something sweet.

I went to the numerous German bakeries up and down the street and stared at the counters and thought, “Maybe the lemon cake will do it…” And the lemon cake was glorious. But I found myself scraping through the napkin as if those last crumbs are going to satiate what I’m searching for. They didn’t.

When you visit a temple to meditate or to worship, you will often be offered prasad, food that has been blessed. You consume those blessings along with what you eat.

“Prasad is very important,” the monk who maintains the Sivananda Temple reminded me as he puttered around, gathering mine on a copyright page discarded by the Sivananda Publications League. He was closing the temple, so I was ushered outside to nibble through a handful of raisins, half a banana, and two cookies, and suck on a couple mango hard candies and even some fat grains of sugar. Prasad is always sweet, one of my teachers at the ashram in the Bahamas said during my teacher training, because the taste of the divine is sweet.

Satsang with Sri Prem Baba starts before my yoga class gets out, so I rush from far end of Ram Jhula to the other side of Lakshman Jhula, and slip in the door just after the singing ends and the lecture starts. Prem Baba, Brazilian by birth, wraps himself in beige robes and sits on a chair with beige curtains. His cloud of a beard has gone white, and his steel gray and white hair is slicked back from his face and lays in ringlets over his shoulders in that way only people of South American countries can seem to pull off. The effect is of these dark eyes floating above a cloud occasionally split by a toothy smile. He reads questions delivered to him from the crowd—more than a hundred people attend his daily satsangs—and answers the question in Portuguese, pausing for his translator.


His lessons are simple, and read a bit like the book of Proverbs.

“By giving, you receive.” “When it doubt, go meditate.” “Know where you are. You won’t get anywhere else by denying your feelings.” “A true anger is worth much more than a fake smile.” “All your fantasies for your future are connected to your stories from your past, but who are you without this past?” “Life is a mystery to be enjoyed with the heart. It’s not to be thought about with your intellect. It is to be felt.”

It’s tender food for the soul, and a comfortable sort of spirituality—just a few verses to guide your ship.

After he has talked for an hour or even an hour and a half, which feels more like 30 minutes, he concludes with, “OK?” Pause. “Let’s sing.” Then the room swells with the music of guitars, drums, a violin, an egg-shaker. People sing and dance in the back aisles. They line up to bring him gifts—flowers, garlands, fruit, letters, their mala (prayer beads) for him to finger and then hang around their necks.

Two afternoons a week, I also go to a satsang with the towering Swami Muktananda. He’s enormous, a tower of a man, and his voice resonates through his body like a call to action. When he makes himself laugh, and he often does, it’s a belly laugh. There’s a physical comedy to what he does, too. Just sitting there in his chair, he’ll roll his eyes or stomp his feet or gesticulate wildly.


His talks pull from Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism, talking about Moses more often than Vishnu. And he laces in contemporary culture and events as well. It was sitting on the floor in his satsang that I first heard of the earthquake in Japan. “Say an earthquake, 8.9 hits Japan and now there’s a tsunami headed for Tokyo. Yes. That just happened,” he said, but it sounded like a thought puzzle. I didn’t believe it was more than a hypothetical—earthquakes at 8.9 don’t actually happen, right?—until he began to dig more into it.

Satsang is like getting directions, Swami Muktananda says. I was where you are, and here’s how I got where I am. See if it works for you. Mostly, though, he says to meditate at the start of every day, find and hold onto that peace.

He’s not compromising about that. Ask a weird, abstract question—all he does is take questions from the crowd, in writing or in person—about something like “Why did we incarnate as animals first and now humans? And what is it that’s reincarnating?” and his response is, “Let’s not break our brain with that level of things.”

What you want to focus on, he says, is “I am.” You are the divine, a spark of God on earth. Go after realizing that with the intensity of a samurai. If a thought threatens to take you away from your focus on that truth, put your sword to it. And yes, he gestures and cries, “Aya!” as he chops that distraction away.

What he says is often just poetry: “Your life is a prayer upon the earth.”

I skip meals to get to these satsangs sometimes, but I never seem to come out of them hungry for anything.

And yet, I think these are often still just the trappings of spiritualism, not the spiritual pursuit itself. In many ways, the gifts, the clothing, the photos taken of and with Prem Baba, the blessings on your mala (I think Swami Muktananda would laugh if you thought your mala needed his blessings and say, “They’re just beads. What does it matter if I’ve touched them? They’ll still just be beads and the problem isn’t with your beads. It’s with your mind.”), even the handing over of your commitment to your spiritual path in writing—they’re all just part of the illusion that any actions on earth matter.

If you want peace, look within. If you want happiness, find it there.

Sing and dance, certainly. Listen and learn. Be coached. And then sit and be still. That is your real work and that is the real journey.

Then you will realize—not just know or understand, but realize—that it was not the Baba’s blessing, the white you wore, the smudge of ash on your forehead that mattered. It was within you, in an interior those things can never touch. And it will go with you, whether you are here or there.