Amethyst: my birth stone, a healing stone, a fitting stone to be passed onto me by a friend to wander across the sky with. We spend an afternoon sitting on the floor of a silversmith's workshop, coaxing liquid silver into pendants and rings with the hot kiss of a bright blue flame. The silversmith's gnarled fingers deftly weave the elemental silver into a cone to slip over my purple rock and the amethyst is ready to wear and to heal shattered hearts.
Such skill is so lost in the sprawling metropolis that is city life. We are so alienated by the people who sweat over the objects we possess, yet here people personally know their tailor, their jeweller, the baker. Not only does that make the dress or the necklace or the bread more meaningful, but it makes one fully appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into such things and the true scale of human achievement. To pick out a sheet of material, to be measured and to watch it grow is so much more beautiful and satisfying than walking into a bland and anonymous shop.
We dodge inquisitive sadhus and a wild white horse and ignoring the warning signs nailed to the fence and we scramble into the jungle and over the crumbling wall and we are inside. We wander wide-eyed around the desolate remains of the ashram once belonging to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where The Beatles stayed in the sixties to study transcendental mediation, and wrote a lot of 'The White Album'. We wander in the hazy afternoon sunshine, being careful to watch out for elephants, as the mountains sigh above us and the only butterflies I have seen in Rishikesh flutter lazily past out heads. I step inside a meditation cave overrun with brambles and wildflowers, and wonder at the phantasmagoric mind of John Lennon looking up at the same walls and dreaming.
We stumble across the shell of the old satsang hall where rafters hang precariously from the ceiling and the walls have been painted in technicolor by people who claim to be artists, writers, shamans and dreamers, all searching for something and perhaps finding unity and peace here in this place where there is space to 'imagine'. I leave a plastic flower on the altar as an offering to those madmen and wandering minstrels who infiltrate small town bedrooms and shake up the thinkers scrabbling in suburban graves, whispering into their ears that escape is possible, that there is more to the world, tugging with restless fingers at their shirtsleeves.
We climb the skeletons of stairs, passing room after room with cryptic messages and lyrics scrawled on the walls where many seekers have traipsed before us, hoping to be filled with the same raw genius as the band. I reach the roof and ascend a rickety ladder that stands against a water tower until I am level with the sky and I let the prickly peace of a perfect moment saturate my pale skin and think about those overgrown minds that have gone before me. I am constantly following wild minds to the ends of the earth, searching for those fabulous yellow roman candles that explode like spiders across the stars.
Later we wander along the beach, wondering at the lives of the sadhus who live in the rocks looking out at the Ganges, here where it smells like the ocean, the salted scent of freedom and adventure. The laws of the moon and the tides here mean that the nightly offerings to Mother Ganga get washed up in this spot. There are hundreds of flowers resting on the shore, looking as though they have bloomed right from the mouth of the gentle surf. Huge daisies and fat pink buds dip their petals in the water, acid coloured oranges and stray strands of gold shuddering in the breeze.
I spot a huge shape silhouetted against the rocks; bloated, matted, two legs, two feet, face down in the sand and wrapped in an orange shroud. It the body of a holy sadhu who has renounced all worldly possessions. It is a dead human body, swollen with the river, rotting in the amber Indian sun. My own living body is trembling in horror at the audacity of death daring to show itself here among the living, in the beauty of the beach under a tinkling waterfall.
I came here partly to escape the morbid thoughts relating to death that were pressing on my chest, the uncertainty of what to believe grating at my soul with sharp fingernails. I came to reflect and to find reassurance and yet here is death; unannounced, unapologetic, raw and naked and gruesome at my bare feet on the beach.
We inform some gentle Indian ladies from the ashram who are wandering among the flowers and they explain that for religious reasons, particularly holy people cannot be cremated in the traditional way. They tell us that this person would have been given a ceremony and left to be washed away in the river, that they would pass a message to the other saints and they would come perform the necessary rituals to send the body back on its way, merging with the prana or life force of the Ganga. They were calm and philosophical and told us that the incident was a message from god that one day we would understand.
