India - More Auroville

What we love about Auroville:

The farms.  Auroville is dotted with small-scale organic farms, growing a wide variety of vegetables in an even wider variety of sustainable, permaculture styles.  Each one expresses a unique vision for how people, land, resources, plants, and produce can relate and co-create.   One of our favorites was Solitude Farm, which displayed an inspiring hybrid of cleverly integrated organic, permaculture, do-nothing (a la Masanobu Fukuoka), and traditional Tamil farming practices; and they have some excellent marketing, too, including  a budding CSA, an annual farming/music festival, and a farm-to-table café that served breakfast and lunch 6 days a week!  Farms need to be sustainable for the land and for the people living on it; a farm-to-table café seems like a great way to get people to directly partake in the bounty of the farm, expose more people to healthy food, generate income for the farm, generate more positive buzz for the farm, and have some fun!  

Best green smoothies ever.

Planting Okra seeds - or "Ladies Fingers" as they're called here

The closeness to nature. Every day and night we’re reminded how swaddled we are in wildlife.    We’re sung to sleep by a chorus of frogs behind our bed; we’re startled by tiny geckos running along the walls and springing from behind bookshelves; we’re delighted by a family of mongooses that creep out of the jungle to eat the food scraps we leave for them.  The only wildlife we aren’t particularly fond of are the mosquitos.  I miss this kind of intimacy and companionship you can feel with nature when you aren’t so surrounded by other humans, where there are wild spaces where those wild creatures can make their own homes, so close to yours.  I don’t realize how deprived we are of that comfort until we feel it again.

Climbing trees is even MORE fun when you're looking for guavas!

Our friends.  We are extremely lucky to have some friends here in Auroville.  A few of them are left over from my visit here 4 years ago; one of them is a new friend that we’ve only just met.  But all of them seem to be playing an important role in our journey here, giving us the love and support and guidance I feel like we’ve been looking for.

Ongkie is an Indonesian/Chinese hybrid that moved to California at the age of 27 (that was in the 70s); he’s one of the kindest, gentlest, Zen-iest characters I’ve ever crossed paths with.  He lived at Green Gulch Zen Center in the Bay Area, CA, a Zen monastery where the resident monks live together, meditate, grow food, cook food, process, make crafts, and live a simple and pure and beautiful life.  What surprised me about Ongkie is that he isn’t rigid or structured or overly-anal-retentive or even very “spiritual”, at all.  His philosophy is closer to just accepting life exactly how it is, and not taking it too seriously.  He’s more concerned with having a peaceful life than attaining some kind of enlightenment.  Oh, and he’s Auroville’s #1 hairdresser.

He’s hilarious – chock full of gems.  Here’s some Ongkie advice:

-Your neighbor is complaining about you playing music next door?  Go to him and say, “I know a quiet place you could move to – the cemetery!”

-Maybe we should just simplify the English language.  That’s what they did with Indonesian to make it easy for people to learn.  Verb conjugations?  Forget ‘em!  I do, you do, he do, they do.  Much easier.  Different tenses?  What for!  Today I do it, Yesterday I do it, tomorrow I do it.  Much better!  And if you want to say ‘a lot of chickens’, you just say ‘chicken chicken.’  ‘A lot of people’? ‘People People.’  Easy.

-On Yoga: “I like Yoga, but in all the classes the teachers just talk too much, it’s too distracting.”

-On Auroville:  “Auroville’s not India.  It’s California.  It’s a country club.  It’s the place where the people who have been backpacking for too long come to retire and eat good food.”

You are a fountain of wisdom, Ongkie - We love you!

           

Ongkie doing his thing!

Such a cool cut!  She's so beautiful!

Betty is our next door neighbor at our homestay here in Utility community.  She’s always chattering away in French with her daughter, walking or riding their bikes or motorbikes past us sitting on the terrace, and never hesitating to say hello.  Imperturbably kind, generous, welcoming, and bright, she’s been pretty much the best neighbor we’ve ever had.  She let us borrow her sharpest veggie-chopping knife (still pretty pathetic in true Indian fashion) and she lets us use her internet when it’s free!  She took a few moments on one of our first days to point out some important locations on the map, including the best farm to get organic eggs and exactly where to fill up our 5 gal water jug with good drinking water.  She brought us cups of coffee on one of our first mornings and sat and chatted with us, and has come over a few more times since.

She’s been like our guardian angel here in Auroville – she’s not afraid to talk about big things like gratitude and dreams and family and conscious evolution right along with the small things like the best restaurant in town and how to bake a cake on a gas burner.  She’s just so encouraging, so positive, it’s somehow struck a chord within us of gratitude, possibility, and hope – just the kind of spiritual boost we needed. 

She moved to India from Spain, after living there for nearly a decade since leaving her native France.  Her 9-year-old daughter, Lhasa, that she’s raised almost entirely on her own, is one of the most mature young women I’ve ever met; she lives in an incredible home in an incredible community in an incredible part of the world, teaching French classes in the school and doing Reiki healing for free.  She couldn’t be happier, even if she doesn’t know if she’ll be here forever.  How did she do it?  She believed in herself; she believed in the overwhelming beneficence and abundance of the Universe; she learned to Trust in the Divine and let love, money, and objects flow through her life, letting go of them with faith that what she’ll need will come when she needs it.  She feels like whatever she has, it’s enough; whoever she is, it’s enough.  She’s learned to feel that sense of gratitude so strongly, so intimately, that she sometimes feels totally overabundant with giving.   

We can’t help but admire her, and be inspired by her.

Betty’s practice:  Every morning, meditate for 15 minutes; then, go for a walk in nature and look at all the beauty around you.  Acknowledge that beauty, connect with that beauty, feel how it resonates with the beauty within you.  Then, sit down and write your gratitude list: write your gratitude for everything and anything that you feel thankful for on that morning.  Next, you can express gratitude for all the things that you want to manifest in your life, as if you already have them.  This gratitude list will direct the flow of your life, and make all the difference, as you begin to live in gratitude.

Cute.  Cows.  Everywhere.

We came to India, and embarked on this trip, because we wanted to find the inspiration to reset ourselves, rediscover our spiritual life, and discover the next life stage for us: what does the Universe want from us next?   It’s a question I think everyone comes to at some point.  I expected something to happen – and I was concerned that even though we were traveling around the world, that important thing might not happen to us.  But here in Auroville, in India, we both had the sudden feeling that the new selves we were looking for were already here; we don’t need anything external to happen in order for us to suddenly change our ways of being, our perspectives, our habits, our consciousness.  What we really need is an internal change – we needed to discover those new selves waiting inside us.  What a joy to find them there, waiting for us! 

This is pretty random, but I can't possibly think of any context where it wouldn't be random... so... here ya go!