Were I Little Red, My Grandmama would be dead

July 30, 2010

The Isha Foundation of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India is a yoga center, a retreat, an ashram, a school, a place of worship (in a sense) and an enclave located at the foot of what is considered a sacred hill.  But my visit was unrelated to almost all of that, and made in complete ignorance of Isha and its existence.  As has happened almost consistently here in India, I boarded the train (see previous blog) with little knowledge of what I was to be doing, other than the fact that my theatre artist buddy here in Southern India (He calls me ‘Jaws’ and I now refer to him as Tambi, meaning Little Brother) wanted me to join him in a program he would be conducting at the school.  He loves being at the school and they had requested him back after a successful endeavor several years ago.  As far as I knew, as I weaved my way through sleeping bodies on the railway platform, would be teaching some children using the Pied Piper as a text (something Tambi likes) and possibly working with him on a very brief staging of As You Like It (Shakespeare in an ashram).

My first day proved frustrating to me, as I sat and watched my friend in animated action, working the children quickly and creatively to whip up a staging of three different stories into performance pieces to be unveiled just four days later.  The highlight of the day, surprisingly, turned up in the form of an 8 year old girl who for some strange reason ‘adopted’ me as her friend almost immediately, as her morning drama class began their initial activities.  Every day she made sure to pull me this way and that, to make sure I was near her, or participating or sharing my camera with her.  Other than that bright little light, my expectations to be more involved were dashed, quickly and precisely.

Now please, my friendly reader, judge not harshly this ego-centered frustration, as it is merely set up to the experience of this journey.  Although my friend and I got into a little tiff over expectations on his part, my part and the school’s part—and the clash of those expectations—I continued to offer my support, although occasionally a few choice evaluative pieces of advice. Simultaneously, I yanked myself away from the drama classes to wonder about the open air, farm-like ashram, diving into a little reflective thought to struggle with this feeling of purposelessness and potential waste of time.

Ah, friendly reader, you ask the question. “You were only there for a day, a single day, before you harbored these feelings?” And you are correct. But after the frenzied activity of Chennai, I was not ready to be put to the side to support others.  “Oh, the ego of this one,” you spout.  Wait, wait, wait.

In the evening of the first day, a very auspicious day apparently, a small procession was to be staged outside the temple there.  Now let me side step for a moment and introduce the other players in the ego-driven drama.  The Isha Foundation has what is called a Home School; children of people who live and work there and many Indian children that were born or have lived a significant amount of time in the US and have parents who have sent them to be boarders at the school.  Most of the school staff is volunteer, cared for by the Foundation, which houses and feeds them all.  The dining area is a huge hall that has long, thin mats rolled out for each meal, which students, teachers and visitors sit on to be served by kitchen staff and helpers.  But I digress.

The drama teachers at the school are two—one a once upon a time music teacher from the US who happened to be there when the school was started a few years ago and the other a Lebanese man who is now a monk at the temple.  A lovely pair of people.  Well, on that particular day, a full moon day, many, many hundreds of people were visiting the ashram because it was also a highly significant day on the calendar.  So the regular full moon procession gained additional auspiciousness.  The drama monk invited me to the procession and explained the entire significance as we walked along the muddy path.  I wish I could adequately describe the evening, with drums, cymbals, fire, dancing, praising the goddess and etc in front of a large cow.  But I cannot.  Let me instead say it started a nice relationship with the dancing drama monk.

So, what about Little Red, you ask, noting the title of this blog (have you forgotten?).  Truth is, Little Red wandered from the path.  For me, the path diverged from my expectations.  In the second day, my frustrations continued, but now I had something else to consider…what this place was all about.  And then, when the drama sessions ran late that evening, my Tambi went back to the cottages to sleep and I walked on with the drama monk to get food.  As it was late, food was served in another area.  My monk friend took food back to Tambi, but I stayed in the dining area (an outdoor foyer) where the dancing drama monk came to join me after.  As we sat, we talked about his world at the ashram, the purpose of Isha as a place of meditation not religion, rather a kind of secular spirituality that avoids preaching a doctrine rather promotes a kind of self-actualization to encourage growth, and personal satisfaction in who you are and what you do.  A place of two quiet temples and a temple pool for metaphorical rejuvenation.  I am not quite doing this justice, because my monk friend was laughing and joking the whole time, and through the conversation we unveiled a connection between the pursuit of creativity and the purpose of this ashram.  Even as I write this it is hard to believe the connections that were coming, but it was an engaging and reflective conversation that, if you’ve followed me this far, you start to understand the unexpected pathway it was pulling me along.

Over the next couple of days, as I helped the drama group when and where I could to put together their almost overly ambitious program, I visited the temple pool.  For those who know me well, to see me wandering the open hallway between the changing room and the large archway embracing the huge set of stairs down into the stone pool clad only in a dhoti, you know something was up.  The pool is a place of silence (and significantly cold water) where one half hour is for men and one for women all throughout the day.  The ceiling is a colorful painting of bathing in the Ganges.  And a linga, or worship stone sits at the center of the pool for meditation.

Now if that ain’t enough, my friendly reader, I also visited the brick domed temple at the center of the place.  There is a large linga in a round room with little cave-like alcoves for meditators to tuck into and, well, meditate.  Every fifteen minutes a little bell rings and you enter quietly into the cool, dim temple and find a place to sit and use the silence to your advantage.  I enjoyed the first time so much, I returned at noon the next day when a small concert of sorts played for half an hour—Tibetan bowls, guitar, drums and solo voice echoing through the space.

All these experiences offered time to reflect with few distractions; a kind of time I rarely get.  It was, surprisingly to me, the right time for it to happen, as I just passed three months in India and sort of needed a moment to reconsider how I was approaching my experiences here.  As you might be guessing, my interactions with the drama program also changed and I easily started cutting material for the props person, babysitting children not in rehearsal and seeking time to chat with the local drama folks.  I started to, what is that word, relax.

On the final evening, my Tambi friend and I performed.  A fun way to end, and to surprise the folks there who still knew little about me.  And in the end, they all honored me almost as much as they did my friend, who was doing all the work.

So, reader, you survived this far and wish to know about my reference to ‘Grandmama.’  Well, Grandmama would be dead because I wandered off the path of my initial expectation…and never returned to it.