Wild Death

The Buddhist’s Kashi. The Hindu’s Holy City. The citizen’s Banaras. Varanasi: the oldest city in the world, from the first millennium BCE. Named for the confluence of the Ganges with the old rivers, Varana and Assi, now the ghats known as the beginning and the end.

At midnight we are led from the airport to our hotel, Palace on Ganges, at Assi ghat, one of the main spiritual sites of the city, the place where one bath can eliminate 100,000 births, according to Hindu belief. Patrons and pilgrims, religious thinkers of all kinds flock here still, as they have for centuries.

We wake before dawn with smoke already filling our throats in the Himalaya-inspired room, tucked into the earth near the banks of the river. My beloved selected this room with a double bed (over the river-view twin) because he draws sustenance through touch. In the night I have dreamed of a baby newly walking who beckons me to leave the room, and I wake with a moan, the baby’s childlike fierceness as real as my own skin.

Before light our guide ushers us through the weave of tuk tuk drivers and beggars, and leads us through narrow alleyways to a waiting boatman, stopping to buy two lamps, candles nestled in leaves, marigolds around the wicks. We will light these as the sun comes up, and place them in the water, making our secret wishes for our loved ones.

We enter the long, wooden boat, and we are taken further into the fog, the lights from the distant ghats a misty gold, the ring of bells and throaty chants and the dip of the oars in the water both strange and familiar. In a few moments tourists will descend upon the river, along with boatmen hawking every manner of souvenirs, as they grab the sides of boats to place brass bracelets and rough-carved figurines in front of faces. For now, as we stream toward the Shiva side of the city (the other being the ‘karn’ or bardo side) we’re greeted by a sadhu on the shore, naked except for a loin cloth and gold-rimmed glasses. He raises a stream of smoke to the sky. Upon the platform that the sadhu stands, a street dog is humping a bitch whose teats haven’t yet receded. Nearby at a table, a couple prepares the flame for morning puja, and then with a stick broom, sweeps the dogs from their perch, but the pack barks and growls, their tantric practice a different sort.

Less than a hundred steps away a body is burning in a funeral pyre and the mourners move through the smoke -- talking, touching, singing. We find it difficult to offer them their privacy, for it is so unusual to witness the death of the body in this direct and oddly gentle manner. I think of my father cremated sixteen months ago, and I wonder what it would have been like to watch his body burn, to smell his flesh in the flames, to stand watch until the bones could be collected and taken to the Mother River.

When we’re back in the boat, rowing toward Manikarnika, the ghat that cremates 270 people each day, our guide tells us that some souls are considered so pure they are taken to the water directly – pregnant women, children, sadhus, and those who have died through snake bite, the mark of Lord Shiva. He looks in my eyes to ensure that I understand – a body or a limb can float by if the fishes haven’t consumed it completely.

On the excruciating twenty-two hour train trip to Varanasi (another story entirely) we have read the extraordinary contemporary novelist Geoff Dyer’s, “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” and so we are somewhat prepared for the insanity of the driving conditions, the seeming chaos of the alleys, the ever presence of death through all the senses. Still, we do not know the ferocity of Varanasi’s grip, we are not aware of what is ingested with the taste of ashes. We are not familiar with the devotion that will cause pilgrims to run to 98 temples (56 of Ganesha!) within twenty-four hours, to run from the first ghat to the Assi ghat, to run in the knowing that the soul is being released from 8.4 million rebirths (the math counts layers of atmosphere multiplied by a ghat’s particular power.)

When we leave our boatman and head toward the old city, we’re greeted by masala merchants, bony cows, armed soldiers. Near the Hindu Golden temple, is a Muslim mosque, and since this is a site of violence, before we enter we must deposit everything in a keyed locker, and then be searched. A woman soldier reaches under my bra, feels along my pubis. Later, I ask the guide if there have been terrorist threats in the news. “This is the way we do things since 9-11,” he says, “If they can do that to your people, what can they do to us?”

