One of the most extraordinary things about the effulgent creativity and the omnipresent display of the pantheon in India is its unabashedly vulnerable nakedness about our deepest fears and desires (the ones we usually try so hard in the West to keep private).
This would make more sense to me without the pronouns (and specific theism), but otherwise it has some resonance.
This morning, on my last full day of vacation, on my way to leave my bags in the office of the bed and breakfast where I was staying before I walked about in Santa Fe for the day, I walked back through the breakfast room, where I had eaten an hour before.
To my happy surprise, good friends from home (a former co-worker and his wife, whom I’d just been thinking about because I knew how much they like New Mexico) were there finishing their meal.
We spent much of the day together, until I had to leave to catch the train to Albuquerque to be ready for tomorrow’s early morning flight back home.
It felt a perfect completion of a trip made to study yoga and be in community for the week.
So said the meteorologist, when I called to check the weather yesterday before getting ready to go out for work. I thought, “it is easy to enjoy your day, ‘regardless of the weather’ living in a nice house with enough money for heating and cooling, working inside, and getting food flown in from wherever, if the garden isn’t doing well.”
I am awed and fascinated by the weather, although living this almost entirely protected and secure (from the elements, less so from other people) urban life, it is an almost vicarious relationship.
One of the reasons I love gardening is that it links what the weather — a rainy and cool spring like we are having; a drought, like we had for the past four years; violent thunderstorms; a snowy winter — with what food grows well, how my wildlife supporting little garden in the front thrives, helping to tie me back to the earth.
