Beaches, Bones and Hare Hare

All right, here I am in the glorious country of Peru. There is culture here! There are little tiny women wearing alpaca and socks with sandals and top hats. I love it. It is also a third world country, and the thing is that this is one of the fancier ones, you know? Lots of huts made out of reeds and no foundation, so they´re falling over and grocery stores are like the Quik-E Mart because you buy all of your meat and vegetables from the farmers´markets on the streets. I´ve tried bananas and oranges so far. Katie bought a large avocado today, I´ll let you know how it goes. It´s also a bit colder than we expected here and it´s moist all the time so I immediately got a sinus infection. I had to go to the botica where another American volunteer talked to the ¨pharmacist¨about what antibiotic I should take. She prescribed something and was talking to me about how to take it...she pointed at her mouth, shook her head no, and then pointed at her butt. I looked at her and said, ¿QUE?¨ And she did it again. Luckily, they understood by the look on my face that I thought it meant not in the mouth, in the butt, and corrected the gestures. I really need to learn Spanish. REALLY good thing I cleared that up before we left.



Now about the Farm!: So, you know when you have this fantastic concept about going and working on a yoga farm? Sure you do. Well, sometimes things come up as surprises that you were not quite expecting along the way. Of course this isn´t shocking, I did read that the farm was a Hare Krishna mission of sorts, but I did not quite know all that this entailed and it seemed a minor detail at the time. Well, just our luck, in case we had no idea what Hare Krishna was before, we were to be educated fast because we arrived to the Eco Truly Village in the middle of their 25th anniversary festival. Let me explain what this entailed: 500 people from all over South America that came to the Eco Village for 5 days of singing very loudly, playing drums at any given moment and oh they just LOVED to go on until 1 a.m. and start up again at 4 a.m. Oh, did I mention we slept in a tent so we could hear all the joyful singing and drumming at any time? Ah, well you know, we could just feel the love more that way. I already know several chants. I´m pretty good at them. Oh, and there are cold showers and the sun doesn´t shine here much. Now, sarcasm aside, there is an ashram here which is neat and peaceful. We danced in it the first night we were here and got a feel for the excitement and energy and we got to see the ceremonies right away. There was a wedding and induction ceremony for someone (like a Hare Krishna baptism) on another day where they decorated the courtyard with a giant mud-flower yantra that they burned fruit on in the middle of. There were Hare Krishna bands that played every night. Like Christian rock, but Hare Krishna instead. The gurus who founded the place were here, one is German and he loved my name; basically asked why my parents would name me after such a crazy goddess. I told him it fit. He has intense eyes and stares into your soul a lot. This can be disconcerting, but I think I stared back fairly well.



Yesterday was the first day without the festival, so we got to watch everyone pack up and ship out. Druva, the coordinator, led us on a bonafide tour of the place which turned into a large explanation of all of the iconography featured throughout. The trulys are these cone shaped buildings that are earthquake resistent and feature lots of Krishna and avatar images along with scenes from the Bhagavad Gita and he led us through what they were. Yet each time he introduced a new scene or icon, we turned it into a philosophical conversation about the religion and the practices. After three hours of this, I realized my head was about to explode. I will say that I understand most of the principles of the foundation of their religion and it really matches those of Christianity and Buddhism. I love to learn. We participated in their meditation session last night where they chant (I played tambourine during this) and read a passage from the Bhagavad Gita. They did one in English yesterday about serving others as the road to being happy and ridding yourself of material possessions, much like Zen.

Alas, we may not stay the month we expected because the urgency for volunteers is not there as much as I think they appreciate the devotional side, which we just cannot offer them. I do enjoy the beach, but it is very dirty. It also happens to have burial mounds on it FILLED with protruding human bones. I have seen a human skull, femurs, humeruses, tailbones, ribs...Yep. JUUUUST great. They explained that they had to dig up a nearby cemetary because they wanted to build something else there, so they just plopped the bodies there on the beach and that some are 400 years old or so... We saw some kids poking the skull with a stick. Katie said that´s bad joojoo. I agree.

All right, well I will let you all know how this continues to go. We will stay for the rest of the week and find out more about the volunteering as we get further into it. I miss you all, and I hope you are doing well. The nearest town is 20 minutes away and the computers are a bit old, so I will post pictures and video as soon as possible.

