Inspiration – Page 2 – Wendy's Out of Station

To Hellfire Pass and Back, Hallelujah

Soundtrack, a very broken Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen,
performed by Jeff Buckley

I’ve never been one for war memorials, I’ve been to one Dawn Service, never felt I wanted to go to Gallipoli. But something in me jumped at the chance to take a trip to the River Kwai, it just seemed right somehow. I didn’t really even think about what it would be, just knew I had to go. It seemed like a good reason for having found myself in Thailand.

You might question my soundtrack recommendation for this post, but it seems so right to me, the rough, broken emptiness of the empty Hallelujah of Cohen crying for meaning. And performed by Jeff Buckley, the spaces between the guitar strings become the spaces in a disillusioned heart full of longing. For me, the sun-baked jungle mountains reached out to sons of a sun-burnt country whose faith was formed in suffering in a sun-parched Judea, until it resonated with a very hot agonised human thirst for meaning. I hope you’ll come to agree that the Hallelujah respects the spirit of those men, who, although broken, dying, tortured in body, mind and soul, even in death, still remained human, remained Australian, and endured.

Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah

Our journey to Hellfire Pass started at the War Cemetery in Kanchanaburi where almost 7,000 graves attest to the 15,000 total POW deaths, and signal the some 100,000 Asian civilian deaths, lives that were lost building the infamous Thai-Burma railway between 1942 and 1943. Such a short time for so much death.

Standing among the graves of unknown soldiers I felt moved to sing Amazing Grace. Wandering I saw a crocheted poppy, symbol from last Remembrance Day. A friend of mine made several of those and here I was seeing one in Thailand. How far our simple acts of love and compassion can reach.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah

People from our group found the graves of some for whom they had come to pay respects. Already moved, we moved on to the site of the Bridge over the River Kwai. Bombed and destroyed and rebuilt it doesn’t seem to meet the size of David Niven, but the agony is bigger, somehow in every rail, in every sleeper, every rivet.

I had to go and look at the locomotives, two original rails re-laid, somehow they made it more real.

I love that in South East Asia there seems to be this habit of building temples near sites of suffering and death. As though prayer and stillness could ease the souls, the grief, the pain. I like it at the very least as a sign of respect and reverence.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I’m not even sure now how much I knew about Hellfire Pass before yesterday. We got to the museum, which is so fitting, and the thing that struck me most… a sign that said: there are no artefacts in this museum. The men who suffered and died here brought nothing with them to leave behind.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah

Warned about the number of stairs (121) and the “rough” track I headed off down the path to Hellfire Pass.

The rail bed is immediately impressive. Yes it’s been cleared and maintained as a memorial, but the engineer in me says this was a well built railway line. Cut into rock with blood. And the scenery is so gut-wrenchingly beautiful.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I was walking along thinking how impressive it was, how incredible the feat of construction. The roughness of the cliff, cut back in to make the railway line level along the mountain side. It’s rough going even now but what stopped me, brought me up short, were the occasional sleepers still buried in the path. And I remembered again that this was built by men, POWs, by hand. Men brutalised. Feed starvation rations of plain rice, eating insects for protein. Digging through granite at the point of a gun.

And it is impressive. But then I came around a bend and saw the actual Hellfire Pass. And my immediate thought, “It’s an empty tomb.”

It was called Hellfire Pass because the Japanese forced work 24 hours a day. And as the pass was dug, the conditions and the flames of the fires that lit their work by night, were as close to hell on earth as the men could imagine. And it wasn’t imagination, they were living and dying it.

At that point I started to understand how it was that the war in the Pacific came to a place where it could only end in the otherwise unthinkable use of nuclear bombs.

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah

It seemed kind of kitsch, but I felt I had no option but to take my hat off in awe, in horror, and in wonder. Awe and wonder, at the brokenness of hell, at the empty tomb filled with gut wrenching despair and loss and suffering.

And Mary stood alone outside the empty tomb and wept

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

I was humbled in the presence of such great spirit.

