life is the red wagon simple and strong
the life is the red... is the red...
oh it's no big deal

but when the feet are draggin'
oh
you pull me
and I pull for you
you pull me
and I pull for you

I dare say you would not be interested in the topics of our dialog; but then again, you might find some of the thoughts similar to considering the space between stars, or the far end of the Universe, should there be one, or its conception, if it had one. Ah, ha! You see, these days existentialism doesn't score as well on the Nielsen Ratings as it used to.

Once you get a whiff of the Mystery, though, you begin to get this strangely comforting feeling that things are, after all, much larger than you projected them to be, and you (by comparison) are much smaller, a little bit less in control of your destiny than you imagined. It is a sweet gift; when your muscles aren't bound up in such great effort to prove your permanence or grandeur, your relationships with people invariably improve. Not convinced? Then don't read on, I'm not trying to convince you.

I am sitting on a wrought iron bench at the edge of the trees, watching the loose weave of clouds sail easily overhead, from day into night, colored by the raqys of sun as She sets. First white, so that the lace became flying wings of angels or doves; then with a moment-by-moment change of hue, the lightest cream, the softest yellow, the mellowest orange, a blend of all three as the least layer movesw eastward toward the sea, higher strata moves north to the mountains and Canada, and the highest of all, the nearest to the stars and the last to wrap itself in colors of dusk, remains still as though watching the dance of the rest. If it looks carefully enough - if it looks at all... but why not? - its eye sharpens to a telescopic point, narrows to a county, a city, a neighborhood, a yard, and here I am beneath it all, as visible to the sky as it is visible to me. Why not?

The crickets... as I have attested, my invitation to nature, to wash like a heavy sea right up to the shore of my front step, has made my 3.5 acres a veritable Cricket Sanctuary. I should put up a sign... ah, but clearly there is no need. The crickets are here. They are here to announce morning, and here to announce evening; the latter duty has been their pleasure for an hour or so, their beautiful, staccato voices blending together into a discordant harmony -- discordant harmony, how interesting -- that stands like an understory to the song of the breeze itself. The same breeze that escorts clouds there, or there, or nowhere, sends a cool draught over the lawn, into which the crickets... into which the crickets add their part.

I thought once that the source of our creativity was the height of our joy -- but then I found it difficult to write about joys without writing also of sorrows. I found it difficult to kiss without also feeling the tears, or dance without feeling the pull gravity somewhere in my heart. It slows, you know, the heart slows in its beating, as though it were in less and less of a hurry, has less somewhere to be, or less desire to be there. I found it difficult to smile without remembering...

Tonight, I passed some time with Tevye, the village milkman: Tevye, whose fundamental beliefs are challenged at every turn, and at every turn helets go, further and further. A daughter marries against his judgment, a daughter marries without his consent, a daughter marries without his knowledge... and with a smile and a shrug he bows to the will of the God of change, bows to the god of gravity, the god of aging, the god of humanity, asking of the same spirit: Why...? Didn't your teachings say, follow this path, it will keep you and your family safe, it will grant you peace and propserity, give you enough?

We are all born to teachings, however modern we presume ourselves to be; yesterday the teaching was constancy, and the challenge was change, while today the teaching is incessant change, and the challenge is cessation. Didn't you say, follow change, it will keep you and your family safe, grant you peace and properity, give you enough?

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears

Nothing like the flow of notes and heart sense, as the planet leans into Autumn's chill, and we lean toward one another for warmth.

And along that wild and sinuous path, you do learn - or at least, you make some decisions: these things I hold true, for now, until further learning modifes or disproves them. I have written poetry for some years, well, since I was a boy, so now it is lots of years. And it dawned on me (that's a nice turn of phrase, if you think about it) it dawned on me that a poet's poetry rests on the fact that everything is in everything else, that all the things around us and far away from us is made fromt he same stuff of Being, and so being, has at its core a common thread. When a poet opens her mind or his mind to that broad ocean, metaphor isn't only obvious, but is inescapable.

So along those days and years and words you select and collect and begin to reflect it all back to others. Each affirmation goes out in words or colors or musical notes, and the world mirrors it: if it rings like a matins bell, you can feel it was closer to the center of things, to a Truth you can rest upon; if it clangs like a piece of scrap tin thrown in the street, you know it to be part of the myriad Things, a superficial view of the world that sees everthing as separate.

Well. What happens when you toss out an idea and it pleases you? And you toss it out again and it pleases someone else? For a time it makes a sweet mantra, like saying yes, yes... yes... as you walk down the street, accepting everything.

And what happens when you pick up book by an ancient sage, and read your words, down to the last goat [sic], if your voice, in his or her writing?

