Tag: Asia
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Planting a Vertical Orchard
From the Earthville Blog: For our first service retreat program at the Dharmalaya Institute in Bir, our friends at SanghaSeva brought sixteen wonderful, hard-working volunteers from all over the globe to work with us, so we took on a major project that could only be done with that kind of person power: landscaping a landslide to…
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A Picture of Progress
From the Earthville Blog: We’ll be posting a detailed update on the construction of the Dharmalaya Institute soon. For now, here’s a little picture of progress… 🙂
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The Earthville Orchards
From the Earthville News page: The Earthville Network is pleased to announce the launch of the Earthville Orchards, a win-win-win-win opportunity for conscientious global citizens and responsible businesses to sponsor tree plantings in order to offset their carbon footprints while creating green jobs for Indian villagers and more… Read the whole story here.
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Fueled by Kindness
So much in life can’t happen without the kindness of others, and this is especially true here in the Himalayas. In a “subsistence-plus” economy such as we have here in Himachal Pradesh, most villagers have enough land to feed their families, more or less, so they don’t necessarily need to work for anyone but themselves in order to…
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A Passage Through India
A familiar sea of humans, cows, and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws… with some new features: People of all stripes gathering around giant outdoor projection screens to cheer every turn of the Indian athletes in the Commonwealth Games… Brand new Delhi Metro terminals, still not-quite-finished and already falling apart, teeming with hurried passengers, mostly unfazed as twelve more press themselves into the…
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The Road to Mudville
Merhaba from Konya! Arriving in this ancient Anatolian city, once a fertile garden of cross-pollination among the great mystics and scholars, philosophers and poets from all over Eurasia, my warm-hearted tram driver, Mehmet, asked my views about Islam and Linux… I grinned. I had spent the whole night on a bus to reach this place…
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Kimchi & the Change Gang
An nyong ha sae yo! (That’s “wassup” in Korean…) Thanks to the gracious hospitality of my Uncle Pat and Aunt Yong, recent transplants to Seoul, i had a precious opportunity to stop over in Korea for nearly a week on my way back to India (after a whirlwind maintenance visit to the US with some…
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The Rising Canal and Other Changes
Buongiorno from Venice, which i thought i’d better see before it sinks much further. Lately, it’s flooding more frequently and more severely, and it’s chilling to drift around this jewel of history and imagine that, within as few as 20 years (if some scientists’ predictions come true) the first floor or two of every building…
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A Joyful Noise!
Sawadee khap from the warm waves of Thailand! Happy to be hOMe again. Conveniently, i feel that way almost anywhere i go… and yet there’s this familiar flavor of effortless contentment on some of my favorite patches of Asian soil. The static subsides… Mozzies & the Matrix Last month in Bodhgaya (where the Buddha formerly…
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Can’t Go hOMe Again…?
We plant trees. We come back later. Some have died, some are still standing… and some have spawned magical forests! After five years away from my old hOMe of Dharamshala (a small but densely bustling town in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, which serves as the exile home for H.H. the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan…
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Power of Place
Sawadee khap from Doi Saket, where i’m planted once again in the Tao Garden, polishing my inner smile. 🙂 Yesterday was the first slow, leisurely day i’ve had since i left India two months ago… and now, after a whistle-stop tour of my world in Oakland (mostly my desk, truth be told), i’m finally catching…
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Dubya & the Sublime Lotus
After the intensity of our inner and outer experiences of recent weeks, my friend Artyom and i were ready for a holiday. We hired a jeep to Sikkim, had good talks and good momos, and then he caught a jeep eastward to Rumtek Monastery (the exile HQ of the previous Karmapa, though the Indian government still…
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Kalimpong Recon
Being in India again is enough of a gift, but the unexpected bonus prize is a reunion with Nepal as well — not geographically this time, but culturally. This whole chunk of the Himalayas from Sikkim to the northern West Bengal hills (from the Bhutanese border in the east to the Nepali border in the…
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Retreat & Advance
For those of you who missed the message i wrote in the clouds (poor timing: as soon as i enscribed it, the Mothership flew by and messed it all up… sigh…), here’s a plain-text version of update: After a sweet and transformative two-week meditation retreat here in Sarnath, i’m now officially the same as i…
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Rocked in the Many Arms of Mama India
As the sagacious space swami Bonzai Baba taught (in the Garland of Pop-Culture Pith Sutra, IIRC), “Wherever you go, there you are.” Well, one thing about India is, somehow, wherever you go, there’s even more of you. More than any other place i’ve been, India has the mysterious power of reflecting whatever one brings to…
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Long, Hollow Bones
I can breathe again…. 🙂 When i arrived at Tao Garden, my breathing was shallow. I didn’t realize how shallow it had become, because, well… i guess i forgot to breathe for the last year or so. But after just a few days of chi kung, yoga, meditation, and simply breathing mindfully, my chest is…
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Taoist Tune-Up
Sawasdee khap from the Universal Tao Garden, home of the Inner Smile and observatory of the Microcosmic Orbit, where you can avail of free Wi-Fi access sipping garcinia tea in the dining pagoda while waiting to get your chi circulated, your blood ozonated, your arteries chelated, and your colon irrigated — all before lunch, and…
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Middle Way Course Correction
Something magic happens when everything familiar is removed from the outside, and all that’s left is (imaginary) me… same old me, new world (or, as one of my old songs goes, “Same Planet, Different Universe”). Kinda like a ginormous sensory deprivation tank but with lots of other auspiciously random people in it, it reflects me…