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save your seeds

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2013.11.02Navdanya-132

On my way back from Mussoorie, I stopped for a couple of days at Navdanya. Here’s how they describe themselves:

Navdanya is a network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 17 states in India.

Navdanya has helped set up 111 community seed banks across the country, trained over 5,00,000 farmers in seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture over the past two decades, and helped setup the largest direct marketing, fair trade organic network in the country.

Navdanya has also set up a learning center, Bija Vidyapeeth (School of the Seed / Earth University) on its biodiversity conservation and organic farm in Doon Valley, Uttarakhand, North India. [Read more…]

i ♡ my body

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2013.10.30-15

I stepped into the small shop in Mussoorie to get a bag I’d asked too much of stitched up. The man sat on the floor of the shop, which was not much larger than the strapping SUVs that wrangled their way down the narrow old streets. His wife sat in a chair, stitching by hand. He motioned me to sit on a low bench as his hands reached for black thread, and slipped it it into the spool of the hand-powered, well-oiled sewing machine. His hands moved with a precision born of decades of this motion — gossamer thread, eye of the needle, the smooth movement of cloth under the jabbing point, fingers safe, hand spinning the wheel. As he worked, I looked at the sign taped to the wall above him:

2013.10.30-18

Someone belatedly caught the typo. Made a correction with pen. The tailor was done. He lifted a pair of golden-handled shears that could have cut through armor and with a delicate snip, finished the job. “Kitne?” I asked.  “Das rupees,” he answered and I handed him the worn red note worth sixteen cents and gave my thanks to him and his wife and returned to the winding road that led uphill.

 

trek & treat

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2013.10.20Trek-125

Back in Oregon we called them hikes. Here in the Himalayas, they’re treks. Same movement of body across landscape, listening to breath, feeling legs do their wondrous work, pacing oneself, and simultaneously absorbing your surroundings while not falling off a cliff. Visitors like myself do this for fun… [Read more…]

grant me a higher ground

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2012.10.11Mussoorie-4

Just like seaside communities share a feel, their gestalt, made of salt air and sand, here too there is something that has brought back other mountain towns I have known. I flash to visits with Mott in Grenada’s Hermitage village, where behind the chocolate factory, the hill descends into a steep tangle of greenery where we would stumble down to collect callalloo. I am huffing up the hill to a house in Valle de Bravo, soon to discover forests of monarchs. With the wooden call of ravens filtering through dripping evergreens, I am in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Even the ride from Dehradun was a trip into the Rift Valley in Kenya, complete with vendors selling roasted corn-on-the-cob and shacks selling sodas and chips to honeymooners and young men on motorcycles. The shop shacks and homes alike are cleaved to cliffs – the contradictory meaning of cleave made clear here. What can stick fast can also be drawn asunder. It is easy to imagine the damage caused by the flooding in another part of Uttarakhand this past summer, the engineering bravery of all those hillside homes tumbling down with the force of water and gravity. [Read more…]

ripple effect

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One of my absolute favorite photojournalists is Ami Vitale. Here she is talking about her work around the world for a short film by MediaStorm, featuring her photography and videoography, as she talks about the power of the lens, the power of the natural world, and the power of people to make change in their lives.

in praise of geysers

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geyser

It’s simple. Ten minutes before you plan to bathe, you flip a switch. The light comes on and the water heats up. You wash. You turn the switch off. Geysers, as these small almost-instantaneous-but-not-quite hot water heaters are called in India, are so smart. I don’t keep a kettle simmering all day so that when the urge for a cup of tea strikes, I can have it instantly. (btw, for my tea at home, I use this, one of the best Christmas presents I ever received.) Same idea. Yet this is how we heat water in American homes. It’s the second largest energy expense in the average home, typically accounting for about 18% of the utility bill.

