a glass half-full of life
get into your body, Wild, blooming deserts, South America, doing, Hinduism, death, little things, Bombay Begums, and living joyfully
Hello Dear.
Thank you for joining me. I hope you are good and wholesome and loved.
This past week I worked on old articles, fought with HDFC, rewatched Bombay Begums (a Netflix series on fierce Indian women), read, went on long-long walks, ate hour-long lunch buffets and kilos of mangoes, and spent half a day making sure everything is okay with the blog.
Having just read Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, I also kept thinking about how I have got to get inside me, inside the core of me, in the real thing, and write from there. In the old articles and travelogs, the spirit of the old me is right there. It was all me in them. Traveling with my backpack, sometimes feeling bigger than I was, but on days much smaller than I could ever be. Or making a schedule as a writer who had quit the job she knew believing she had something important to say. A hope not much different from imagining flowers will bloom out of a desert.
While reading my old writing I remembered that past me who went through all those experiences. But I felt distant from that person because I have changed. I am not so scared of challenging hikes anymore nor uptight about every minute of the day. I laugh at some of my past writing now and most grammar mistakes appall me but it is all me and I should own it.
So I own it. Though my week was a concoction of all the above activities, a few incidents stand out more clearly than the rest.
Such as the early evening when I visited the Library, asked the librarian if the kittens of the library cat were doing okay, and was taken to them to play. Sooji, Laddoo, and Simba ran out of the store room as soon as she opened the sliding gate. Their mother Pushpa trotted behind their tails.
Out on the grass, under the July sun, the kittens did all the kitten things. They bit each other, snarled, jumped on top of each other, rubbed against their mother, pulled crisp blades of grass, attacked twigs moving with the wind, and clawed up trees reaching into the sky. The librarian said caring for those cute perfect fur balls takes a lot out of her.
When the kittens crawled under my squatted bottom and clambered up on my feet and sniffed my behind and sharpened their nails on my foot and explored me as an object of curiosity and not something to be scared of, I bet I could have cried. Wrapping her arm around all three of them, the librarian pressed the kittens against her chest, said she couldn’t take them home because she has two fat cats, and admired their blue eyes. I couldn’t stop myself from telling her she had the same deep blue eyes. She blushed.
The warmth emancipating out of that sweet human being who treated me as her friend further enveloped me. I can’t take the kittens home because I am always moving around and have no home. I have to leave new friends behind to make yet more new ones in another place which I will also put past me. Knowing all this, I was still dizzy with joy.
How can playing with three kittens for half an hour be the highlight of the week for a grownup with her own full life climbing her like a Rangoon Creeper clasps a wild tree? And not just mine but my partner’s life, too, is intertwined around me.
The primal need to be touched, loved, wanted, and held had filled me. The force of life had cuddled me, reminding me our most important needs are the most elemental ones.
The week’s highlight could have been waking up at 5, meditating, walking in the perfect stillness of the cool morning, and working until lunchtime only to bike to a vegetarian buffet cafeteria. The hour-long meals consisting of salad, curd rice, papadum, fried poori or chapati, dal, vegetables, steamed carrots and peas, juice, and coffee in the large green garden were special. More so because I focused on the food and was aware of every bit of it in my mouth.
One morning also stands out in my mind when I thought I would eat the whole world but I stopped at half a dosa and half a poori. Mangoes have overwhelmed me too. Some days I have eaten as much as two kilos. Three mangoes after the morning writing session and three after the evening walk aren’t unusual for me. And the sweet deliciousness of mangoes has been dissolving me completely.
And then there were the Bombay Begums – women who break the conventional boundaries, go for what they want, and learn to lean against each other. They made me laugh and made me cry and showed me how so many of our lives are so connected.
Then there were the long long walks in the green which are pretty vivid in my mind. Walking in the forest with mud under my feet and green canopies covering my view of the sky has always been enchanting for me. Everything is washed away when I walk in the forest.
Or the high point of the week could have been making dosas and eating them with the preparation of cottage cheese and moringa leaves I plucked from the guesthouse tree. Inhaling a plate of ghee rice with bamboo pickle I had bought from Coorg last year, Thai green curry I prepared, and yogurt also tops the list.
The Sunday hours my partner and I talked in bed, giggling like two little children, poking each other’s stomach, and jumping on top of each other like those little kittens only to laugh out loud were quite crazy too. I even left the book Wild aside to be with him because during weekdays by the time he gets free I am already asleep.
The moments that stand out most from the week are the ones that satisfied my most primal needs: food, warmth from another living being, a conversation or a gentle touch on the arm, laughter and fun and play, moving my body, nature, human connection with not only those around me but also with others through books, visuals, and my own writing.
Once I shared an article from the New England Journal of Medicine in Looking Inwards. It was about a dying guy who amidst all the pain and the anticipation of the upcoming death was not concerned about his treatment’s progress or future but if he got his wife’s cheeseburgers or not. Immediate needs and desires seem to matter the most to us.
Cheryl Strayed writes in Wild that she didn’t think about her mother’s death or her divorce or her ex boy-friend and her urge to take heroin from the time she started hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Occupied in keeping herself safe from bears and rattlesnakes, keeping her foot on the trail so she didn’t fall off the edge of the mountain, having enough water, making sure the stove didn’t choke, and aching from her wounds and scabs from carrying the huge backpack, she was pulled in her body and her immediate needs.
While keeping herself alive and safe of course she didn’t have time to spiral into things that had happened in the past but weren’t there at that moment.
For me, the anticipation of an editor’s reply is less scary than wondering why my gums have been red and sore for months. In between, they once healed on their own and I relaxed as if someone had lifted a weight off my head. When my editor replied he would publish my story, I was elated but not as much as I had when my gums had turned pink from red.
