Category — A World of Family

Yesterday I went to the market on my scooter, in the town about forty-five minutes from where I live. I bought some fabric from a man who refused to let me pay my bill before he could give me tea.  He told me that next time I come, I must have a samosa, too.

While I was driving, many thoughts went through my head, as thoughts always do when I am traveling in the luxury of my own company.

Isn’t it amazing that a landscape can wind itself into you? How you may not have noticed every lovely detail when you were new and raw in your transition, but now, two years later, that lone magnolia tree in a field can bring you to tears? Or the egrets, the great white birds, friends of cows and water buffalos, winging over the emerald rice paddies, the egrets have you waving after them foolishly, able to do nothing more than put your hand up toward the sky as if you thought you could touch them.

How you love even the dustiness, the color of it, all the lonely dusty roads and fields, crisscrossing like veins over a vast country.

India is certainly majestic. But it is not mine, not really, because I am from somewhere else.

We are preparing to go back for a visit, soon, to Canada and the U.S. I am thoughtful and sorrowful and excited and over the moon. And scared. And happy. And thoughtful.

But what I wanted to talk about, on this rambling evening, is the shape our community takes. Christine’s question in the comments on the last post made me think that I take so much for granted, I’m never completely clear.  Actually, I’m never sure just how clear I should be, but I think I can tell you this.

Chinua and I have lived in community for all of our married lives, and for many years before. In fact, in the whole time we’ve been married, we’ve only spend five months out of intentional community.  We’ve lived in many different situations.  There was the big house in San Francisco, with people everywhere, in all the kitchens, falling down the stairs, spilling out of the windows.  That was fun.  There was the house in Arcata, always changing. For a while it was all boys and me, and then it was a few couples with newborns, and then we moved back to San Francisco to a largish flat with all our babies and had lots of crazy fun interspersed with whispered fights in the hallways. That was crazy. And then we lived at the Land. A couple of times. There’s lots to say about all of it, but what I will say is that I really love all those people I lived with, and I really believe in community.

This is the shape our community in Goa takes now.  There aren’t so many of us, really. There have been six of us (adults) committed to being here for six months of the year. We have three small houses close together and one a little farther away. Our courtyards touch.  We eat lunch together everyday. We take turns cooking, and we have a circle once a week to decide who will cook on what day.

We are a meditation community, and we are followers of Jesus.  We do daily meditation in the Christian and Judaic traditions, and we focus especially on the Divine Presence of God among us.  In our weekly circle we also decide who will guide each meditation.

The committed people in our community keep the structure running, but it is an open community, which means that we have a lot of visitors.  The meditations are open to whoever would like to experience this kind of meditation, and lunch is always an open invitation. It’s great, really, because we get the best of whoever is cooking; everyone can put their all into one or two meals a week. Lunch in my family is the biggest meal, and dinner is usually pretty snacky.  Sandwiches, or omelettes, or leftovers.

We live close together (the meditation space is on my rooftop) but Chinua and I and our family are the only ones living in our house. (Thank goodness, because we only have two bedrooms.) I love this. We run in and out of each other’s kitchens, but we can find our own space, too.

Sometimes the rhythm of it all (the lunches everyday, the other meetings we have) gets repetitive to me, since every other waking hour is filled with the restraints of family life, but I remind myself that if I can sigh into the structure of it, into the restraint (as a friend of mine once said) I will gain the freedom to learn to truly love.

Our vision is for a Jesus focused, creative community exploring art and music as well as the disciplines of meditation and prayer and worship, in an international hub. Goa is the place for us, right now.

We will be back here in October, for our third season. If you are interested in something like this, something rather crazy and fun, you can email me.

So.  I hope that clears things up.  If you’re interested, I can write more on meditation in the future.

This feels like a letter, somehow.

I’ll sign it,

Rae

We’ve been having a deep retreat, covering meditation and other practices for those of the Jesus Way. So far we’ve talked about community life, meditation, contemplation and intimate worship, the practice of singing together, and loads of other stuff. And then today it was time to run away to the gigantic banyan tree that is down the road aways.  We packed food for an evening picnic and loaded up the scooters and cars.

On the way.

It takes about two seconds after we arrive for them to be up a tree.

