O thief, tell us of the beauty of Paradise.

I saw three crosses very different from one another
That on the right is alive and not dead
that on the left is dead and not alive
that in the middle makes me marvel
it is like one who wakes while he sleeps
it is like one who lives while he dies
it is like a son of man and he is God.*

After asking around - nobody had heard of the 'town' it was said to be 'near' (i was beginning to think it was some mythological place, like Tir-Na-Nog) i found it, Kurisumala Ashram (or rather it found me...)

It was certainly real, but very remote, hidden away high in the Western Ghats, away from phones and computers, this small community of twenty monks, with an attached dairy farm and nothing for miles but rolling rugged hills. So i stayed for one week, breathing, walking, reading, talking (surprisingly, for these were Trappist monks) to Brother Augustine in particular (he and i would 'take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies') I don't have the words for the beauty, save to say that itwas what the Celts called a 'thin place'- where the barriers between heaven and earth are broken down and eternity is made visible. A place where the air was luminous and cold, where ordinary people live out extraordinary lives of quietude method patience and constant prayer. Constant prayer.

'There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire, whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss. The things of time are in connivance with eternity. The shadows serve you. The beasts sing to you before they pass away. The solid hills shall vanish like a worn out garment. All things change and die, and disappear. Questions arrive, assume their actuality and disappear. In this hour i shall cease to ask them and silence shall be my answer. The world that your love created, that the heart has distorted and that my mind is always misinterpreting, shall cease to interfere with our voices.'
-Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas.

And now i am back in the madness and the mayhem of The City, this time Bijapur, Karnataka (i am North-bound, these days) Here we have collosal Medeival Mosques and dust upon dust upon dirt upon people, smouldering piles of rubbish and for some reason lots of wild pigs, snuffling in the rubbish and lapping up filthy stagnant water and sleeping, whole families heaped together, like soft hairy pebbles. It feels good to be alone once again (i feel quite the intrepid explorer). There is a fresh sense of, if not danger, then something that requires guardedness. As a lone female gora (white foreigner) i am not exactly inconspicuous - there is that unbridled curiosity again, and the Eyes that Follow and the daily, hourly interrogation: "why you no husband? why you not want SONS?" I've decided that i make a lousy tourist. I trundled on my rickety old bike, by accident, deep the heart of the city, and found myself quite, quite lost, and when i did find the mosque that is home to four hairs from the Prophet's sacred beard, it cost 100 Rs (my food budget for the day) to get in. Considering that every square inch of the ancient place was covered in graffiti ("Pranjeet loves Sita") i don't know where all those rupees go. I will hit the road again tonight, for some more travailling. Next stop Ellora, Maharashtra.


*from the Syrian liturgy, based on the writings of Ephrem the Syrian, Deacon Monk of Nisibus, West Asia.