I think that the message is this: death is an intrinsic and inevitable part of life, it is almost a rite of passage, just like all of the other human milestones like hitting puberty or giving birth or reaching old age. Death is unapologetic and it does show up in beauty uninvited. Life in India is pure and visceral, sweating and throbbing life and death, undiluted and in plain view of us all. It is a place of extremes and of contradiction, bursting with colour and with life but with death and cruelty and tragedy too. Yet isn't this life itself in her most pure form? Loud and bold and intense and real, shattering your rose-tinted glasses and forcing you to gulp down the sugar and the bitterness.
It is a reminder of the transience of the bloated exterior of our bodies, the shell of the soul. The sadhu looked inhuman and misshaped because that which made it alive was gone: the soul, the prana, the life force.
Sobering as my discovery was, in the end it is a very fitting end to my time here. Before I came here I had witnessed death for the first time and I was horrified by it, and forced to confront the burgeoning awareness of my own mortality and the mortality of the people I love. Here people simply accept death as an absolutely necessary part of life, which it is. In the West, we tend to keep death behind our floral curtains and hidden in our teapots to be supped in dark whispers during wakes and in churches and yet here death is revered and paraded and adorned with bright flowers.
We try to control nature but we cannot for we are nature. Eventually we will all crumble back into the earth or get caught in the tide and washed up against the rocks and we will rot and feed the worms and the beetles and fertilise the soil but that is a beautiful thing. The world keeps turning and life feeds life and it is very difficult for us to grasp but we are part of the eternal, brilliant cycle and only when we accept this can we truly be able to live.
A wizened baba on a balcony passed me a card to slip into my bag which reads:
'Life is short, fix your mind on God
Try to understand yourself
Time is passing fast, your death is waiting
Follow your intuition, listen to your inner voice
Open your third eye, wake up
Everything is possible, God bless you
Universal Love.'
The next day, Badrish the palmist performed a puja to get rid of the rest of my negative energy. He said some mantras and gave me a handful of rice, which I passed over my head to symbolise the last of the negative thoughts leaving my mind and afterwards I threw them into the river, with a flower offering for god. He performed a healing ritual with a wand made of peacock feathers and physically brushed the negativity from my body and into the ground with his hands.
It is curious, when I first came here and imagined negative energy leaving my body during meditation, i visualised it billowing from my mouth in clouds of thick black smoke. Yet today when I close my eyes the image that comes to me is of wispy, rust coloured smoke, as though all of the darkness has gone and this is the residue, like the embers of a dying fire.
As we finish the last of the chai that we will share together, Badrish says to me 'My heart has become very close to your heart. I feel like I am your family, you are the same age as my baby and that is why I wanted to give you this mantra, to heal you'. I throw the rice into the river and say a prayer and it rains down into the water like a pearlescent firework and I feel light and golden.
On my last evening in Rishikesh, I leave the crowds of the town as they prepare noisily for a n annual Shiva festival and head instead to the stretch of beach that I love to run along in the mornings before the tourists descend on it, when the beauty of the mountains and the sand and the water feel like they belong to me. Armed with a bowl made from leaves and stuffed with petals and sandalwood given to me by a tiny boy and the candles left over from my birthday cake, I find a suitable rock to perch on and unwind the auspicious red wristbands from various temples from my wrists, to be given back to the water.
I say a silent prayer of thanks to the universe, for leading me to this place when my soul was guttering in the wind like the candle in my hands and for making me grateful for this wonderful life that is mine. I push my flower basket into the current and watch as it floats along with the water and into the lilac darkness, setting off on its own journey into the world without me. I realise that we must trust the natural ebb and flow of the tides of life and only then can we shine most brightly.
I write these words from London and there was a time when I was drowning when I thought I would never make it back here, everything was too hard, the journey too long, my life pointless and meaningless. There is not one specific event that changed things that I can pinpoint, it is more of an accumulation of experiences and the time and the solitude I gave my mind to heal. I am looking out over the rooftops that I thought might never be mine again and I see that they are beautiful and I feel like I can do anything.
I still don't know what to do with my future, or what kind of person I want to be, or even how I'm going to make the money to simply live in the immediate weeks, but today I read a great book and drank a perfect cup of coffee, and I walked home in the dusk as aeroplanes in the sky left pink trails across a premature crescent moon. I dug my hands deep into the warmth of my coat and peered into golden windows at lives that will never be mine and felt the warm bubbles of contentment rising in my stomach, because I have remembered how to ride along on the current, and there is no need to worry anymore.