From the Ashes of Phoenix, I Introduce to You: The Beaten Path

Just so you all know, especially for my mother's sake, I won't promise to go anywhere that no one has ever gone before. This isn't Star Trek. Really, I am just running away from the "simple kind of life" ideals that American society loves and I'm young so SCREW THIS! The idea behind my blog is that the need to find a path to happiness is inherent in all of us. That "self discovery" mumbo jumbo. For me, I am someone who loves to start from scratch. I like to take the little comfy life that I have set up for myself, disassemble it (much like having to take apart your tinker toy and Lincoln Log concoctions as a child, difficult, but in order to build a new cabin or airplane, I need the parts from the other one) and use the parts of my physical, mental and emotional states for one specific purpose instead of several. Sounds selfish? Well, it is. For those who wish to grow, we must change constantly. To create new facets of ourselves, we must alter another one to make room, like cutting down the crops before the new season's harvest can grow. This meaning is the origin of my name, Kali, the dark goddess of Hinduism, and a philosophy I am only beginning to understand through myself, family and friends, philosophy, the current news and history itself. I realize that I, along with the world, have a pattern of behavior where if something seemed too perfect, too normal, too steady, I had this antsy need to muck it all up--even in the slightest way--in order to get things moving around again. This proverbial machete I hold makes sure that life keeps on escalating to a new degree and allows me to learn, albeit usually the hard way. By trespassing into unknown territory, by molding and remolding my hopes and plans for the future, I will become, eventually, someone with a solid and steady foundation... *cough* Right? Someone who just sheds my skin and grows a new one from time to time. Hmm, sounds messy.

Society views "finding yourself" as an event that occurs in the teens and/or early twenties and perhaps again during a mid-life crisis. Although I disagree, and believe that most people who wish to become better versions of their current selves are constantly looking for reinvention and new territory, I am in my early twenties, and thus currently fit into this category for self-discovery. Recently out of college with an undergraduate art degree under my belt, no husband or children to look after, I have options: Start grad school, get a full-time job, and find the aforementioned husband and children, a house in the suburbs, a few noodles to toss in our swimming pool, typical American dream, blah blah. This is great. Part of me wants JUST THIS! I am a smart, domestic woman who has maternal instinct. I LIKE TO COOK! Yet...there's that antsy factor, and until that hushes itself down, I know that the destructive pattern can pipe right back up and remind me that I am not yet ready for this adventure. No, instead, I'll need to do a bit of spirit searching through a plan to uproot myself in every way possible. My plan will be completed through traveling into the depths of the unknown (to me, anyway), out of my comfort zone, and apparently into lands where I don't know the language, cultures or traditions, and opening myself up to learning and adapting to a new lifestyle. Jane Goodall studied gorillas and could behave like one in order to speak to them. I want to transform in a similar way with fellow humans. I am going to study myself in other cultures. This ability to see how others live their live is purely reflecting back onto how I behave once I am there as well. I will let you look in too! I will take video and blog as often as I can about what I am learning along the way.

In case you don't know, I am from Arizona. I have traveled by myself since I was 18. I took myself to New York and I was immediately hungry for more cityscapes, more art and melting pots of culture. Then, when I was 20, I left to study abroad and live in England for five months, where I studied very little and instead when traveling, I found myself wining and dining my way through cities, visiting landmarks and seeing more through a lens than I was really able to soak up through my own eyes. Unless you are able to spend real time somewhere, you become disassociated and glazed over by travel. I was stretched for time and cash and spoke to natives only in order to ask where the next tourist stop was. Yet In Tuscany, my last stop, this changed. I opened my eyes and asked myself what I was doing here. Who would I speak to? What would I learn? The medieval towns pulled me in and I took deep breaths in. This place didn't feel touristy even though there were others. There were no long lines for landmarks here really, each place had centuries' old history, was important to someone, and wildly interesting. It was a place I could be tired. Traveling for nearly three months can do that, and I started to feel I had done the rest of my trip all wrong because this was a place of peace, a place of natives, a culture that thrived on being hospitable and telling their stories of the land. Now I realize I'll have to go back and do it all over again later in life to make up for losing the whole point of travel-- to embrace a culture, to feed and love and ask questions about what you are seeing with your eyes. So where will I go? When I got home nearly two years ago, I decided I would stumble around my home country, America, get in some good cities and feel what it is like exploring the birds of my own backyard. There are places I said I never cared to go that I am dying to visit now, places like South America, Asia and Africa, that call to me. Learn a language and work with all ages, all races, and different interests. I start in Peru in two weeks from today. I will be there working on a sustainable farm on the beach in Chacra y Mar, in the Huaral province an hour or so north of Lima. Many of you may wonder why I chose this. Well, as a city child, I actually do feel a yearning to learn about land and how food grows and long to see the stars and live on the ocean. I hope to bring back many interesting new skills like gardening and vegetarian cooking and of course, the ever popular goat milking. I will stay there for a month and then Katrina, my dear travel buddy and I are off to see the sites of the rest of Peru, hike the Inca trail, and go to Chile or Argentina or both. Yes, money is an issue--as always with any art degree, but I think I can figure something out.

In my blog, I want to shine light on differences that aren't so different. I want to see great landscapes and meet fantastic people. I want to aid in the coming generations' ability to destroy the walls that exist between countries and cultures and hope we will learn from each other as citizens of the Earth, showing just how far humans can grow.

I hope you will all enjoy my little evolving blog.

All my love,
Kali, The Beaten Path blogging lady