They’re looking up because the Superstar Husband is way up here:

Can you see him?  He’s right in the middle.

This one just stuffed bananas in his mouth.

This is a monkey I found in the tree.

And these are shenanigans:

This is a man from Holland who has many years of experience in Christian community and with meditation.  We invited him to come and share some of his wisdom with us. I’m not sure that he expected this kind of adventure, but he got it!

We like to stick our guests in trees.

Also our Leafy boys.

I’ll just get it out first so you aren’t wondering.

I was planning a trip to Ethiopia to visit my friends at Drawn from Water. Everything was ready. I’ve been needing to take some time away, I wanted to visit good friends who I haven’t seen in a long time, and I wanted to find out about ways that we can help them.

I had my tickets. I was set to leave on the 19th.

And then I found out that India has changed its visa regulations completely.  If I leave now, I won’t be allowed back into the country for two months, even though I am on a five year visa. It has never been this way before, and Chinua has been in and out to Amsterdam, Turkey, and Israel since we’ve been here. But, everything has changed, and the timing wasn’t the greatest.

It goes without saying that I can’t take a two month vacation from my family. So I won’t leave until we are ready to be gone from here for two months or more; probably not until this summer.

I’m adjusting and getting over it.  I only cried a little. I will still be going away for a little rest, probably somewhere close by, but not getting a whiff of another place, which is what I felt I needed. I’m sad that I’m not going to see my friends.  I really, really was looking forward to it.

Anyways.

I just watched this about the earthquake Haiti and my heart broke. It is an important part of being human to be able to put yourself in the place of someone else and imagine what it must be like to be them. In a time of loss my troubles begin to reveal themselves as very small, very normal troubles.

You can give to the relief effort here, and find a larger list of possible places to donate here. It is a beautiful thing when people around the world can get behind their brothers and sisters in a time of tragedy.

So what is it that we have been doing, that has kept me away from this computer for so long?

We have been coughing and blowing our noses, but that is not it. That is not all.

First, there were our gift projects.  I found some lovely cotton canvasy type fabric in the Mapusa market (I really must take you on a tour of the Mapusa market one of these days.  You won’t understand my life if you don’t come with me) and had cloth grocery bags made by my new fabulous tailors.

* A note on the tailors. I’ve had so much trouble with tailors over the last year that I’ve seriously considered just buying a sewing machine and making all the kids’ clothes myself, something I would LOVE to do if I had a clone who could finish my book and host all the people who come over everyday. If there were two of me maybe we could get it all done.  What I did instead was took a deep breath and walked into every Nepali shop that I’ve been avoiding here in my tourist town since I arrived.  I hate shopping. Remember? Loathe it.  And there is nothing that will frighten an anti-shopper like myself more than an overabundance of choice. So I took an afternoon and forced myself to go and talk to all the tailors.  I found some with a wide open space in the back of their shop, so they were practically outside, but with a shade cover.  Good working conditions. Check.  Polite, not smarmy. Check.  Understood what I meant. Check. Good stitching on the samples. Check.

I found my dream tailors and I have loved everything they’ve made. Wonderful, because the kids always need clothes and there are no thrift stores here and don’t even get me started on the horridness of things that are sold in the shops. *

So anyways, I had the bags made, and then the kids drew simple designs and embroidered them.

The gifts were a hit. We gave them to our neighbors and close friends.

We decorated our Christmas tree; this year a tiny spruce.

We got the rooftop ready for a Christmas party that we had on Christmas Eve.

And then we had the party.  It was so sweet. There was plenty of food, and the decorations were so peaceful and nice (the stars were made by Miriam and Johanna, members of our community from Germany and Switzerland.  Some are made of paper and some they made out of palm fronds) and I read the Christmas story while the kids acted it out. The child who played Mary had a bit of a nervous problem of picking her nose, so the video may prove to be an embarrassment one day.  We sang carols, with Chinua, Miriam and Johanna singing three parts, and Chinua performed his arrangement of the Little Drummer Boy, which never fails to bring me to tears. The guests went away happy and blessed, and we were all happy.

(Kid A took this photo at the party.)

Christmas day was beautiful and sweet, except for my sleep deprivation from going to Midnight Mass the night before. I may tell you about that at another time. (Mistake!)

