davidjoshuajennings

Summer’s tent is broken and the monsoon has unfurled its vaporous belly over these mountains again, bringing with it a world of mists and uncertain landscapes.

The heat has become amorphous – neither warm nor cool but also both somehow. Moisture perfuses everything. Surfaces have taken on amphibious qualities. The trash that was dumped around Mcleod Ganj all summer is now being washed down the mountain in swollen streams. My skin this evening has taken on the texture of a salamander’s.

Over the next two months it will rain nearly every day.

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Forget what it’s like to have an air-conditioner and a refrigerator.
Forget the taste of meat and the way it made your belly all piquant and full.
Forget what it’s like to drive a car or to ascend in an elevator.
Forget Mickey Mouse and Donald Trump and movie theatres.
Forget the American supermarket’s block-long aisles of cereal and shampoo…

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I am lying in a hospital bed, bleeding. In a room somewhere down the hall I hear monks chanting verses from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is mid-day and outside the weather is gloomy.
The fact that the monks are chanting means someone has died here recently, meaning that whatever hospital room the monks are chanting in will be unusable for a few days, as Tibetan Buddhists don’t move the bodies of the dead until a week after the heart stops beating. Before I encountered Tibetan Buddhism I had always assumed that the cessation of the heartbeat signified the death of the person. For them, the cessation of the heartbeat is only the inaugural step towards the moment when the consciousness exits the body to seek its next reincarnation. The monks chant over the dead body to help the consciousness find its way…

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[9:03am]

I am standing on the third-floor balcony of my Indian friend Anupriya’s house, looking down on a relatively quiet neighborhood in Faridabad — a suburb of Delhi. Here and there old men are wandering up and down the road in a desultory fashion. Their clothes are wet and they are covered from head to toe with pink and yellow powder. Across the street, a dozen or so grown women are throwing buckets of colored water at one another.

Holi 2013 has begun.

[9:30am]

I have moved to the rooftop and am now throwing water balloons at random people in the street. I am accompanied by a Frenchman named Thomas. Thomas is dressed completely in white and is wearing orange ski goggles.

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Mcleod Ganj, India—It feels there are things to be tapped into here, that there is a poetry to this place.

Spring is coming and the tourists are beginning to arrive in droves. They arrive alone or in eclectic groups of strangers who met days or weeks ago, wearing headbands and lots of bracelets and pants with billowing crotches and long blonde scraggly dreadlocks.

A few nights ago I met young Englishman who doesn’t wear shoes.

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13:00 - The shaman comes into the hut like something out of a dream. His body is covered by a black tunic. Fanning out from his face, erect, with iridescent colors, is a plume of scarlet macaw feathers. A long cape of green feathers hangs across his back and a blue parrot feather pierces horizontally through his nostril. Some ten pounds of glass beads and charms and lavalieres and bones and jaguar teeth swing from his neck all tinkling and chinking as he approaches with the whishing scratch of his leaf bracelets. He sits down in front of me. His face is tattooed, his pupils black. They revealed nothing, betray nothing, are emotionless.

“His dress mimics the spirit of the Ayahuasca,” Louis, my guide, says from behind me. 

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Oklahoma City, Oklahoma — An old French traveler I met years back told me that children and the elderly get along well because they’re both so close to death. One just crawled out of it, the other is sliding into it. One is arriving, one departing.

Arrival to a new place is birth and in the new land you are a child. You have a world of rules to learn, a new reality to wrap yourself through. Like a child your ignorance is forgiven.

Departure is death and like death your absence creates a void. The impressions you leave behind are images that will remain with those behind. You are elsewhere and already new, constantly changing, detached from those images unless you choose not to be.

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