The crickets, having avoided mass destruction from the whirling blade of the mower, are literally and figuratively enjoying a "hayday", while the birds... well, the thistle plant which now stands shoulder-high on the rise outside my window, whose flowers I have watched mature from ragged buds to glorious purple crowns, have now gone to seed, and any morning - a morning such as this - I can look out and see two or three goldfinches, winged tufts of sunlight, eagerly plucking seed from the open pods.

I am sure what they don't eat is scattering to the winds, and come spring I will have twice ten the number of plants I watch mature today: the hazard of letting go.

Snapshots retrieved from a life in motion.

At my parents' cottage in eastern Canada, I paused in the yard before entering the house, the spray of stars catching my imagination and my daughter's eye, the local green gone underground for the night, while the infinity of space and the fullness of a galaxy took our breath. With our eyes we tiptoed around the heavens, navigating imponderables, while the fragrance of the garden reminded us our feet were planted on the earth.

Then, as if to make the colors more precious still, the night was spent in incredible pain.

You may know something of the region in which I stayed: famed cultural hub in the center of the island, the most densely populated place on the planet, presenting fine silverwork and woodcarvings, musical instruments and high-art batik to the world. The best of the jet set would return from such a trip laden with cheap goods for friends or for sale.

Somehow objects bought cheaply can never quite escape the stamp of "commodity", however. I returned with very little. I returned without my partner, without silver or carvings or wall-hangings. With almost no photos, since I told myself my eyes would be my camera. I suppose they were, and the film has faded somewhat with time.

But beyond the stuff of the senses which, while possibly faded, is still so intense and precise: the smell of melati trees lining the road; the deafening chorus od frogs in the rice padis outside my window; the charcoal braziers puffing out small clouds and delicate road-side dishes; faces of friends... beyond all that there are these things of value. I still possess one; I find it amazing it is still intact.

With those first words, I have given you the freshness, the low rays of the sun, the clear skies of so many mornings. It is Saturday: I have given you some stillness and freedom from Purpose. There is the faintest breeze, in fact, which plays around the drying field grasses and late-summer flowers, and an untainted blue sky. My daughter is whistling in the living room. Outside, the crickets -- who love the fact that I haven't mowed the upper field in weeks -- have set up a cadence, a syncopated cricket-waltz, three to a second; or perhaps their syncopation is a studied lack of rhythm, dancers who don't know the steps, and so hes...itatethenstep then hes...itate and another until Schubert or Brahms would measure them incompetent, or brilliant, failed student or master...

In the tall, unmowed field they are the masters.

So my piece of the world turns in the direction of the sun again.

There is a... buzz...? or a humming from inside me, from within the house of my bones, like the sound of departing dreams; as though, if I stopped my ears and the sounds of the woken world were held away, I would hear a door open, footsteps within me, or echoing voices, and everything moving through water, the ebbing waters of night, taking on a gentle, aquatic distortion. Sometimes, waking late on a Saturday, the colors and textures of that dream space are almost tangible, almost, so when the manifested world begins to pour in, you reach after the dissolving words and faces, stretching to hear or to see: what did you say...? what was it you said!

tech • nol • o • gy | tek'näləjē |

noun (pl. -gies)

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Greek tekhnologia 'systematic treatment,' from tekhnē 'art, craft' + -logia 'knowledge', originally in reference to grammar. In the mid-1800s applied to industry and industrial works. Finally, circa 1964, 'High Technology' was coined for the overtures of the digital age.

Like most words, its meaning has followed the pursuits of those who use it, mirrored the world in which it is uttered, and dissolved its connotations from one web of meaning into another, gently pulling its associations along with it.

An object of art or craft would, at one time, leave my hand and fall into yours; an exchange of goods would (somewhat inaccurately) bring equivalence to the transaction; and your production might feed my belly while the work of my hands fed your heart or your mind. Today, however, the gathered production of 400 billion suns is softly, distantly falling over a span of years, sifting down into the upper atmosphere of this minute planet, received there by an even more minute chip of metal atop a Chilean mountainpeak: a trade we establish... without return.

What we took for a band of shining dust is no more than our local neighborhood -- an unimaginable multitude of stars, around whose warmth are huddled equally uncountable planets burgeoning with life -- and that knowledge made us all as insignificant and grand as we could be. We thought we were alone? We thought we were unaccompanied?

Bela has been challenged by change lately: there is plenty of it to go around, while constancy is constantly in short supply, and her body is changing as well, so while the rug may not have been pulled out from under her feet, the floor has been pulled out from beneath the rug; a more confusing situation, since the appearance of ground is mocked by the spongy and intangible feeling of the flying carpet weave, high above... nothing, it would seem.

Before she left, I reminded her that we have two hands, that we have one hand for giving and another for receiving -- one hand which holds the past and which makes us feel secure, while the other opens up for whatever the day or the week or the year will bring us. You may wish to close one or the other because what they carry or what they call is uncomfortable to hold; still the past is there like a jewel or a stone, and the future is there for anyone who cares to unclench their fingers.