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

After the mist this morning we went to Saiyoknoi Waterfall, where there is no water. But the fallen leaves were being burned and created an eerie, supernatural sense of not being alone in these mountains even today. The tree roots, reaching out like some kind of skeletal being, one still shackled. Still reaching for god and home and meaning. Poppies and flower offerings for peace, on a Japanese loco, in the smoke and the sun and the drought.

Hallelujah

But I was still despairing about humanity. How can people have a future in a world of so much reckless hate? How can we have a future if it’s all happening again? Do we even deserve a future? I wandered off alone, unable to cope with other people.

But inevitably it was back in the van and we were off again to another rock cut railway with wooden trestles and I despaired.

The POWs working this section were herded each night into a cave so they couldn’t escape. And in that cave today: Buddha, incense, prayers for peace. I don’t know why, but it made me pause and wonder, maybe, maybe, maybe, is there some hope for humanity?

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Prologue February 2014

We are driving back from Chennai beach through the slum. Ok to be accurate, we are crawling through the fish market on the edge of the slum on the edge of the beach on the edge of Chennai. Even in the locked car with a/c on full recirculation the smell of the fish is penetrating. The fish lie there eyes all milky, guts smeared on the ground below. The flies covering them are like a heaving pepper crust. Stall holders are pushing trolleys laden with more buckets of fish to hawk to the evening throng, the madding crowd. Down by the water’s edge, looking away from the market’s filth there’s a film crew with a press of onlookers and extras filming – on some level I wonder if it’s drama, reality or both? Children press against the car windows begging. Shoppers and commuters patiently wend their way through, each occupied in their own drama, threading between waves and cameras and stalls and traffic and road works. It’s a chaotic whirl, but it’s a whirl that’s outside the secure insulated bubble of the car. And inside my bubble I’m starting to realise I’ve lost my heart.

Karthik is pattering a monologue on change in India, loss of moral values, the concentration of wealth in the upper and middle classes. While some things change, caste is still very bad. Progress isn’t helping the ordinary family who lives and works outside IT. He’s just a poor man who wants to make enough money to go back to the country and live with his kids. He so rarely says much, so rarely opens up about his thoughts, and I’m not listening. Well I’m listening but not processing.

My heart is somewhere back behind us on the beach.

Home is where your heart is, but tomorrow even though I’m on a plane going home, I’m leaving mine here.

All India is change…

Shiva – Lord of the Dance – Nataraj

Close your eyes and imagine you’re having a dream… you can see a fire in front of you, a big vertical circle of fire that’s pulsing with energy so it’s as though it’s alive. It’s burning in the air like a slow turning annulus. And in the middle of that circle of flame you can see the silhouette of a figure dancing.

You move closer and realise the dancer is the most beautiful man you have ever seen. Muscles so defined they’re almost sculpted, wild dreadlocks flying, dark skin glowing, sweat droplets flying and glistening like prisms of molten gold in the flickering firelight. Dancing, a balance of perfection in motion, and always, permeating your very being, there is a thrusting pulse and drumbeat.

The energy of the fire, the energy of the dance and the pulsing drumbeat draw you closer.

You approach and see that this magnificent man is dancing one leg raised in the air, foot pointing toward release and salvation, inviting you to take the first step to walk the dance of your salvation. Somehow in the frenzy of constant movement, his other leg is fixed on the ground. Except it’s not on the ground, as you get closer you see he is standing on the back of a dwarf. The dwarf is ego; he has risen above everything the dwarf represents and selfless he’s dancing in the centre of the energy of the universe.

You move closer again, drawn by this thrumming beat that seems to be coming from inside you, deeper inside you than your own heartbeat, from the very pulsing life of your cells. You see that the drum is in his hand. He has four hands swirling round his body in this magnificent untameable dance.

One hand beats the drum, the pulse of life.

One hand is the pedestal for the dance of a cobra, swaying languidly, thrusting provocatively, head raised, hood flared, tongue darting, eyes like diamonds this symbol of renewal, fertility and the sexuality of sustaining life.

One hand is empty, pointing at his raised foot. The empty space between hand and foot forces you to acknowledge the agony of the apparent absence of god, times of absence of meaning, to confront the empty vacant voids in your soul, times when you’ve had no choice but to gaze into yourself and weep tears into the darkest abyss.

