india dream book

a travelogue that started in India and has not ended

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vision board

Just over a year ago I started collecting images of India and posting them here. It was my version of a vision board: If I made known the things I wanted to see on my trip, I thought, I had a better chance of seeing them. Of course, some of the places I was sure I'd go, like Agra, to see the Taj Mahal, or Dharamsala, where I was going to visit with the Dalai Lama, never panned out. And places I couldn't picture at all before I left became sharply clear to me in ways I had never anticipated. When a sweet and kind of stoned dude in Amagansett told me about the golden dome and intentional community in Auroville, I had no idea what he was talking about. I ended up spending a month there, navigating the red dirt streets on Sally Rockets, my awesome, shitty motorbike. And instead of sitting in an audience with His Holiness, I spent a week in satsang with Mooji, a soft spoken, by-the-people guru with long, perfect dreadlocks and the simplest, most profound message about the Self I had ever heard. The truth is, when I started this vision board / blog, I was scared. I didn't want to go to India anymore; my life on the east end of Long Island was unexpectedly good, and it felt dumb and more than a little irresponsible to interrupt the flow. I started this site as a way to reclaim the excitement I'd felt months before when I booked my one-way ticket to Delhi. It was a dream book in the truest sense -- a place to connect to deep desires, ones greater than the sense of comfort calling me to stay somewhere known. Once I left, this became a place to chronicle my trip; I knew a few people were reading and following along, but I loved the freedom of writing for no one, of creating something beautiful that captured, or aimed to, the weird dream reality I'd chosen to live in. Last week, when I was home for Christmas, I found a small three-ring binder on my bed. "Alison's India Dream Book" it said on the cover. "Do not throw away." Inside, my mom and stepdad had printed out all the pages of this blog and filed them away. It was exactly how I had never intended these words and pictures to be experienced -- I liked the mutability of the format, the way you had to prepare to swim if you wanted to dive in -- but I liked how solid the Dream Book felt in my hands. Proof of some unconscious navigation behind all the right turns.

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step into it

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this weekend (last weekend)

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2 cups flour (rice, spelt, gluten free) 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups milk (almond, oat, coconut) 1/4 cup melted coconut oil 3 eggs 1 tablespoon maple syrup shredded coconut chia seeds ghee for the pan

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earth in my hair

I did my second sweat lodge in one week last night and this morning everything about me smells like dirt. It's messy in there, the womb lodge, and everyone emerges flecked and specked, painted with dirt stuck to sweat-wet skin. After the second round I went to the house to get water for the group and I poured a warm jug of it over a stranger's bent wet head and left brown rivulets in the sink. He howled with pleasure and told me, "You are a beautiful soul."

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[coral]

One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (via feellng)

reading Joan on loving and leaving New York 

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bright nights

It's one of those Amagansett nights where the moon is so bright it will wake me up when it ellipses past my window. My parents are here, my mom and my stepfather, so I've been seeing this place through new eyes, the way you do when you show someone something that's important to you. I think they like it here. I caught my mom on the front yard swing this morning on our way into town and later I snuck a pillow under her head as she lay stretched out to read on the hammock.

I'm leaving here in three weeks. I am ready to go, desperate almost, but my home is magical right now. The sound the crickets make is like a quilt and the ocean today, flat and serene, was something else I wanted to wrap myself in. I made dinner tonight -- local fluke, local corn, local tomatoes, local kale -- and we ate it outside on a table with warped pillar candles and a giant shell. There is something unusually special about the ends of things. Leaving, knowing we're leaving, casts a place in a gold light and people are less their faults and more their idiosyncrasies. Whenever I get to the end of something, and love it all over again like I did at the beginning, I wish I could sustain that feeling through the middle. Why shouldn't we always live in wonder, in appreciation? It's the lightness of impermanence. I really believe that everything ends and then new cycles begin again, but I am still pushed into remembering it's true every time I come to the top of an arc.    

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much loved books, some of the ones I kept

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cleansing 

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books

I've always been a girl of letters.  There's a portrait in the Musee d'Orsay by Renoir called La Liseuse, The Reader, and the first time I saw it -- 20 years old, in love with Paris, full of Nutella, Orangina, and cheap red wine -- I felt immediately seen.  I wrote a note in my tiny journal: "La Liseuse: c'est moi," because the girl in the ruffly, high-collared smock coat with a high swoosh of reddish gold hair was absorbed so lovingly, so familiarly in the book she held that I felt an instant kinship with her.  More than that: I was her, and whatever we were reading was clearly awesome. 