I don’t have time to follow his thought because we are soon pressed against the stone wall, chanting in the distance becoming louder as men move toward the Mother Ganga. “Ram nom seta he,” the voices chant, and I ask what these words mean.

“The name of God is the last truth,” our guide speaks.

Then the men are beside us, holding a body on a palanquin, a dead body covered in a gold cloth, with gold ribbons tied around the head and feet. After the mourners pass, an old man with a plastic box of cards thrusts a picture in front of my face. “Want memory card?” he asks, and I shake my head, a habit already, to decline the offering of things placed in front of us at every moment we are in the street.

“Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card?” he says over and over, his chant cutting into my consciousness. Every cell of my body is a memory card, a body whose remembering I can scarcely realize at times, for whose is this body, remembering? This body is the vehicle, the Varana and the Assi, my self, and yet not mine at all.

Wild Mother

Photos by BBC

On the day before we are to take the bath at the Kumbh Mela, we discover that the town’s security situation has changed. Our guide, Mr. Parikshit Joshi drives us around the site so we can see what we are in for. The main ghat, Har Ki Pauri, will be inundated with sadhus and temple leaders, who bring their devotees by the thousands. We will be hiking toward Ashti Parvath ghat, directly south and across the Ganges River from where the sadhus will immerse themselves before dawn the morning of January 14th, the first bath of the months-long festival. Because of the need for high security in the region, 20,000 Indian military, state police, and the RAF, a rapid action force, has been brought in to deal with suppressing potential riots and terrorist threats. We soon learn that plans may change hour to hour, and that we will not know until the day of events what our approach to the site might be.

Mr. Joshi points to the long, fenced, narrow bridges and tells me that if the procession became too crowded they herd people onto the bridges and then lock the gates, sometimes for hours, until the bathers at the ghats move toward their homes and tents. My husband takes my hand. I have been claustrophobic for years. I avoid elevators, crowds and locked rooms. I close my eyes and listen for an inner voice I have learned to trust. Could I overcome my fear if this situation emerges? I look to the man sitting next to me, who I have been loving for three decades. Something beyond our intellectual understanding has brought us to the Khumbh Mela, and we want to complete the ritual, to understand something about why we have come. “Think you can do it?” my husband asks, and I nod, feeling safe knowing that neither of these men would allow us into a foolhardy situation. The holy bath calls to me beyond my fears.

Life sometimes sounds nonsensical when lived by instinct, those moments before too many thoughts arise. First impulse is the way we had children, and chose homes and healed cancer. As I come into the wisdom of an (ahem) older woman, I want more body-centered instinct and less mental chatter. I realize my inspirations are no Jesus on a naan, however, I consistently find direction from what arises in my imagination, and sometimes just by leaning into things. First impulse tells us to get to the Kumbh Mela at the beginning. Thus, even though we’d had rather a full day of Shakti Peethas and Shri Swaminarayan, we ask to leave the hotel at four in the morning, to be at the ghats when the sadhus are in attendance.

Pilgrims walk here for many days, often families carry one shared bag, wearing bare feet, or worn sandals. The weather is unseasonably cold in Haridwar, 4 degrees C at night, and so this is not an easy journey. The families save resources so they might come for a bath in their beloved Mother Ganga.

In the hours before dawn, we walk through the dark. Past the checkpoints no vehicles or bicycles are allowed, only those travelers on foot, and we walk down alleys so dark I cannot see the ground. People emerge from alleys and buildings, people come from everywhere, chanting, moving quickly in the blackness, no lamps or lanterns. Although I had prepared myself for what it might be like to be noticed as westerners -- we had a few days of acclimating to being the new ones in town -- I have no idea of the degree to which those effects are amplified at the Kumbh Mela. According to our guide, people coming from rural areas may have seen a western person in the media, and some have not yet seen one up close. And it is mostly the locals who have witnessed westerners bathe in the Ganga.