His fourth hand holds fire. Fire that is the end of all things, fire that is destruction, because in this dancing beautiful man you encounter all the elements of life; creation, salvation, renewal and destruction.

His third eye pierces your very soul. You gasp at that naked knowing.

Flying around his head are matted wild dreadlocks, cascading and crashing together like rapids and logs on a ragging roaring river. In his dreads, like jewels in the celestial sky, are both the sun and the moon, for this is the bringer of light to the world. Drawing closer still you see in the dreadlocks a small boat. The dreads flow like water, like the mother river Ganga the source of all life and fertility flowing out from this man’s head. And in the boat you see a skull, for death holds no fear in the realm of such magnificence.

Water coming from the river Ganga, his mistress, his lover, flows into you through the pores of your skin, all life comes from Mother Ganga.

And still this man dances, this god, this human perfection, this primal beauty… sculpted muscles, genitals raised, dreads flying, arms twirling wildly, drum pulsing, pulsing inside your body as the flames burn. Look into the beauty of the divine and meet the eye of the god.

You feel utter peace at the centre of all things. The fires burn, burn with the energy of life and the universe… everything is complete in the dance, nothing can be added by strivings or destroyed in tragedies. The rapture and freedom are intoxicating, it moves you to another place. A place where you are above ego, and where your true self is safe to let go and your soul can dance with the god…

Dance

Namaste – the god in me acknowledges the god in you, and in all things

A Madurai morning – market magic

The next morning

Today is slow. I’m in a five star resort converted from a British cotton and silk merchant’s company estate. It’s lovely. There are peacocks outside my bedroom window. There are cool sweet scented breezes. There is a pool to which I will retire directly for the afternoon.

After last night and before this morning’s violent re-emergence of breakfast in under 15 mins – Karthick took me early to the Madurai markets. Apparently it’s Sunday and in good post-colonial style Sunday is still a holiday here so much of the markets were closed. But I still had fun wandering around the flower wholesalers taking photos scented with jasmine and rose. The rose wholesalers offered me chai and a smile.

Then we went to the vegetable market where my pictures smell of coriander, mint and curry leaves. Lots of smiles and waves and head wobbling. Being 80% closed was much more relaxed than a normal day I’m sure, but that suited me and my camera.

Aren’t these just such beautiful people? Makes me smile just remembering them welcoming me like it was perfectly normal for a crazy Australian woman to be wandering around at dawn taking their photographs like they were royalty.

It was then back to the hotel for breakfast hmmmm. You will have guessed above, it was a fatal mistake. No more to be said about dodgey omelette. I’ll live, just feel like a day by the pool. Sorry to today’s three programmed temples, but I’m sure there will be more in the next 12 days.

I now receive a daily call from Delhi office to make sure everything is in order madam. Ah well, good to be memorable! I’m not mentioning the omelette, they’ll only worry. Now for that nap then the pool.

Temple Junkie

Confucius say: woman who walks barefoot in Hindu temple should watch where she puts foot. Eeeuuuuw

Did actually see a yin yang symbol in Jambukeshvara Temple, along with quite a few Chinese style lions head and dragon carvings on the gopuram. I guess they have been trading for 3000+ years so exchange of art makes sense. But I’m getting ahead, distracted as I am by recollections of standing in ugh Vishnu knows what… I refuse to speculate. Anyway since last I wrote it’s been days of full on temple overload (I started this days ago, sorry, you do now have Pondicherry in between.)

We left the villa in Madurai and started winding our way north. First stop Trichy also known as Tiruchirapalli. Two temples, overnight stay, hotel not memorable. Temples totally memorable! The first Ranganatha the largest Vishnu temple in India and site of my unfortunate foot step. It was once destroyed by Muslim invaders so was rebuilt with seven walls and facilities for the entire town to hide inside in case if siege. Granaries, kitchens, sleeping quarters, cow sheds, the works. It was the penultimate day of a festival so there was lots happening. It’s an auspicious time for festivals in Tamil Nadu it seems. P’raps even festival season.