Because there is little cultivation, the life of the soil is given space to grow, the soil life contributes to the health and growth of the plants. Sometimes it detracts from the helath and growth of a single plant or species, because this richness of life includes insects and stronger varietals, which can crowd out some desirable produce. However, the goal is always thesame: increase life. Do not use toxins to try to push natural processes into your timeline, but become wiser, become more subtle in your contact with the earth... become a master... so that you better help the earth work for you.

An example is intersowing pulses with rice, a technique developed, proposed, and manifested by Japanese-born agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka. He took a dead hillside and transformed it into a thriving forest of life ove the course of 20 years of zero cultivation. The process is to plant rice, allowing it to grow to near harvest, then intersowing barley pellets while the crop is still standing. When the rice is harvested, the stalks and all are laid over the barley, protecting it from birds and from heavy sun, and trapping in moisture asa green mulch. The barley rises and is harvested. I believe they work in a rotation of clover or another nitrogen-fixer in between plantings as well.

Here, Krishna has planted tall stands of papaya and banana, with the understory planted in pineapple and other crops -- while full sun is better for pineapple growth, the land beneath the tree crops would otherwise go unused... two crops for the price of one.

A beautiful and rustic spot. We helped rush drying peanuts into shade so that coming rain would not wet them, bringing molds. We ate food freshly cooked after being freshly harvested... a dream, if a hard-won dream... but then, all farming is this sort. That fact that you can farm with vision, with skill, and with spirit makes the physical labor involved small compared to the riches which are collected...

India as a country has embraced that vision, in fact (rightly) sees this aspect of its cultural heritage and current social structure as its contribution to the peaceful future of our species: the politics of nonviolence and society of communal realization. They passed law in the early seventies to protect the vision of the mission of Auroville, and continue to support the project in many practical ways -- funding and support of infrastructure, as well as direct funding of a number of scientific or social projects which are run within the circle of the community.

Today Manny and I rented bicycles... that is, two-wheeled, pedalled vehicles. Numerous parts were missing or inactive, a bare boned Bike that you pushed hard uphill and pushed a little less hard downhill... a bike like everyone else's bike, a bike that has been doing work for people for many many years. So now it is only fair that you do a little in return, don't you think?

Well, we rode down and out of Auroville proper, in the direction of Pour Tous, the Auroville cooperative grocery store. It is deveral kilometers away, and we took back roads to smaller tracks to walking trails to get there. Everything is presumably well-mapped, down to those walking trails... but then everything is poorly-marked, so we did manage to find ourselves somewhere other than where we expected, a little bit sweaty, at the gate of a Brit who fortunately happened to be talking to his workers at the time, and who somewhat sardonically pointed us in the right direction, with a "'Spect I'll be seeing you again in ten minutes!" as his cheerful farewell.

Well, his directions were fine, and we found ourselves in the town of Kuilapalayam, the closest settlment outside of Auroville proper, and 2/3 of the way to the Indian Ocean beaches. Once we had finished our shopping, the community of Aspiration was literally just across the road, and we decided to stop in for a visit.

I was intrigued with the place, as it is one of hte largest intentional communities in Auroville. We were welcomed by a student who has been living there for about a year as a "guest", and invited to have lunch with them. After hearing our story, and of our interests, we were quickly introduced by our francophone hosts to Djoti, a Tamil man of 40 or so, who has lived in Aspiration for 20 years. He was born in the area, attended Auroville schools (as public schools did not extend into higher grades) and was invitied -- surely on account of his intelligence and spirit -- to attend a private high school in the States. He studied outside of Greenfield, MA, and hoped to continue to college there but, funds and opportunities lacking, he returned and worked with the community since.

Djoti was extremely open and helpful -- yet another shining example (literally, shining a very good light) of the kind of people who inhabit this part of the world and this project as a whole. Another man -- now I forget his name, the local names does sing into my memory yet -- added color and comments, and we talked theory and philosophy of community for an hour over good curry and yogurt.

Aspiration was the first community in Auroville, and was the port of entry for over 80% of the current Aurovilian population. There was no housing on the mud plains at the time -- this is before all the pioneering replanting took place -- and those who came from abroad needed a place to set their feet down, before proceeding to establish new communities within the project's properties. The community continues to function as an intentional one, sharing meals and other pragmatic aspects of living in close quarters, as well as sharing a common philosophy -- that of Sri Aurobindo, political thinker, philosophical visionary, teacher and activist. They follow his writings and practices, but not as a community -- individually in their own homes.

Other communities have followed the model of Aspiration. "Creativity", another community closer to Auroville's center, was modelled directly on the processes and group dynamic of Aspiration. Adventure is a small group working with intention on the principals of living and sharing some resources. Verite, of course, we visited briefly in my last blog entry. A few more lean this way.

