Stuff from an Old Notebook #18

SIVANANDA ASHRAM, KERALA INDIA, 2007

I've always found it difficult to write when immersed in something.  Meditation, martial arts, yoga, these practices require full participation.  One can only write from the role of observer, and in full immersion, this separation is impossible. (On the other hand, being a foreigner in Japan distances you, so it is easy to report and retain).  So the notes from my time in the ashram are haphazard and scattered: 

-Hearing the roar of lions at night and during savasana, coming from across the lake. 

-The sound of someone singing in the shower.   

-The dhobi drying laundry in the sun.  

-Sitting in lectures, the same as it was one thousand years ago.  

-The call of the Asian Koel, what I refer to as the Ali G bird: "For real, for real, for real."

-Sadhu taking photographs.

-Hindu devotional music blaring from the coconut forest, and from elsewhere, the call of a muezzin cuts through. 

-Om graffiti

-Feral dogs hardly recognizable as dogs 

-God as flower behind ear; smudge on forehead, ash symbolic of humility, draws power

-Man made god in his own image. 

-Why can't man answer the simple question, "Who am I?"

-Wizard of Oz as a sacred text.

-iPod Mothersbaugh techno in Singapore airport at 6 a.m.  Upgraded to Business class, and while in my broad seat, read that there are no distinctions between human.


On the turntable, "Meat Loaf, "Bat out of Hell"