*

I love books.  They are perfect new, crisp and uncracked; they are wonderful bent and smudged, underlined and margin penciled.  They are my favorite gift to give and to get.  I've never really gone in much for library books.  They seem too temporary, so decidedly not my own and almost impossible to love in those plastic slipcovers, slick and dirty like sweaty, covered couches.  I buy books.  When I remember I write my name and the date and maybe the place on one of the first pages, something my dad did on every single one of his (many, many) volumes.  I've picked up books of his and seen the name of my college town (Evanston) or somewhere fabulous (Aix-en-Provence) and the date, and I can picture him there, then, with that book.  It's pretty sweet. 

*

But I am trying to pare down.  To simplify.  I want to be tied down to fewer things.  I became unsentimental fast about the things in my backpack in India, and I'm trying to hold on to the feeling of expansion that having fewer possessions brings.  So yesterday I sold my books.  All of the ones in the storage unit I'm trying to dismantle. Two big, big boxes and five or so smaller ones.  I found I couldn't go through the boxes because once I started to read the spines I came up with reason after reason to keep this one, that one, these two.  So I took the boxes to two of my favorite stores, Spoonbill and Sugartown and The Strand, and didn't watch as the books were unpacked, examined, stacked, or repacked. I went to the Strand last and when I got back to my car, its trunk empty, my boxes gone, I stood on the sidewalk by the freight entrance, put my sunglasses on and cried. My name is in those books and my father's name and probably ticket stubs and boarding passes and notes in my mom's curly handwriting (just like mine) in her ancient copy of Ulysses that I read in college.  Writing about them makes me miss them, but I love thinking about them on someone else's shelf, tucked into another liseuse's bag.  We love things and then we pass them on.  We fall overhead deep into a book, distracted by it to the point of drowning, and then we resurface, close it, and take deep breaths once we find another. 

[powerhousebooks-blog]

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Dumbo 

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flower crowns and the fourth of july

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this was beautiful and uncomfortable and eerie and smelled of molasses. made me cry. 

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things

of all the things I arrived in India with, I came home with very few.  some I sent back to New York after leaving the cold north: a pair of jeans, my beanie, a scarf, and some thermal layers.  The rest I swapped, donated, folded neatly and left behind.  I have a few new -- and new old -- clothes to replace some of the dismissed items, but of my original possessions I returned with one pair of leggings, a t-shirt, one bikini, and some socks.  The rest...poof! 

On my first full day back in Brooklyn, Jessie brought me a few items from my closet at the beach.  I had enough clothes to get me through the end of the month, when I'll go back home to Amagansett, but I was craving another pair of shoes and a t-shirt or two.  Jess filled a bag for me -- dresses, shorts, tees, a skirt -- and suddenly I had more outfit options than I've had in a very long time.  Instead of feeling excited -- the usual emotion that accompanies new clothes -- I felt a little sick.  what was I doing with so much stuff?  here, at home, it's easy to be a consumer.  I don't have to carry my possessions on my back, and because I'm not confronted with them all the time -- folding, packing, hand-washing, analyzing (can I wear this on an overnight bus ride and in a temple?) -- I'm not as engaged with them.  they float out of the periphery and into full view only when I fingersnap for them to appear. 

I realized while I was away that I acquire things as a form of travel.  having something new satisfies, temporarily, my need to see new, experience new, do new.  it's a way to channel antsy energy.  A quick fix for wanderlust.  In India and elsewhere I had no desire to buy. I didn't go on a shiny, kaleidoscopic textile binge or stack my wrists many bangles deep; I felt no need to take advantage of impressively low prices to buy something incredible and artisan and handmade to use or view in a house I do not have.  I was experience sated.  I had motorbikes to learn how to drive, sunrises to wake up for, holy mountains to scale, clumps of slow-moving cows to avoid on those motorbikes I was learning to drive, and rice to eat with my hands off of banana leaves.  I was reminded of something I already knew: we need so little.  everything I have is already more than enough. 

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feeding friends

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Brooklyn