Every day a dozen experiences, a half-dozen meetings, and a couple of real enlightening moments... almost always accompanied with a smile.

Today the sun is out. Manny and I return to the Matrimandir this evening to meditate -- the power of that experience something I cannot really share. And after dinner we will stop at Bharat Nivas for a concert of world-class quality. More music in life and in act.

So, Auroville in brief: almost 40 years ago, two spiritual and intellectual leaders in southern India created such a strong community of followers, and such a beautiful blend of yoga asana practice and the science of living in the modern world, that the energy in their wake resulted in this major international undertaking: a city that belongs not to a single nation, but to all peoples, and which is inhabited not by a single culture, but representatives of all cultures. The plan was so broad and so far-reaching, and the vision so refined and elevated, that it has for all of this time defied some of the fractures that have disrupted other projects of communal living -- where communalism was the only aim -- or experiments in spiritual community, where spiritual growth was the only aim. It holds the bar so high (as Manny puts it), that attainment remains in the future, and in so many directions that new waves of human endeavor and intent always find something in which to invest new energy.

Auroville itself is a large, loosely-woven town composed of over 80 individual "communities", each of which holds its own vision, its own mission, and its own social structure, ranging from cohousing with shared resources and meals in a shared kitchen, to bedroom communities that more resemble suburbs than experimental villages. Whether communal or common, however, every living group here exists within a field of incredible energy and intent, and over 1700 full-time members are drawn into the fabric of the founders original vision.

Verité is one of these communities. It was conceived as a spiritual and educational center which, true to the central teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, strives to have the lightest environmental footprint possible. The community is completely off-grid, generating all electricity in solar panels, with high-efficiency bulbs in all lights, and candles substituted whenever convenient; water is pumped with a windmill and stored in a system of cisterns; there are two hot water systems which run cistern water through black heating panels -- a system of painted pipes exposed to the sun -- which raises temperature sufficiently for a fine hand-bath. Otherwise, showers are cool, which is a blessing in the humidity of the monsoon season.

Bhavana, who has been with the community since its inception, manages the beautiful and functional structures of Verité: the Verité Hall, an amazing circular hall used for meetings, dance, yoga or meditation; the Integral Learning Center, or IRC, where students come to learn about environmental living, spiritual growth or other topics, and whose architect followed Japanese lines and wide-open rooms without walls to create delight for the eyes and cool breezes for the body; and the guesthouses and central kitchen, where groups of students or seekers can stay for some time, learning more about community in Verité, with the opportunity to visit many other communities in and around Auroville. There are currently 9 full-time residents of the community, and a couple of long-term guests who took time away from their more mundane lives, to invest in the sublime.

The more time we spend with each Veritian the more beautiful their spirit appears, the deeper their commitment and knowledge, and more extensive their experience. Bhavana (BA-ve-na) has been here almost 40 years, and has seen the entire life cycle of this amazing human experiment. Danya has been in the community for 25 years, and moved through many, many refinements to living in community; he spends 6 months stateside (still working with Omega institute in New York, I believe), and 6 months in Auroville. Aurelio is from France -- I haven't heard his story yet. Isha is a long-term Veritian and handles accounts. Charles arrived from England three months ago on a second (and perhaps permanent) visit; he is a Newcomer, meaning he has received an extended guest visa, which may be converted to permanence or citizenship after two years probation.

All in all, an amazing and complex current of people with vision and with values, with enough energy to transform a dead plain with no shade for miles and miles, into a buzzing and swirling human space. Dedicated to, and literally belonging to, all of humanity.

Rama related this story of the Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi: the young man came to the mountain in 1900, at the age of sixteen, after a near-death experience. The near-death was not a physical death, but the sudden and complete realization that his body would perish -- a complete understanding which left him immobilized for some time. He understood the central question of his existence -- perhaps of all of our existence -- and left home to study it deeply, left the noise and intrusions of the mundane life to dedicate himself to meditation, to insight into this life.

He lived in the small Virupaksha Cave, on the side of Arunachala, the red mountain, just above and behind the major temple complex in Tiruvannamalai, for 17 years. Devotees found and followed him. His understanding deepened and his teaching broadened. During the 17th year, there was a heavy drought, and the Bhagavan did not have access to water. Above Virupaksha there was a spring, and one of his devotees convinced the Bhagavan to move near this guaranteed water source, building in the process a small building around a cave there. They lived there for six years.

Maharshi's mother had understandably tried to convince him to return home -- but without success. After many years she took up his teaching, became a devotee herself, and came to the new site to live with him. She passed away six years later, and once the Bhagavan freed her from her body, they descended to the foot of the mountain and created her samadhi. He did not return to live in the caves above, but taught there at the base of his beloved Arunachala. More followers came, came from all India, and an ashram was built around him, around his teaching. That is where we visit today.