Such skill is so lost in the sprawling metropolis that is city life. We are so alienated by the people who sweat over the objects we possess, yet here people personally know their tailor, their jeweller, the baker. Not only does that make the dress or the necklace or the bread more meaningful, but it makes one fully appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into such things and the true scale of human achievement. To pick out a sheet of material, to be measured and to watch it grow is so much more beautiful and satisfying than walking into a bland and anonymous shop.
We dodge inquisitive sadhus and a wild white horse and ignoring the warning signs nailed to the fence and we scramble into the jungle and over the crumbling wall and we are inside. We wander wide-eyed around the desolate remains of the ashram once belonging to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where The Beatles stayed in the sixties to study transcendental mediation, and wrote a lot of 'The White Album'. We wander in the hazy afternoon sunshine, being careful to watch out for elephants, as the mountains sigh above us and the only butterflies I have seen in Rishikesh flutter lazily past out heads. I step inside a meditation cave overrun with brambles and wildflowers, and wonder at the phantasmagoric mind of John Lennon looking up at the same walls and dreaming.
We stumble across the shell of the old satsang hall where rafters hang precariously from the ceiling and the walls have been painted in technicolor by people who claim to be artists, writers, shamans and dreamers, all searching for something and perhaps finding unity and peace here in this place where there is space to 'imagine'. I leave a plastic flower on the altar as an offering to those madmen and wandering minstrels who infiltrate small town bedrooms and shake up the thinkers scrabbling in suburban graves, whispering into their ears that escape is possible, that there is more to the world, tugging with restless fingers at their shirtsleeves.
We climb the skeletons of stairs, passing room after room with cryptic messages and lyrics scrawled on the walls where many seekers have traipsed before us, hoping to be filled with the same raw genius as the band. I reach the roof and ascend a rickety ladder that stands against a water tower until I am level with the sky and I let the prickly peace of a perfect moment saturate my pale skin and think about those overgrown minds that have gone before me. I am constantly following wild minds to the ends of the earth, searching for those fabulous yellow roman candles that explode like spiders across the stars.
Later we wander along the beach, wondering at the lives of the sadhus who live in the rocks looking out at the Ganges, here where it smells like the ocean, the salted scent of freedom and adventure. The laws of the moon and the tides here mean that the nightly offerings to Mother Ganga get washed up in this spot. There are hundreds of flowers resting on the shore, looking as though they have bloomed right from the mouth of the gentle surf. Huge daisies and fat pink buds dip their petals in the water, acid coloured oranges and stray strands of gold shuddering in the breeze.
I spot a huge shape silhouetted against the rocks; bloated, matted, two legs, two feet, face down in the sand and wrapped in an orange shroud. It the body of a holy sadhu who has renounced all worldly possessions. It is a dead human body, swollen with the river, rotting in the amber Indian sun. My own living body is trembling in horror at the audacity of death daring to show itself here among the living, in the beauty of the beach under a tinkling waterfall.
I came here partly to escape the morbid thoughts relating to death that were pressing on my chest, the uncertainty of what to believe grating at my soul with sharp fingernails. I came to reflect and to find reassurance and yet here is death; unannounced, unapologetic, raw and naked and gruesome at my bare feet on the beach.
We inform some gentle Indian ladies from the ashram who are wandering among the flowers and they explain that for religious reasons, particularly holy people cannot be cremated in the traditional way. They tell us that this person would have been given a ceremony and left to be washed away in the river, that they would pass a message to the other saints and they would come perform the necessary rituals to send the body back on its way, merging with the prana or life force of the Ganga. They were calm and philosophical and told us that the incident was a message from god that one day we would understand.
I think that the message is this: death is an intrinsic and inevitable part of life, it is almost a rite of passage, just like all of the other human milestones like hitting puberty or giving birth or reaching old age. Death is unapologetic and it does show up in beauty uninvited. Life in India is pure and visceral, sweating and throbbing life and death, undiluted and in plain view of us all. It is a place of extremes and of contradiction, bursting with colour and with life but with death and cruelty and tragedy too. Yet isn't this life itself in her most pure form? Loud and bold and intense and real, shattering your rose-tinted glasses and forcing you to gulp down the sugar and the bitterness.
