Hi friends! I’m still on the island but one of my island-mates is going into Vila so I asked her to post some blogs for me…really these are just some copies of letters I’ve written to people in the last few weeks that after writing I realized I wanted to post so then I typed them out…yay, solar power!

A letter to a Yoga friend:

May 29, 2008

It is as if I have roused myself from a bad dream and woken up in paradise.

The hot season has vanished almost overnight, and a calm, cool, constant wind has taken its place. A bad fever has broken, and I am suddenly at peace.

The wind enlivens me, inspires me. It calls out to the Vata inside me, and for once I no longer see the Vata as a hindrance - but feel its strengths: flexibility, lightness, movement, transformation.

“Wind” and “breath” are the same word here. The words for “inhale” and “exhale” are “pull wind” and “let go wind”. It takes a long time to say in a Yoga class, but it really is a beautiful image.

With the abrupt change of seasons, the colours are suddenly brighter, the lines between the ocean and sand suddenly…crisper somehow.

I have begun to kill rats again, after several months of trying to live with them. A book I am reading called The Vision about a man’s relationship with an Apache shaman is helping me find some honour in it, at least in bringing some consciousness to the task.

This week I spent three entire days cleaning up the feces built up in my house during my several weeks away. There must have been hundreds. And I have never cleaned this house so thoroughly -- climbing up onto every shelf & ceiling rafter, and as I swept and swept into my new plastic dustbin (I can’t believe I just used a coconut leaf broom for a whole year), I started thinking about the nature of rats and my relationship to them.

An interesting question I’ve begun to ask myself lately is, “if my life were a movie, what would this particular event/illness/creature symbolize?” it’s just a way of stepping outside myself, I guess, and seeing the bigger picture - but I’ve found a way to talk to myself in a vocabulary that means something to me, and that makes investigating things easier, if you know what I mean…

Anyway. So what are rats? Or, more accurately, what have they been to me? Small, insidious creatures, feasting nightly; eating away at whatever I have been careless enough to leave behind. I am compulsively meticulous, though, which means they mostly eat away at plastic bags and containers. Pecking away at my treasures while I lie awake fuming, chasing after the shadows with the flashlight I keep by my bed for this purpose, or alternatively plugging my ears with my fingers & squeezing my eyes shut in a kind of desperate denial.

And yet, they are so small and so RELATIVELY harmless it seems cruel to murder them. “It’s just…stuff…” I tell myself. And so they survive, and thrive, and multiply like a virus in the body.

I killed two in two days before the big cleanup, and felt a certain confidence, a certain TRIUMPH as I swept. And I asked myself what I have allowed to eat away at me over the past several months - thought patterns, habits, behaviours, relationships - too small to demand action individually but en masse enough to break every container, to weaken the whole system, to desecrate a sacred space with their waste.

Three days it took - around 20 hours altogether, and I still find pellets appearing on shelves or rolling onto the floor - the aftermath of the first kriya so to speak.

Or maybe this is just all lies to make myself feel better about being a murderer.

I am becoming more and more comfortable with animal slaughter, which is sort of disturbing. I certainly do not participate, but I don’t run and hide the way I used to. I can walk freely among the torn, bloodied carcasses, sit down with friends while they casually make soup out of intestines.

I have never before been present for the kill, though I have often heard it in the distance.

Some people have heard of Hindus here, they know them as cow-worshippers and often ask me about it, and I was thinking about that the other day as I passed a cow in the bush - that I don’t really know the stories behind it - the mythology or the scripture or anything other than cow as ‘giver of milk’. But I’m passing this cow and thinking there’s so much I do that Hindus do that I don’t fully understand, and I kind of shrug and nod, “Hello, Mother” - which felt at once bizarre and sort of comforting - like I knew where I was for a moment.

The next day a kill was announced, because my brother was discovered two-timing two girls and we found out one was pregnant, so we had to make a sorry ceremony for the non-pregnant girl’s mom in the morning and do an engagement ceremony for him & the pregnant girl in the afternoon (against the will of all three involved in this love triangle - I have it all on tape).

Usually the kill happens in the bush, but somehow the animal ran all the way down the hill and my uncles chased it into my yard. I was in my kitchen and I chose not to come out, though I listened to the whole thing.

It was so quick, the attack and then the fall, the death. I never realized how quickly the whole process happened. I almost found a kind of respect for these men I feel I know so well, suddenly revealed to be true hunters.

Almost, but not quite.

If we are all one consciousness, what is the difference between pulling a bunch of cabbage up from the earth and slicing the throat of a pig or a goat? Their levels of consciousness?

It is frightening the questions you begin to ask out here, when once you knew, knew with certainty, where right and wrong lived.

Is it really rape if it is all they know and all that they expect?

Is it so wrong to hit a child when the child knows that will be a consequence of the behaviour?

I don’t think I believe in absolute morality anymore, and I think I used to - though ultimately, I don’t think it matters much - my own moral code is essentially unchanged.

Finding compassion for these people has made me better, not worse - though I guess I won’t really know until I’m out of it.

The mosquitoes have significantly dropped in numbers with the drop in temperature - though I seem to be plagued with a new race of welts that I attribute to ants or spiders or both. I consider that my cleaning spree has disturbed hundreds of these creatures.

Without the suffocation of the heat, the bites cause more curiosity than despair. I calmly observe my body’s reactions, wondering how much it can take at one time, wondering how the scars will layer on top of each other, checking the swollen areas constantly from an almost…artistic perspective. Just to see the picture they make. And yet I am calm.

Do I exaggerate this world I live in? I don’t know. I wish you could come here and see for yourself. I’m certain you would only see the beauty in it. The rest takes time and a trained eye - or perhaps I really have gone mad out here.

And if I did, who would know?

And yet even as I write I know it is all true - all of it at the same time. This world - it is a jungle and it is a temple. It is a hotbed of violence and a circle of love.

Is it different everywhere else, or anywhere else? I don’t know.

I have found my way back to Yoga again - this time more gently, gradually than ever before. Small baby-step goals. Rewards along the way. There has been no Love in Yoga before for me - no sweetness, no kindness. It has always been a tangle of guilt, self-hatred, a strangling perfectionism in the name of Sacrifice and Duty.

I feel the Gurus laughing at me almost daily - when I fall on my face in the Crow, when I open one eye to sneak a peek at the time mid-mala, when I hit a hideously off-key note in “Jaya Ganesha” - and I laugh with them now, sometimes out loud (is that crazy?) It’s just like one long light-hearted game.

That’s life, I guess.

I just finished the novel Chocolat about a medicine woman of sorts opening up a chocolaterie against the will of a fuming country priest. It is a truly decadent book - rich, colourful…thick.

Tonight I made a fire and boiled water, almost considering a cup of hot chocolate in celebration of nothing - a rebellious act considering the late hour and the morning meditation ahead.

I made some Rooibos tea (the one I got at your organic store in New Plymouth) with cinnamon instead…and at the last moment I thought “What the hell?” and threw in a teaspoon of chocolate powder.

Just a teaspoon. But it was enough.

I feel certain now that this is my path.

Well, there you have it - for once, a letter and not a panic attack on paper. So you can stop worrying about me, at least for the time being. Because I really am okay now.

Om Shanti