Oh, the kids were so excited and Chinua and I made crepes together and then friends came over with hula hoops they had made for the kids, and then the other members of the Turbans (the band Chinua was in in the Himalayas) showed up (we haven’t seen them since we left the mountains) and then we went for a family swim.I’ve been worn out, lately, and missing my family, so this soft, sandy Christmas was just what I needed. God always knows, doesn’t he?  He always, always knows.

The fifth day slipped through my fingers.  And again I fell asleep when the kids did, which was very romantic on my husband’s first evening home. I think I felt safe and my body just collapsed. I’m still fighting some sickness. But I’ll keep trying to post every day this month.

Renee was an angel and watched the kids while I went to the airport with Cypriano, my house owner and the taxi driver.  I grow exhausted driving so far here, so I took the easy way out, and spend an hour catching up on reading.  I was reading a novel about the U.S., and blinked whenever I happened to look up, very surprised to find myself in India.

I find the local airport a very odd place to hang out. I’ve spent some time there, over the last year and a half, waiting to greet beloved people, noting all the strange shapes of people whom I haven’t seen before.  I stand outside, trying to get a piece of shade, hot in the sudden humidity that has returned. People spill out of the doors, everyone grumpy in the inconvenience of flight, noses wrinkled as they withstand the calls of taxi drivers and hotel touts.  This is a mild airport, nothing like Delhi, or Mumbai.  Even the taxi drivers are fairly lackadaisical, falling back when you tell them you’re not interested, rather than pursuing with increasing volume.

I’ve been living in one village or another for the last year and a half, used to people who mostly dress alike.  Here it is Indian housedresses or little Catholic dresses. In the Himalayas, it was Salwar Kameez with a dupatta tied around the head. The men here wear towels most of the time, towels or shorts. The men in the Himalayas wore Gaddi hats and vests over white shirts, herding their goats and cows.  So it is strange to see all these modern Indian people.  They seem very pale, and they wear many different things, not just one traditional costume.  Many women wear glittering saris and have perfect pedicures, while some have cropped hair and are wearing jeans and t-shirts. One woman is wearing a toque with a button up shirt and a swishy skirt.  She seems odd here. Just as I seem, to the people around me.  She and her husband, who is wearing many gold chains around his neck with a pink shirt that is slightly open at the collar, welcome two irritated-looking men who seem to be hardly able to walk.  The two that are oddly dressed walk quickly after taking the suitcases, leaving the two other men toddling in their wake.

I watch, and watch, and wait.

And then there he is, and he is beaming. “I hardly wanted to expect that you would be here,” he says, “just in case you weren’t.”

On the way home we eat baklava that he brought from Israel, and we look at each other.  I tell him my strange experience of reading the book in the car and feeling like I left the country, and he nods and exclaims, “I know!  Isn’t that strange?”

It is good to have him back. He is my perfect grown-up.

Robbery is not as fun as making believe that you are a warrior princess. Obviously. Even if you lie awake thinking about how you could catch the robber if you only had the chance, (maybe you could bash him around the shins a little with a plastic cricket bat, just a little, just so he wouldn’t get away before the villagers came out and grabbed him) it’s still not the fun kind of lying awake, more the speedy mind kind of lying awake.

Is there a fun kind of lying awake?

Is there a way of posting any lucid thoughts when you are seriously sleep-deprived and you are weaning your baby, which has you lopsided physically and emotionally?

A thief broke into my neighbor’s house a week ago, while she was away. They took a bunch of stuff and then moved on to the next house, the house behind my house.  There, they were surprised and chased off by a guest who was sleeping in the living room. The guest was too disoriented for pursuit, but he probably saved my friend’s house from being ransacked, since she was also out of town.

It did not escape our notice that both of the people who were robbed or had a robbery attempt made on them, were out of town.