It is a reminder of the transience of the bloated exterior of our bodies, the shell of the soul. The sadhu looked inhuman and misshaped because that which made it alive was gone: the soul, the prana, the life force.
Sobering as my discovery was, in the end it is a very fitting end to my time here. Before I came here I had witnessed death for the first time and I was horrified by it, and forced to confront the burgeoning awareness of my own mortality and the mortality of the people I love. Here people simply accept death as an absolutely necessary part of life, which it is. In the West, we tend to keep death behind our floral curtains and hidden in our teapots to be supped in dark whispers during wakes and in churches and yet here death is revered and paraded and adorned with bright flowers.
We try to control nature but we cannot for we are nature. Eventually we will all crumble back into the earth or get caught in the tide and washed up against the rocks and we will rot and feed the worms and the beetles and fertilise the soil but that is a beautiful thing. The world keeps turning and life feeds life and it is very difficult for us to grasp but we are part of the eternal, brilliant cycle and only when we accept this can we truly be able to live.
A wizened baba on a balcony passed me a card to slip into my bag which reads:
'Life is short, fix your mind on God
Try to understand yourself
Time is passing fast, your death is waiting
Follow your intuition, listen to your inner voice
Open your third eye, wake up
Everything is possible, God bless you
Universal Love.'
The next day, Badrish the palmist performed a puja to get rid of the rest of my negative energy. He said some mantras and gave me a handful of rice, which I passed over my head to symbolise the last of the negative thoughts leaving my mind and afterwards I threw them into the river, with a flower offering for god. He performed a healing ritual with a wand made of peacock feathers and physically brushed the negativity from my body and into the ground with his hands.
It is curious, when I first came here and imagined negative energy leaving my body during meditation, i visualised it billowing from my mouth in clouds of thick black smoke. Yet today when I close my eyes the image that comes to me is of wispy, rust coloured smoke, as though all of the darkness has gone and this is the residue, like the embers of a dying fire.
As we finish the last of the chai that we will share together, Badrish says to me 'My heart has become very close to your heart. I feel like I am your family, you are the same age as my baby and that is why I wanted to give you this mantra, to heal you'. I throw the rice into the river and say a prayer and it rains down into the water like a pearlescent firework and I feel light and golden.
On my last evening in Rishikesh, I leave the crowds of the town as they prepare noisily for a n annual Shiva festival and head instead to the stretch of beach that I love to run along in the mornings before the tourists descend on it, when the beauty of the mountains and the sand and the water feel like they belong to me. Armed with a bowl made from leaves and stuffed with petals and sandalwood given to me by a tiny boy and the candles left over from my birthday cake, I find a suitable rock to perch on and unwind the auspicious red wristbands from various temples from my wrists, to be given back to the water.
I say a silent prayer of thanks to the universe, for leading me to this place when my soul was guttering in the wind like the candle in my hands and for making me grateful for this wonderful life that is mine. I push my flower basket into the current and watch as it floats along with the water and into the lilac darkness, setting off on its own journey into the world without me. I realise that we must trust the natural ebb and flow of the tides of life and only then can we shine most brightly.
I write these words from London and there was a time when I was drowning when I thought I would never make it back here, everything was too hard, the journey too long, my life pointless and meaningless. There is not one specific event that changed things that I can pinpoint, it is more of an accumulation of experiences and the time and the solitude I gave my mind to heal. I am looking out over the rooftops that I thought might never be mine again and I see that they are beautiful and I feel like I can do anything.
I still don't know what to do with my future, or what kind of person I want to be, or even how I'm going to make the money to simply live in the immediate weeks, but today I read a great book and drank a perfect cup of coffee, and I walked home in the dusk as aeroplanes in the sky left pink trails across a premature crescent moon. I dug my hands deep into the warmth of my coat and peered into golden windows at lives that will never be mine and felt the warm bubbles of contentment rising in my stomach, because I have remembered how to ride along on the current, and there is no need to worry anymore.
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