As we take off our jackets and Richard removes his pants and shirt, I become aware of the people around us, watching us while they make their own preparations. I walk down the steps into the freezing river just as I see my husband’s body fall below the churning waters. He holds onto the iron rail to keep his torso still for the current is strong. I lift my hands into the Mother Ganga and pour the stream over my head, my skirt flowing around me like a blood-red pool in the steel grey water. A glowing statue in the distance lights the heads of other bathers -- falling, rising, jumping, bowing, shivering, stilling.

I splash a river salutation. In my mind: Ganges! Ganges! as the loudspeaker blares instructions in Hindi. Over my body is flowing the ashes of the dead. Where we are standing in the River is the place of last night's puja, the ceremony we witnessed, with fire and flowers, and chanted by a son and a priest as they performed the last rites. I am swimming through souls. Something deep inside realizes a belonging I have never registered, like what Marabai has written:
“I came for the sake of love-devotion;
seeing the world, I wept.”

Before we leave the ghats, I ask for a moment to offer my gratitude at the place we took our bath, and as I bow and lift the water to my head, my lips, my heart, I become aware that a group watches my movements. My hair and skirt is wet from the dip an hour earlier, and my feet are bright red from the cold, and around my shoulders I clench a saffron shawl for warmth. I am aware of an elder man to my left, watching as I pray, and as I turn to follow my men back down the road we arrived upon, this old one meets my eyes and we nod to each other. What passes between us is something beyond language and culture. This poem of India: a Mother river, a long pilgrimage, a seeing in the dark.

Wild Pilgrimage

Tomorrow morning I board a plane for Mother India. The notion of traveling to this exotic country began ten years ago when my Zen master, Shifu, also known as Dr. Kim Han Suk, suggested that India was one of those places I could clear my familial karma. Not just my own lifetime, but those of my ancestors and children, and perhaps even their children. Damn that proclamation. In classic student fashion, I rebelled, argued, dismantled (all inside my own mind,) knowing that I had received wisdom in the form of what my friends, the Dakini Sisters, called The Big Hit. Like the Zen stick that could come down upon our shoulders when we slumped in meditation, The Big Hit was a way Shifu could shred my psychic comfort by making me rethink everything I think I know about who I am.

An eldest child who was invested in being a good student, loving mother and conscious citizen, while underneath simmered that wild girl, I spent the last decade resenting the possibility that I could be responsible for others, all while nursing my husband through a rare cancer, and going to my father’s bedside after his brain tumor, and helping my mother, son and myself through our family disease. All experiences that led me to ask – Who is it that needs healing? I no longer believed that karma had created my family’s fate – karma was one more concept, one more identity that I would cling to. Still, I was afraid. Would I lose my mind in India? And would I want to live in that emptiness?

It wasn’t until one of the Dakini Sisters said, “Well, aside from all that rebelling, what if you went to India to see what was there?” that I allowed the place to lure me. A year later, when we received a financial reward, we thought about the lands we could travel to celebrate: Spain, Italy, Ireland and Wales all captivated. Instead, when my beloved asked me where I wanted to be for my fiftieth birthday, my eyes teared, because I knew I was compelled to go to the mythical land of Kali and Lakshmi and Saraswati. A few Google searches later, we discovered that the world’s largest act of faith, the Kumbha Mela, was happening within two days of my birthday, and then a few moments later, that we couldn’t find any compelling reason to stop ourselves from attending this magnificent event.


The Kumbha Mela will begin this week, in Haridwar, where the river Ganga enters the plains from Himalayas. Organized in the holy cities of Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik, the Kumbh Mela (Festival of the Pot of Nectar) features the largest human gathering in the world. We’ve heard estimates of eighty million people, with half that number present at its pinnacle. The religious festival invites devotees, sadhus, rishiks, yogis and tourists from almost every corner of the world. We will be present for the opening baths or snans, January 14th and 15th, the latter a solar eclipse.

