Sure enough it's nighttime, the end of a day. I'm back on my hilly perch, suddenly warm in my sleeping bag on this cold country night, and writing by the light of the nearly full moon.

What a difference a day can make to my slug-a-bed body. I started today still full of yesterday's gluttony -- a huge bag of pistachio nuts, 50 cents worth of gumball machine Skittles, gooey malt ball leftovers, and I'm sure some things I'm forgetting. I woke full of food and feeling toxic in my blood and stiff and grumpy and lame in my body. Now I sit clear and clean breathed and almost but not quite present in the moment. I was thinking how the yogic slowing of the mind is exactly like being in the country after a city, the way sounds suddenly take on a different scale, and even crickets are deafening and a single car passing in the distance once an hour seems like a racket, and even the sound of acorns falling from trees is distracting.

A picture of a picture of swami
Vishnu Devananda, founder of the ashram

Only after yoga is my mind quiet enough to hear its own racket. I can't hear a thing for the din in the city; out here and after a mega dose of yoga the chaos has eased to discernable patterns.

This guy was directing traffic at the gate

And plus my body is buzzing exactly like when I'm on an opiate. As I lie here now, under the milky light of the moon, I'm getting little shoots of pleasure from my legs to my forehead, and as I lie on my belly I can feel my organs rubbing happily, massaging each other. And my deep breaths are unobstructed by any tremors, and my nose is clear enough that I don't have to use my mouth for breathing.

Note the beautiful doorjams and windowpanes

I worked my ass off this afternoon, painting windowpanes and doorjams, and my partner in painting, Shamboo, is a sometime regular staffer here. He has some great stories, like how he lived for a few years in the Bay Area as a bicycle nomad, living out of his saddlebags and camping often in the Marin Headlands. And how he was "bicycling around Utah" and found a cave and commenced a 40-day water fast, which ended 10 days prematurely when some well-meaning folk rescued him.

Shamboo contemplates his new copy of Notes From the Road

The place feels a little like summer camp in that everywhere are named structures, like the Vishnu Temple, Durga Temple, Bathhouse, Mediation Room, and everywhere are paths with cutesy little signs pointing the way. And the people pool is constantly changing, so everyone's forever in that getting-to-know-each-other vibe, which feels to me exactly like the first week of camp.

And the days are so stuctured:

5:30am wakeup bell

5:45 the wakeup bell rings again, for anyone who hit the snooze alarm the first time

6:00 Satsang, which is chanting and meditation. As one person put it, we "sat and sang".

8:00 a 2-hour yoga class.

10:00 a feast of the most incredible food imaginable.

11-4 "karma yoga", which is working on the upkeep of the ashram. I'm doing a "work/study", which gets me my stay for half price, which is $15. I think I wouldn't have to do the work part otherwise.

4:00 afternoon yoga

6:00 another stellar feast

8:00 evening Satsang. I'm not a big fan of the Satsangs, since for the 40-minute mediation my mind is mostly wandering so I'm merely sitting uncomfortably with a crick in my back (interesting how hard it is to sit when we've been made dependant on Lazy Boys). Then the chanting is all devotional stuff in Sanskrit, and it moves too fast for anyone to get the hang of it and be musical. Then there's a little lecture on the need to surrender to god and on the universality of the divine. Fair enough, but I'm mostly here to let the divine enter through yoga, and enter it will, with or without church. As Woody Allen put it, "The divine can't enter through the mind, it has to enter through some other orifice, if you'll forgive the disgusting imagery."

But anyway, a car is passing slowly in the distance on the gravel road and it sounds like traffic noise to suddenly spoiled me. The crickets are chirping away, so loud and intense it keeps reminding me of mellow ambient techno music, in wild stereo as the waves of sound come and roll from all directions. There's some animal poking in the grass about 100 feet away, and whatever it is just snorted. Myabe it's the infamous nocturnal donkey I was warned about. The moon is bright as a nightlite and I hope it gives me deep enough sleep. It feels like midnight in the North Pole, not quite night. In the morning at 5:30 they'll be ringing the bell for Satsang and I wonder if I can feign sleep and just show up for the yoga.

All is well in the countryside as I slowly acclimate. Om peace peace peace.

Comments?

Previous Contributions:

------- mediate? or meditate? silent mediation sounds like an interesting idea though. in that case, for the sake of that, I hope its mediation. ------- perhaps that snort at night was not a donkey at all but the Ashram Swami sniffing around for the newcomers intentions.. They say some Yoginis can read minds...in any case , be grateful the donkey chose not to serenade you spontaneously.. ------- Keanu? ------- bul shit -------