April 26, 2002Gudi Padva is the name given to the first day of the Lunar New Year of spring, which is observed particularly in Western India. It is also the first day of the Chaitri Navaratri, spring's "Nine Nights Festival" which culminates on Rama Navami, the ninth day of this waxing fortnight. Rama Navami is the birthday of Ramachandra, seventh incarnation of Vishnu and protagonist of the Ramayana, the shorter of the two of India's great epics. Six days after Rama's birth comes the full moon known as Hanuman Jayanti, which is the birthday of Hanuman, Rama's unparalleled devotee.

One ideally plants oneself firmly somewhere for at least the duration of Navaratri (better yet, for the forty days beforehand), the better to focus on meditation and other spiritual practices. Those of us with more mobile destinies observe such fetes as time and space permit. In my case, since I happened to be in Albuquerque on this Gudi Padva, I celebrated it with the family of Dr. Vasant Lad, with whom I celebrated many previous such days when I was a student at the Ayurveda college in Poona and he was teaching there.

As usual, we began the festivities with neem leaves. Neem, or nimba (Azardirachta indica), is exceptionally bitter, the better to symbolically start the process of "personal spring cleaning," of eliminating from the body everything unwanted that accumulated over the winter. In India fresh neem leaves are as near as the nearest neem tree; in New Mexico, we had to make do with the dried version. And as usual, we shifted from bitter to sweet, following the dried leaves with the luscious meal that is traditional in Maharashtra for this day, centered around puranpoli, a sort of chappati stuffed with sweetened chickpea flour, courtesy of Dr. Lad's wife Usha.

This New Year was particularly new for the Lads in that it was their first with a new family member: Manjit, who had but a few weeks before married Aparna, the family's daughter. When first I met Aparna she was two, and her brother Pranava but a few months old. Now she is thirty, and studying Chinese medicine in Albuquerque, and Pranava, now twenty-eight, is studying allopathy in Pune. I'm happy for them both, and am at the same time increasingly aware of how decreasingly I resemble a spring chicken. Oh well ...

By the end of the weekend seminar I taught at the Ayurvedic Institute I had cheered right back up, and proceeded in superannuated cheer to San Francisco, where I lectured at the California Institute of Integral Studies, zipping promptly back to L.A. in time to catch a night flight to Australia. Both Rama Navami and Hanuman Jayanti found me in Oz, in the rain forest near Mullumbimby, where our next installment begins.

April 12, 2002From Silverton to Albuquerque, thence to La Mirada, and on to San Diego, for a rendezvous with the Four Dormans (writer Danielle, chiropractor Patrick, and currently unemployed twins Zoe and Samantha, who will be four in June), dinner with yoga teacher Jaruska (whose odyssey began in Prague, and continued in Italy before "hopping the pond" to the Western Hemisphere), breakfast with acupuncturist Dr. James Williams, and lunch with yoga teacher Alicia ("Isabel") Isen, before returning to La Mirada.

Then on to Santa Monica, and the cozy home of yoga teachers Erich Schiffman and Leslie Bogart, followed by a day-long expedition to Santa Barbara (inspired by Scott Blossom, driven there by Matt Pasendian), for a lecture at the Santa Barbara Yoga Center (program coordinator Mickey Hannah), after dinner (an Indian meal prepared by Dineh, a native of Iran) at the home of philanthropists Howard & Janet Stein, before forgetting my wallet at the yoga center prior to my midnight return (Scott driving) to Santa Monica. Greyhound transported the wallet to Hollywood the next day while I delivered a lecture (organized by Katherine Newmark) in Bel-Air at Yoga House (the brainchild of its proprietor Tara Guber), followed by a Thai dinner at the Santa Monica airport (Leslie, Erich, Scott, Matt, Katherine and daughter Emily attending).

To Seattle the next day, and a somewhat less hectic schedule of walks and meetings, the most salient one being a breakfast of buttered Scotch oats and blueberries with Dr. Ron Schneweiss, a native of South Africa who, after nearly three decades in Seattle, is now in charge of determining how best to introduce CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) into the curriculum at the University of Washington Med School.

When not socializing I hobnobbed with John & Sally. One signal advantage of staying with a musician is the potential for being exposed to musicianship of a high order, which arrived this trip in the form of a private recital by pianist Judith Cohen, at her home, just prior to her departure for concerts in Budapest. Judith has partnered with John in various recitals; this evening I particularly enjoyed the Scarlatti, but all was enjoyable, and well accomplished.

Thence I went to Albuquerque, just before the new moon, and well in time for Chaitra Shukla Pratipada, one of India's many New Year's Days, on the day after ...

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