I went through the seventeen stages of post-robbery trauma, admittedly in proxy, since I wasn’t actually robbed: curdling stomach juices, adrenaline, fear, apathy, anger, betrayal, ice-cream cravings, acceptance, squinty-eyed looks at all the men of a certain age who might have run off with a pocketful of money, the cessation of the squinty-eyed looks, returning to saying hi cheerily to everyone, and gossip.  Well, it’s not really gossip, but I spoke a lot with my Goan neighbor, Maria, about it.  Since she knows almost no English and I know only a few words (and counting!) of Konkani, our discussions are very limited.  We click our tongues a lot, and shake our heads.  “This man is very bad,” I say, and she shakes her head.  “This no good,” she says.  “This first time. This seven years foreigners coming, no thief.” And we click our tongues and shake our heads.

Then, last night when I was up with the boy in my house who has never slept through the night and hopefully will before he ages even one more month, there was another robbery.

I heard shouting, and then I saw running, and there were flashlights, and more shouting, and more running, and pretty soon all the neighbors were gathering on the road and in front of my house. There was a lot of yelling, and a description from the old man who had seen the thieves and shouted first, and then a repeat description, and then lots of questions about which way they ran, and then their route was described a few hundred times.  Then real progress! In their flight they had dropped the laptop that they stole!  And also, they had left their shoes behind.

Lots more shouting.  Finally, I toddled back to bed. It was about 3:00 in the morning. Did I mention that I am on single-parent duty for the next couple of weeks?

We have changed the locks on our doors.

I was so shocked after the first theft.  And then I wondered why I was so shocked.  As though I don’t know that the world is full of grasping, full of people with less, people with a broken conscience, people who need drugs, people who will steal tools from a non-profit organization, people who will walk away with the guitar of someone who tried to help them. Last night I was shocked at the thief’s boldness in coming back to the same place, and walking into a house with people in it, but more, I noticed how the whole thing was bringing the light into sharper relief.

There is a great decency in this village. Everyone expresses concern, people have been in tears because this has happened here.  And then, in the middle of the night, the people in the area banded together to try and figure out what to do, to shout and race uselessly into the jungle, searching, to commiserate, to shake their heads and cluck, and to simply be together.  It’s the kind of thing they totally take for granted, but I don’t, because it’s not every place that has everyone from the elderly to the very young rushing towards the scene of the crime to do whatever they can to help.  You more often find people retreating behind locked doors and watching behind their blinds as the police arrive.

Leafy is overwhelmed with delight.  He won’t stop hugging me. All of his favorite coconut trees gathered around in our yard, to greet him.

There is a new gate and driveway and a concrete courtyard at our house.  It is a vast improvement. There is also a lot of fungus and mold to deal with, which is not a vast improvement.  I’m a little overwhelmed by all that I need to get done.  But one step at a time is a good pace.

Cultural transition feels a bit to me like playing Memory.  You turn a card over, hoping it will match the card you already have, the one with your homeland stamped on it.  It never matches.  Maybe you squint for a moment, through the light in a certain forest, or at a particular stone formation, but then, no, it’s not the same card.  The trees are shaped differently, and the light hits them in a funny way.  It is not your forest, after all.

It is beautiful to see new things, again and again, but it can be a little disconcerting.  It is a very long game of Memory, and you are never winning.

More than the beauty or the sense of welcome from the people here, the thing that strikes me about returning to Goa is that I am finally finding matching cards.  The first card is not the homeland card, it is last year, when we had Solo, or when we researched dolphins, or when we bought the bread from the breadman with the squeaky horn.

I turn them over and they match and it is bliss. I’m almost as delighted as Leafy. 

(It will be a while before we get an internet connection, which is not bliss.  Until then, I apologize, especially to my family and friends who have been waiting to hear back from me.  These small nuggets are the best I can do for now.)

Yesterday I stumbled over a dead cat, and then saw a dog with a large piece missing out of the back of his neck.
Yesterday I sat and had tea at the tailors, then returned to the home of my friends and had coffee under the mango tree.
Once I chose a cycle rickshaw walla who looked old and desperate, and it took me three times the normal length of time to get where I was going, because his cycle was broken.
And another time I chose the first cycle rickshaw walla who yelled at me, and we zipped home at breakneck speed, smashing into the wheel of an oncoming cycle rickshaw when we spent too long in the oncoming lane while passing a fruit cart.

