Om Namah Shivaya (very traditional greeting salutation here at the ashram generally indicating a reverence for God the Supreme Being),
We are settling in nicely here at the ashram (for those getting this first installment -- Bob and I are here at Amma's ashram, Amritapuri, in Kerala, India for five weeks). Bob so loves it here that I think it totally biased his description of our flat (saying in an earlier email we had a flat that overlooked the Arabian Sea). While we do have a very nice flat relative to ashram standards where austerity is the rule, it would be wrong to give the impression that we are in a view room. We do have a distant view of the Arabian Sea if you look beyond the coconut trees (Bob's description and the reality remind me of real estate agents' description of view apartments which often offer only a tiny sliver of a view of what they say you can see). Regardless, it is a nice flat and what it lacks in actual sea views it more than makes up for in having a very lovely view from the back window of the Kali Temple (there are only two windows in the flat--one that faces out to the corridor that provides the passage entry way to all the flats on that floor and a back window which in our case faces out to the temple) . The Kali temple is a magnificent structure that functions as a temple, housing for many of the very long term residents devoted to a spiritual life (equivalent of priests and nuns), and business offices for running the ashram and providing visitors and residents with various services (e.g., travel arrangements, internet stations, small shop that sells clothing and various spiritually oriented items, a second hand store, massage, check in for staying here, etc). It's such an interesting mix of the most ancient with the modern. Taking pictures is not allowed on the ashram grounds (as this is not a tourist destination or attraction but a sacred place of spiritual learning and living). If you go to the amritapuri website, you can get a good idea of what the temple looks like. I will try to get some photos of nearby sights not on the ashram grounds and forward them to you all over the next week or so.
During the day, the weather can be steamy due to the high humidity at times and it's not very hard to work up a sweat, but in general, when in the shade and with the occasional to common breeze, it is really quite lovely. All the rooms have fans and that helps tremendously as it can be pretty stifling in a room with no air circulation. The night time weather is extremely pleasant and that is the reward for any earlier challenges with the daytime temps and conditions. We are here during the tapering of the monsoon season so it has rained some part of each day we've been here thus far and some have been real downpours.
Even though our sleep cycle is still way off, we are trying to settle into a routine such that we arise at 4:15am to be ready for the 5am morning prayers, meditation, chanting, singing, and arati (a very lovely spiritual purifying ceremony) that go on for a bit over an hour in the Kali Temple for the women and the huge program temple for the men. We then prepare our morning tea at the common hot water dispenser, come back to our flat and do our own private meditation and get our things together for the rest of the day. We then head to the dining hall (a semi-open space where if you aren't careful if you step away for a moment, a hungry crow might swoop down and help itself to your breakfast) and have breakfast either of the Indian version (idly and sambar) or familiar Western version. Hopefully there is fresh yogurt (called kurd here) available. They make it fresh each day and it is very popular and goes fast if you don't get to the dining hall in time. Yesterday there wasn't any because it wound up turning into cheese instead of yogurt. After breakfast, we head over to the biotech department at Amma's University which is across the backwater and about a 10 minute walk from the ashram. We take the bridge that was built after the tsunami hit here and made it very clear that people needed a more reliable evacuation route to the mainland than depending on small boat ferries to take people across. Bob works on his Morgan Stanley work as well as preparing for his two statistics courses he is teaching here. I am his teaching assistant and am pulling together the course materials, organizing them, finding resources on the internet to assist with the instruction, etc. We share a small office together (with the fan on and the window open, it is really a nice temp to be working in). The office is nicely situated in that the one window that faces to the outdoors is next to a path that many students walk so we feel very steeped in the college atmosphere of the University here. We haven't quite figured out our meals for the rest of the day as the days differ here for what is going on in the ashram (for example, today Amma served lunch to everyone (close to a thousand people), other days there are many visitors (several thousand) as Amma has a public darshan) etc. There is a dining hall here on campus that we may wind up using, for lunch anyway, depending on how Bob's schedule shapes up as he starts teaching his classes. We eventually make our way back to the ashram, and again, what is happening there in the evenings is different on different days whether it be the ongoing public darshan that Amma started at 11am earlier that day or it may be devotional singing or an instructional spiritual talk. At this point, our sleep has been so out of whack, we are usually exhausted by 8pm or 8:30pm and in bed by 9:30pm only to sleep for maybe a couple of hours or so, before our internal biological clocks tell us it is our normal New York City daytime "so wake up and get going." It will be nice when we finally get 6 or 7 straight hours of sleep again.
We've seen several people we know here from our US connections and that is really nice and comforting. I have a massage scheduled for Wednesday that I am looking very forward to and there are a number of activities I hope to get to before leaving here, including meditating on the beach of the Arabian sea. The ashram offers a lot of opportunities for being around Amma now that she is in residence and not out touring. It's a really nice atmosphere so far.
On the much more mundane side of things, I am doing small skirmishes with some ants in our flat, not very many but enough that if I don't stay on top of it, it could become a problem. I brought some food with me from NYC to help with the transition from my usual diet to ashram food diet. I've got all that food wrapped and wrapped in plastic zip lock bags which so far has been successful but it doesn't stop the few persistent ants who still what to have a try at it. I've tried being relatively humane to them by giving them ample warning (in the way of spreading clove oil as a deterrent) that I mean business if they keep coming into our flat. So for those that do still come in, they wind up being squished. Bob is unwilling to do that and I am no doubt accruing a lot of karma by squishing them but it may be good karma in that I am setting their souls free to become higher beings than an ant or it could be really bad karma in killing these creatures. I hope they are coming to our flat in order to attain liberation from their current life station and know I will not disappoint in getting them there. On a side note, ants come in a lot of different sizes here........from really really tiny to more normal size with several variances between the two.
So now being three days into our five week stay, I would say we are settling in really well and I, personally, am receiving tremendous grace from Amma in having a good experience at the start of this five week stay. I know Bob would eventually love to live here for several months out of the year when he retires and I think Amma is gracing him by gracing me with the support that I could possibly be fine with that too.
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