Inhale deeeeePLEE, exhale compleeeetLEE. So said the Sivananda-trained yoga teacher.  The class started at 8.  I was awake at 6.  The sleep pattern these days is erratic.  One night sleep eludes me, the next I am falling asleep in my dinner.  There’s no alarm clock or schedule to keep, just the ebb and flow of days to dissolve into.  This may be one of my favorite features about this mini-sabbatical.  Dawn loves the hot milk served with  coffee and the hose option given in lieu of toilet paper.  I also like that everyone takes off their foot wear, predominantly sandal-like, before entering any of the stalls or stores along this hippie village termed Varkala by the sea in the Indian state of Kerala.  Kerala is billed as god’s own country and between the vistas, food, and abundant body work options it is easy to see why.  It is the spice garden of India and cashew trees are aplenty too.

I snuck out quietly a few minutes before 7 and had a pre-yoga cappuccino at Coffee Temple on the Varkala cliffs overlooking the Arabian Sea yesterday.  Morning bhajans were playing over the sound system of this caffeine temple with images of Hindu gods, Amma and Jesus banding together.  Sitting at a seaside table with the silk-on-skin sensation of a breeze, the sideways sun not yet high in the sky illuminated everything in its path from the inside out.

Well within the belly of this journey, more days to go than past, losing track of days and dates, forgetting what we were supposed to do in favor of hours by the pool or staring at the sea.  Conversations, stories, observations, plans for the coming days, and business plans for future chapters.  It is fantastic to know someone for over  twenty years and have so much to learn about each other, still.  Over one of many delicious seafood dinners this week which included a happy hour blended bloody merry (their spelling, on special for 70 R instead of the usual 95 R, or about a buck twenty) and butter fish cooked Kerala style in a banana leaf with coconut milk, cashews and spices … slurp, we agreed that there are no spoilers for either of us, just enhancers in traveling together.  We both know how to be alone, and require it.  Taking time away enhances the time spent together, and we are both comfortable with silence, or talking when there’s something to say.  We even share most of the same rummy rules which we discovered over a weak Kingfisher lager last night while our skin turning browner by the day glistened in Odomos fending off the mosquitoes in the gazebo where all meals are served on the grounds of our accommodations.

The day before yesterday we hired a driver to take us around coastal Kerala a bit.  We visited Sivagiri Mutt, a famous ashram in Varkala, founded by the philosopher and social reformer Sree Narayana Guru who died in 1928 and has disciples to this day propagating his concept of ‘One Caste, One Religion, One God’.  A sign outside the ashram read, ‘The self and the world are not two.’  Very groovy philosophy indeed.

We also went to Ponnumthurut Island.  A boatman lead us out on a vessel called a vallam to the ‘golden isle’ just in time to visit the 500-year old Shiva temple during the morning mantras.  The boatman wearing the traditional skirt-like fabric that gets tied and twisted in numerous ways, pronounced luuGe.    We circumnavigated the island over the murky salt backwaters, home to many a species of bird, in the blazing morning sun in a clockwise path, disembarking at the midpoint to visit the temple.

Our timing was perfect – the priest came out of the Shiva temple within 5 minutes of our arrival, having said the morning mantra.  We could see as he opened the doors that the inside was alight with countless candles. One of the men who had been spearing leaves to keep the temple grounds clean clanged the bell a bunch of times to announce that the morning mantra was complete. Then the priest moved on to Vishnu’s temple.

We also went to an elephant cottage, but that was just sad so not uplifting stories or cute photos from that.  Hopefully we’ll see some happier, wild elephants when we go to Thekkady in the Western Ghats tomorrow.

The 170 km drive down from Cochin this past Sunday took 4 hours in a sort of driving meditation.  Suddesh, our driver from Munnar (a hill town in the Western Ghats), did a fantastic job navigating the road.  He said he sees 3 to 4 accidents each time he makes the drive which is approximately once a week.  We passed two fresh accidents during our drive.  Fire trucks and EMT do not rush to the scene of an accident, but eventually a vehicle with a siren makes its way to help out the injured.  The roadways are single lane with a shoulder, driver on the right side of the vehicle, left side of the road, British-isle style.  Anything that happens on the road it is very visible, including the distress of the injured.  We stopped briefly at the second accident, long enough to see that  a slew of locals were rushing to help.

The omnipresent obvious in this village is the sea.  You can hear it behind everything when you’re outside, away from the whir of fans and the cocoon of air conditioning at night.  Behind chat, the hum of insects, bird calls, motorized vehicles, and music from the various food establishments and shops along the cliff.  I spent nearly 2 hours with a man named Shabir, from Kashmir, on our second day here negotiating the price for some jewelry.  The strand of lapis I walked away with is gorgeous and was the one thing I went looking for.  Ever since I learned that lapis lazuli was the source of ink for many an illuminated manuscript at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, Ireland, I’ve had a love affair with this semi-precious intense shade of blue stone.

Not one for organized religion, I do find the rituals and artifacts that various religions reference beautiful and fascinating.  The reason the Chester Beatty Library is one of my favorite museums is because it assembles the stories of many religions under one roof.   After a visit to the hushed, low-lit, non-denominational building, you walk away with the awareness that we humans like to tell stories to make sense of this life.  This was the subject of conversation over another coffee at the temple yesterday afternoon.  Dawn commented that she has built a world she feels safe in, and this reminded me of the class I am eternally grateful for taking at San Francisco State University over 20 years ago called Creation Mythology.  We read the stories that are the basis for many of the world’s religions in that class, and again the awareness I walked away with is that we humans like to tell stories to make sense of this life.  Our final assignment was to write our own creation mythology.  What would your creation mythology look like if you could cherry pick the qualities of the gods, goddesses, plants and animals that resonate with you?  For me it is a practice that invites, coaxes, and deepens the dropping into and integration of self, allowing an awakening into a more harmonious reality, no separation.  Excursions like this provide an expansive playground for such things.  And, like Jack Kornfield says with his book title of Buddhist meditations, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry.  How to be present when it isn’t all fun and games and travel and newness every day.

Yesterday during an extended period poolside, Dawn handed me her headphones saying I had to listen to a certain song.  Both of us listen to music all the time at home, but neither of us have been listening to music very much on this trip.  It was fun to be in this foreign world and transported again the way music has the power to induce.  I’ll probably use the song she played (some French band whose name and song title I can’t recall) as the music for a montage of photos from this trip.  But then I listened to the playlist I put together for this trip.  First it was a song my sister Sarah turned me onto when she visited last summer.  It was fun to have those memories for a song.  Then it got too hot where I was sitting and I walked into the shade, iPod nano clipped to my suit, sat on the edge of the pool, legs dangling in the still cool water and the following triptych played.  The songs and messages paralleled the day.

At the Bottom of Everything (Bright Eyes)

Out of the Depths (Sinead O’Connor)

Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)

Namaste-ji