Tag: India
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Now That I Know You, What Is Your Name?
Smiles all around at the close of our second annual silent meditation retreat with SanghaSeva at the Dharmalaya Institute in the Indian Himalayas. It’s always fascinating to spend a week with people without hearing their voices, and then finally get to ‘meet’ them, while having a sense of already knowing them in a way. Now we’re preparing to welcome new arrivals…
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Himalayan Roots & Global Fruits: The Humble Birth of Earthville
This story was written in response to a request from my friend Rodger Kamenetz to post to his popular Jew in the Lotus page. An unlikely path How did an artist and activist fresh out of college wind up opening a vegetarian restaurant and community center just up the street from H.H. the Dalai Lama,…
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Growing Skyward: Raising the Roof of the Dharmalaya Institute in India
LET’S SEE, WHERE WERE WE…? When we left you with the season finale cliffhanger last June, we had just bundled up our baby building with prayers that she’d survive the monsoon rains without a roof. That was asking a lot from a big mud sandcastle, and we put her fate in the hands of a…
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Zen and the Jazz of Green Building in India
From the Earthville Blog: The biggest news on the construction of the Dharmalaya Institute is in regard to our race against time to get the roof on our baby building before the onslaught of the monsoon rains this month… and the update is that, well, we couldn’t win, so we’ve done our best to change the…
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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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Our First Service Retreat in Bir
From the Earthville news page: This month, the Dharmalaya Institute (a project of the Earthville Network) hosted its first service retreat program for international volunteers on its new eco-campus near the remote village of Bir in the Indian Himalayas. Organized in collaboration with SanghaSeva, the retreat welcomed sixteen participants from eight countries for ten days of volunteer work, group…
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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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Rocking the Foundations
We finished filling the foundation trenches just in time. 🙂 From the Earthville news page: Earthville’s Dharmalaya team is happy to report the completion of the foundations for the Dharmalaya Institute, an eco-friendly service-learning campus in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. The Institute is being constructed in a style based upon the traditional vernacular architecture…
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A Groundbreaking Event!
It’s on… 🙂 From the Earthville news page: After a year of preparation, today the Dharmalaya team in India broke ground for the construction of a new, eco-friendly service-learning campus in the foothills of the Himalayas. The Dharmalaya Institute will serve as the base for our sustainable village development projects in the Himalayas and will also…
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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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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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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…