This one in the guest house where I’m staying is particularly cheerful.

into the clouds

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IntoThe Clouds

This is how my friend described Mussoorie, a hill town in the foothills of the Himalayas, in the state of Uttarakhand: “It’s as though someone has been up all night, scrubbing the sky!” Normally, that is what’s to be expected. Radiant blue skies of autumn. But the monsoon came early, and with a vengeance, causing flooding that wiped out villages in July. And it’s staying late. The scrubbers still scrubbing, nothing to see from down here on the ground but mist and clouds. Normal, these days, is no longer normal. [Read more…]

Dilli, for a start

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houselaundry

I arrived to Delhi to begin five months of research and reporting on Elemental India, with the support of USIEF’s Fulbright–Nehru fellowship. They set me up at the lovely Vandana B&B in Safdarjung Enclave, where I sit on a balcony as the sun goes down, the sky clearing after a day sprinkled with rains that brought the temp down. The birds are raucous, parrots having a cocktail party overhead and the kites catching the last of the day’s thermals. Crows find their stations on bare branches in the tree among a park’s trees across the street, plucking and grooming and stretching into the sunset. A chipmunk war breaks out in the treetops. Delhi is lush from a long summer and heavy monsoon rains. It is a jungle with a dead river flowing through it, inhabited by 22 million people. [Read more…]

mucking about

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BWTWvol9_PGW

It begins something like this…

I was expecting more dead bodies in Varanasi – really, burning bodies everywhere – for this is the place Hindus come to die, hoping for instant liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. But instead I discover that only two of the dozens of ghats are “burning ghats,” stacked with wood and smoldering funeral pyres. Most everywhere else, people are just very busy living. Some do cremate their loved ones here, but most engage in more quotidian tasks.

They wash dishes, wash clothes, wash their bodies. Mothers cook, feeding twigs into compact wood cook stoves and food into hungry mouths. People sell things; they buy things. They pray and dunk themselves in the water vigorously, jumping up and down as they fulfill a lifelong Hindu requirement to bathe in the waters of the Ganges. Others light candles and incense and circumambulate the grand broad-leafed pipul trees where I’m sure all these deliciously pagan-disguised-as-Hindu rituals originated, the idea of God and greater things tumbling from the branches like dappled sunlight.

Read the rest of Mucking About: Stepping into the Unknown on the Banks of Ganges here at Gadling.

And, even better, find a bookseller near you next month when The Best Women’s Travel Writing, volume 9 comes out and you can find Mucking About and a profusion of other great tales from travelers of the female persuasion. Or don’t delay and pre-order now.

 

sweeping air

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I am overly pragmatic. Each day seems so finite, and there is so much work to do. Big work, made out of endless little work. Schools to construct. Minds to make literate. Wells to dig and water to purify. Inoculations to give and hair to braid and food to feed growing bodies. So many streets to sweep and toilets to build.

Instead, it is time for aarti, the Hindu puja taking place this night, and every night, in hundreds of little temples like this one in Varanasi, India. Someone led me here to this place, tucked into the labyrinth of alleyways behind the Manakarnika Ghat, where bodies are burning. On the way, along the other ghats on the water’s edge, we passed a series of Ganga Aartis – floodlights! amplification! – that attract Indian and foreign tourists alike for the full pilgrimage experience. The masses were stacked on the steps that link city to water and packed into handmade wooden boats just offshore, cameras flashing.But the power went out moments after we passed and we found our way by flashlight to the temple building dimly lit with the inverter’s stored energy.

The Hindu priest is kind, allowing my camera and my curious eyes as I witness the rituals I have watched since I was young. Shiva is the focus here, the stone lingam – more breast than phallus – the centerpiece set in a square of silver embedded into the floor like a pious pit. The priest spends more time in careful preparation for the ritual than it will take to enact it, when three other priests join him and, together their hand bells thunder in unison in rhythm to their chants. As a child, the smell of flowers and fire and the hypnotic sound of the chants would transfix me. Now I can appreciate that this ritual incorporates the five elements into one seamless act. Always I have viscerally loved the moment when, at the end, I can place my cupped hands over the heat of the flame and bring them to my face, my eyes closed.

But I have grown old and I think too much….

Read the rest at The Revelaer.