Tomorrow I leave amsterdam via an overnight, 11-hour bus ride to london. I arrive in london monday morning and will have just enough time to check out my favorite art museum, the saatchi gallery (great gallery, terrible website…),  before heading to Heathrow airport for a monday night red-eye flight to chennai, india… I touch ground at 5 pm tuesday.

(this is chennai)

I like being in motion.

And those are my plans. I have the address of a few inexpensive hotels in chennai; as well as the info for an artists’ community outside chennai, and a highly recommended WWOOF site called Sadhana Forest. Sadhana Forest is a part of Auroville, a global community in Pondicherry.

I’ll make it up as I go along; from what I’ve heard, in India one has little choice but to:

toss up one’s hands and let go of all resistance

Alison left Paros, Greece in mid-November. At the time, I had a foggy vision of the coming months; Alison would travel a bit in Italy, then perhaps Spain and Amsterdam before heading home, and I, nestled in our quiet Paros valley, would continue working on various permaculture projects with Jim. I knew that I didn’t want to return to New England in the midst of a cold and icy winter. Greece seemed a pleasantly balmier alternative. Then I began toying with the idea of a journey to India, where Jim and Irini have spent many winters. Their stories make the country come alive with smells (not always pleasant), spices, energy. I decided I ought to adventure in India from January through early May. And that is what I shall do.

In late November I emailed Alison, who was in the midst of traveling in Italy, and suggested that I leave Greece and we meet up and travel together for the next few weeks, until it was time for her to return home for Christmas. Our rough plan was to meet up in Barcelona in early December, travel ’round Spain for a couple weeks, and then head to Amsterdam. Alison would fly home before Christmas and I would spend another freezing week in Amsterdam, coatless (having left the U.S. in early September, my backpack mostly contains clothes appropriate for early-autumn Greece), and waiting to catch a late-December flight to India.

Boy has this month unfolded differently, unexpectedly, and so wonderfully:

If it fits, if it feels good, if it seems appropriate and meaningful, then it doesn’t matter how absurd it is in the light of the established explanation of how things work. Establishments are no longer as stable as they used to be. They are having to make way for another kind of knowing which is concerned only with harmony, with keeping in touch with Earth’s tune.

     Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things

Each of us possesses deep intuition regarding how to live, how to be in this world; a gut feeling of rightness that is often beyond articulation. But this intuitive voice is so easily smothered. For instance, we are told that it’s right to spend eight hours a day in an office and an hour commuting; after all, most everyone else does. We learn that it’s wrong to spend that time in the company of friends, playing in the woods and building things with our hands.

But really, what feels right to you? Spending your life indoors, mind and body sedate? Or living in a way that supports every inch of your body feeling alive, radiating passion for the world around you?

Thought and feeling don’t always align; I say listen hard to your intuition.

At Eleusis one realizes,
if never before,
that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

Henry Miller – The Colossus of Maroussi

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I strive to live among friends and landscapes I love while simultaneously avoiding the craziness… and working to counter it.

The more I learn about permaculture (the development of sustainable agriculture and community), the more I see that as we live now, we really are crazy. Crazy in our lack of reverence for life; crazy in our unhealthy relationships to our landscape and each other; crazy in our backwards approach to life as competitive, not cooperative.