Hindus believe that the waters of the Ganges turn into nectar on the auspicious occasion of Kumbh Mela. And that a holy dip in the divine waters of Ganga eliminates all the evil and past sins from an individual's life. Astrologers believe that bathing at Har ki Pauri ghat during the festival purifies the inner-self of an individual. I don’t know if any of those things are true. Self realization seems possible in any moment. Yet what is compelling for me is the chance to become a pilgrim, to be in the sensation of the heightened moment, to be embodied by the strange journey, to be unafraid of this ‘I’ dissolving, to give up thinking and instead experience being thought. The Big Hit reverberates still.

You can follow our journey to Delhi, Haridwar, Varanasi, and in Rajhasthan -- Jaipur, Shahpura Bagh, Ranthambore, Udaipur – then on to Kovalam beach in Kerala via facebook and http://workingwild.blogspot.com (as long as I can get wireless where we are roaming.)

Wild Relating

Months after our basement was beautifully renovated by a group of wild craftsmen, we’re packed to the rafters with our two adult children, their beaus, and our family from Atlanta and their two magical children.

This is why we created this beautiful space – to share guest rooms and double showers and comfy sofas, to be together. We’re grateful to have little ones to bathe and feed and snuggle with again, and the company of newness in each other too, for we must introduce ourselves every time we visit – who are you now?

What I like about the way we relate in our family is the ability to tell the truth, our personal truths. I like where truths intersect, where the possibility of finding each other can happen. And too, I am beginning to like where my world can be upended in discovery of some aspect of life from another’s point of view. I don’t always enjoy the chaos – like when I screamed at my son in anger the other day over a sarcastic joke he made, because I had a dirty house and unwashed hair with guests arriving in ten minutes. Still, later, when I come to my senses, I will enjoy how a three year old scarfing my homemade divinity puts the prospect of domestic perfection in perspective; I will appreciate how my children feel free enough to describe their discomfort with my anger; I will like how my beloveds can give me spacious silence till I simmer down; I will investigate how an afternoon at the park makes me willing to see that I am fearful of not having it all together, a condition that will surely run nonstop when we arrive in India in a week.

The end of the renovation project happened with perfect timing, though it didn’t seem so when Joel Hester, an amazing welding artist lost all of his tools and materials when they were stolen from his truck shortly after we contracted him. Joel lives in Texas, and makes beautifully welded furniture from recycled cars. Our bathroom vanity is the roof of a Ford Fairlane, which has been molded, buffed and shined, so it now holds a laboratory style sink, curvy wall faucet and an ecohouse pressed paper counter.


I knew Joel’s work would be a great industrial-looking counterpoint to a rainforest marble that encases the double shower, and his work didn’t disappoint.


Strong, textured and masculine, the unconventional vanity balances the tree trunk and branch shapes spiraling up the bathroom walls.


Though we thought the theft would delay the project when it happened, there were other setbacks that caused delays, and the vanity arrived the same week that we were ready for it to be placed. The final decorating touches were completed in September, just in time for a series of parties leading right up to the holidays.

On the last day on the job, our contractor Michael Aaland relayed what had caused much of the delays on our job. The team had lost their main plumbing man when he committed suicide one week into our work, over a relationship issue in his private life. The contractors did not choose to tell us because they were worried that it would have affected our obvious joy in the renovation. I am not sure this is true. Losses, like anger and chaos, are as much a part of our lives as the beauty these wonderful men have created on our behalf. Though we didn't know this man, our hearts went out to every person on the team who worked here, in silence, through the loss of a beloved friend.

One of my teachers, Byron Katie, says “To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. It doesn’t exclude the monster. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare—it looks forward to it, because, like it or not, it may happen, if only in your mind.” In this blog, as we move into the days ahead, I want to capture our selves altered by culture, circumstances and mistakes, not excluding the nightmare, only love; I want to relate with full-on monster intact love.