Hello Everyone! Things here have been incredibly busy for the past week or so but I’ll do my best to relay some highlights from our trip….

I last wrote just before my group left for three days in Tiruvannamalai, a holy city about three hours from Auroville. The city is built around a hill called Arunchala, which, according to Puranic legends, is the physical manifestation of the god Shiva. Traditional wisdom holds that if you circumambulate the mountain slowly and thoughtfully, you will be blessed by Shiva--and maybe have some bad karma erased?--and this pilgrimage destination attracts as many as tens of thousands of people on any given night.

We devoted our first evening in Tiru to this spiritual walk, and I think it was an interesting and moving experience for all of us in different ways. The trip takes about three hours and requires that one walk through both quiet, natural paths and bustling stretches of the city. I really didn’t know what to expect when we set out, but I was surprised by how different various sections of the walk were. We seemed almost entirely alone at some points, but then we’d walk through a small village where dogs followed us for a while or children came up to us asking for money or pens (which seem to be something that tourists often give them). We also saw lots of monkeys, which I still find completely terrifying; apparently, you’re not supposed to make eye contact with them or smile because they think you’re asking for a fight by showing your teeth, and they might also come after food or possessions that you’re not holding onto or paying attention to.

I always find it exhausting to be on guard constantly, and part of what made the walk such an intense experience was feeling like something could come up or go wrong at any minute…. As I think about it, though, I see that this constant feeling of unpredictability is really an unavoidable fact of life here, and the excitement and tension that come along with it are still not things I’ve grown accustomed to…

After our nine-mile walk, which some of my friends performed barefoot (as per the traditional spiritual requirements), we collapsed at a café full of trendy, spiritual hipsters for a much-deserved meal and some laughs about our adventure. My favorite story about the events of that night is the following:

At one point early in our trip, a dog on the side of the road started walking with us, and he stayed with us for about seven miles. At first we all thought it was funny that he just joined us, but then we started having problems with the other, more territorial dogs we encountered along the way; at several points we almost found ourselves in the middle of a brawl, and we had to defend “our” dog against various aggressors. The last leg of the walk is through a busy and very crowded stretch of the city, and apparently just before we completed the circle the dog’s owner came out of a store we had just passed, spotted his pet, picked him up and carried him home. Part of me still can’t believe that this happened—we walked so far with that dog, and then just happened to cross paths with the owner—but then again the place is known for being charged with lots of spiritual energy and maybe that’s just one example of the kinds of things that happen there…

The rest of the trip contained a number of other strange, educational and somewhat unexplainable moments. We visited the ashram of Sri Ramana Maharshi, a fairly significant spiritual figure in Tamil Nadu, and we also went to what purports to be the largest Shiva Temple in India. My friends and I had a range of reactions to this last site, which I can only describe as a combination of Disneyland and the best and worst parts of India. The area outside of the temple was completely chaotic with monkeys running around the ground, beggars asking for food, women and children trying to sell flowers, and motorbikes and rickshaws weaving through the crowds of people. Inside, things were only slightly more contained. Multiple prayers and offerings take place at any given moment, and we spent a considerable amount of time waiting in line to visit specific areas (and paying small fees to avoid the long waits). Apparently, there is also some history of priests extorting money from visitors through a range of schemes inside the temple, and some of us had close encounters with that. I was never really at ease until we had left the temple and had made it out of the surrounding area, but the whole visit was definitely an interesting and edifying one. So much of what I saw seemed incredibly foreign and almost unreal, and it's puzzling when I stop and think about the fact that these places, which seem so weird to me, hold so much meaning for the people who live here and comprise their everyday (perhaps unexamined) reality...

I know I still owe everyone an entry about my work on the farm, and that’s coming soon…I have lots of stories about compost, mulch and other organic matter, and I've also gained a new appreciation for lettuce...thrilling, I know. Stay tuned/Love to all!