The self-healing of the gums had shown me that everything inside me was okay and maybe I was not suffering from a vitamin deficiency as the dentist had asked me to check. (I haven't checked yet.) With or without that essay in print, I knew I was okay inside and that’s all that matters (as that article I shared last week suggests too).
Whenever we are too much inside our heads we should immediately get into our bodies. Putting ourselves in our bodies would make us forget our sorrows because we would have to think about our immediate physical requirements that would keep us safe and alive. Only when our fundamental needs are satisfied and our most immediate senses are taken care of is when we worry about things beyond such as our pains, losses, and disappointments.
We don’t have to put ourselves in physical danger to get our minds off things – but we should get in our body – walk – run – do yoga – exercise – bungee jump – swim – ski – walk up and down the stairs – wrestle – kickbox – play tennis or badminton or skip rope – dance – do something so much so that your feet are so tired you want someone to press them and your body is so sore you want to crash on the couch in the office.
Playing with the cats, chuckling with my partner, strolling in the forest, and knowing I had food and tonnes of mangoes had taken me out of my emotional upheavals and sent me into this immediate real basic physical raw zone in which all I could do was do the thing in front of me or take that step I had to take to get to the end of the road.
And at the end of the road, I saw flowers. Contrary to public opinion, it seems deserts can bloom, too.
What do you do to get out of your mind?
For this week’s letter,
Some of my writing,
quotes I love,
things to read,
things to watch,
and
travel tips.
Past Articles I’ve Just Renewed
Colca Canyon Trek, Peru – A Complete Guide [2022]
Colca Canyon in Peru could be one the deepest canyons but even its lowest points are 2000-meter high. This guide to Colca Canyon trek is as much about the walk as it is about the excruciating time I had going up.
Read the memoir now. Or Pocket for later.
Backpacking in South America [2022] – A Beginner’s Guide
Put together from my nine-month solo travel in the continent, this is the only guide to traveling in South America you will ever need.
Get to the guide now. Or Pocket it for later.
Quotes I Love
All the above four quotes taken from the book Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey
"When your heart is genuine and all you offer is love, you don’t lose people. They lose you." — By Anjali (Found through her Twitter)
“Those of us who can’t do anything else become writers.” — Yours Truly
What I’ve Been Reading
I’ve been reading short stories, books, articles, and so much more. I can’t possibly list all what I have read in the past week so I’m putting down the things I found most relevant and worthwhile.
Beautiful reads from the week,
If you think you have a defined role in the society and define beauty in one particular way, read the piece Burning it Down by Joy Castro
Wearing shapeless green scrubs and with my newly mannish head, working wherever I was useful, I seemed to myself to be not a woman at all—more of a formless, inchoate thing, a sexless monk, my own transitional object.
Four Great Ideas from the Hinduism, by the School of Life — A great piece that interconnects various ideas from Hinduism to show what is important in life.
Hinduism is hugely radical in suggesting that there is nothing especially noble or interesting about being alive.
Once we look at matters dispassionately, a lot of what we have to go through is misery and suffering: we need — with great effort — to grow up, to assume responsibilities, to master a profession, to have a family, to take our place in societies full of backbiting and hypocrisy, to watch those we love get ill and eventually to succumb to old age ourselves. To think highly of ‘life’ is, through a Hindu lens, a fundamental intellectual error.
My Wife Was Dying and We didn’t Tell Our Children About Her Cancer by the Atlantic — A heart-aching tale of a couple and parents to three daughters who didn’t tell their children about the mother’s cancer lest the daughters start counting the days.
The Marriage Lesson I Learned Too Late by the Atlantic — A write-up that emphasizes why small things matter more because they show how much we care.
The things that destroy love and marriage often disguise themselves as unimportant. Many dangerous things neither appear nor feel dangerous as they’re happening. They’re not bombs and gunshots. They’re pinpricks. They’re paper cuts. And that is the danger. When we don’t recognize something as threatening, then we’re not on guard. These tiny wounds start to bleed, and the bleed-out is so gradual that many of us don’t recognize the threat until it’s too late to stop it.
Wild, Cheryl Strayed — This is the story of a woman who in the midst of a divorce, a twisted relationship with a man with whom she has started injecting heroin into her body, and the overwhelming grief of her mother’s death decides to get on a thousand-mile hike that would take her three months through some of North America’s highest mountains. Not only the book is entertaining, engaging, fun, and inspiring but also such a vivid story of how when we are broken we have to gear up and put ourselves through something even harder, something we imagine we would never be able to do, but we push and push, we bleed and cry, and we grow on those experiences that had taken us down and come out on the other side as a much mature, kinder, and more beautiful being.
how beautiful are these hair by Jessica Spence — An artist “who nurtured each brushstroke like I would a strand of hair, a two-strand twist, or a braid.”
Women Street Photographers — A curious Instagram account that might interest you.
Another set of colorful paintings to admire and indulge in — by Kristof Santy
Image Credit: kristofsanty Instagram, Copyrights: Kristof Sant
A little travel News,
Covid Update July 2022: Peru and Chile are now open for all travelers. Find the complete information on the official website of the Peru government and here is the Chilean government’s official website for travel-related information and regulations.
What I’ve Been Watching/Listening
that’s worth mentioning
Bombay Begums on Netflix, as I have already noted above
I have also been listening to my own podcast with Musafir Stories on Old Manali
And for all my Wanderlusters.
As I have shared many photos above and this newsletter is already long, here is just one more.
putting little things together and living joyfully
Thank you for reading.
I hope you have a great week full of love and laughter. Take good care of yourselves :)
Let me know what you think about this newsletter. Just press reply.
Yours,
Priyanka
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