This city and the country it embodies are like this.  The best and worst, all in one parcel. A beggar with missing limbs lolling on the ground like a piece of trash.  That’s a person down there, but everyone is walking on by. A circle of women laughing and pinching your baby’s cheeks. Flowers garlanding the necks of loved ones, lights on the river. God is here, like He is everywhere else. He sits in the dust with the beggar, watches the light change in the daily flow of his creation, and He never doesn’t see. His heart hurts for it all, even when I am too far away to know about the boy in the tailor’s shop who just got cuffed over the head.

We’re getting on the train tonight after an incredibly rich time with our friends. We love our Aussie friends and their ridiculously wonderful hospitality. We will miss them.

Some photos. You can click on an image if you want to see it larger.

In India there is a river.

On one part of this river, there is a city which is said to be the longest standing living city in the world. Many people come to this city to burn their dead and spread the ashes, to study music, and to find India in its potency.

Along the Ganga (river) there are rows of steps, called ghats.  The other day, just before sunset, we went out for a little walk along the ghats.

Let me tell you, the ghats are a different place when you have children. They become wild terrain, a place for climbing and sliding, and mothers shudder because they know these ghats have the filth of a thousand years etched into their stone surfaces. And still the children climb.

The ghats are covered with mud and silt from the river at certain times of year, because the river rises in the swell of the water from the Himalayas, and then settles itself back down again. Sometimes children step onto the mud, believing it will be solid beneath them, and instead their feet are sucked in and covered.  They have to be pulled out with a loud SCHWELP!

And their mothers shudder and cover their heads with their hands, because they have seen the dead water buffalos and goats thrown in. And they have stepped over the piles after the men have their morning poos. They sigh and pull out the wipes and the hand sanitizer.

And they sit and have a chai together, just like old times, but with more rescuing of chai cups going on.

I wish I could show you the look of longing that comes over my daughter’s face if she ever spots a snake. She is a snake charmer’s dream customer.

What will she become, this girl who so willingly twines snakes around her and then reaches out for them and whispers to them?

And now I would like to show you the best photo of the crowdedness here that we have been able to capture.

It has been hard to find time to blog here because we don’t have internet at the house we are staying at, and the power is off from 9:00 in the morning until 12:00 and again from 3:00 until 6:00 in the evening.  It is hot in that way that slumps you a little and makes you shrink from the normal bustle of folding laundry and picking up.

But we have been having a wonderful time. Our friends here are so incredible.  We wish they would move south.  As that doesn’t seem likely right now, we’ll take every chance we can get to be with them.

Chinua took all these photos, and I wanted to show them to you.  The next chance I get, I’ll show you the ones I’ve taken.

I believe that it was sometime in late February when I chose to spend part of a morning out talking on Skype with a dear friend of mine.  I was in a dark little internet shop with the fans going, and no one else was in there, which was nice for a Skype call. She told me that her husband was in Ethiopia, and that they would possibly move there, but don’t tell anyone, because it’s just an idea at this point.

And then on May 12th, they flew into their new life. It was so fast.

It’s only now that I understand the courage that it takes to do such a thing, and I understand it as being fathoms deeper than my own relocation. For one thing, I’m living in traveler India, where there are little amenities for people from foreign countries.  Amenities like Nutella and German bakery goods and even olives if you’re really going to splurge. But my friends Levi and Jessie moved with their three children to Jinka, a tiny town with no internet, and I’m sure, very few amenities.

(Plus, besides a brief stopover in Sacramento, we moved to India from the Land, where we already knew all about power outs and water problems. I always feel like living at the Land was the best training for being here that I could have had.)

The reason for such a bold move was a tribe which holds many old beliefs. One of the more drastic beliefs is that there are certain markings that make a child bad luck, and for the good of the tribe, that child must be killed. By sheer grace and persistance, some families of the tribe who obviously were torn apart by these beliefs, chose to give their children up, rather than kill them. There were ten of these children, and no one to organize their home.  So Levi and Jessie went.

Now they are trying to work out the future.  But resources are low, and even though their costs are relatively low, they are responsible for ten children and seven staff.  It always seems like there are so many good works in the world that have one main problem: lack of funds.  I want to find ways to address this more fully and sustainably, but for now, I’ll let you watch the video.

Drawn from Water from Drawn From Water on Vimeo.

Here is the link for their website, and here is the link to donate.

(Thanks to Carrien for suggesting this post.)