Having declined the temple involving climbing 426 steps we went instead as second of the day to Jambukeshvara a Shiva temple dedicated to water as one of the five elements. There are five famous Shiva temples dedicated to each of the elements. Nice columns and light – site of yin yang carving. I’m being understated, apart from the elephant in chains I really did love this temple (it’s the one on the right above and these ones here below). Continue reading “Temple Junkie”

The Dedicated Temple Junkie – because it was totally worth it

So the totally excitement means I can never see too many temples, and believe me I’ve tried…

The first Vishnu temple Ranganatha was in excitement mode on the day before the end of festival. There was a massive chariot outside over 10m tall and the next day the gold deity dressed in a ruby studded cloak was to be taken outside at 6am and pulled a full lap of the temple town by hundreds of men.

Apart from standing in muck, I had a great time. I was allowed inside the 5th wall where the statue was being prepared to be taken outside. There was much chanting and incense and drumming and blowing of a double reeded instrument called a Nadaswaram. Then the curtain hiding the god from the people was dropped and people raised their hands above their heads pointed in prayer and sought the blessing of the god. The carvings around the huge complex were astounding and I’m sure will prove boring and repetitive in my 1000 odd photos. But I had fun and quizzed the guide on Hindu mythology. Continue reading “The Dedicated Temple Junkie – because it was totally worth it”

The rocky town with the name I can’t pronounce

So before the temple junkie diversion I had already taken you to Pondicherry where I was kissed by an elephant. What happened next? Damn I keep getting behind. Apologies for any confusion or repetition. The next day in Pondicherry started early walking with Karthik up to the big Sunday food market at 630am: a riot of fish, fruit and veg and flowers. I photographed the cauliflower man. He told Karthik that everyone photographs him. In my best Hindi I told him that is because he is beautiful. Half the market cried laughing. It was huge.

Then it was off with Joseph the guide to a commune and ashram. I’m of the view that “the Big Golden Golf Ball” is a cult and a scam so we’ll leave it at that.
Continue reading “The rocky town with the name I can’t pronounce”

That was it for 2014 & my broken heart

I can tell you that from Mamallapuram went to Chennai and you’ve had that post already Out of the world, liminal floating. In Chennai apart from walking on the beach getting lost, we did the usual tourist stops going up to Mount Saint Thomas where the Apostle Thomas is supposedly buried. Visited the cave where he was killed. Drove around town getting lost a lot, but it’s all a blur and only the beach seemed real.

I have to confess that I cried all the way from Chennai airport to Singapore. Maybe it was the idiot sitting next to me complaining about all the rubbish on the beach in Chennai, the beach I’d fallen in love with the two days before. Maybe it was leaving my spiritual home. Maybe it was that pained look in Karthik’s face as I hugged him goodbye, although it could have been that my bum bag got him in the nuts. But whatever the reason, I cried, and cried. The flight attendants moved the obnoxious man. And I couldn’t get a song out of my head

Close every door to me
Keep those I love from me
Children of [Kali] are never alone…

I promised Alison I would never contact him.
I am everyday inspired by the daughters of India, and
So I keep coming back to Kali, I’m always coming home

I Can’t Keep Quiet

Soundtrack: MILCK Quiet

Had a crisis of confidence this morning. Is the India of my hopes and expectations a place only of my imagining? It looks so different out the hotel window. Am I indulging in some white colonial fantasy even thinking of coming to live here? What right do I have to speak? Should I shut up, go home, stay in my place. Could I do that?

But no one knows me no one ever will
if I don’t say something, if I just lie still

Since the global Women’s marches last week I’ve been listening to MILCK Quiet. A song written about finding the confidence to talk about mental illness. A song performed in Washington proclaiming that Women cannot keep quiet when politics abuses. It’s an anthem for anyone who has ever doubted their right to exist, their right to use the planet’s oxygen to speak, to breathe.

Can I keep quiet about what I’ve learned, seen? Should I? Could I?

Maybe it’s time I left my 4.5 star luxury and went out to find the India I love, to find my smile. To find my muse, Karthik’s daughter, and Kali with her sisters.

Febuary 2014
There is a Castle on a Cloud

There is a bookmark on my pillow this evening… “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.”

Today we reached Chennai, last stop on this three week temple tour. I’m in 6 star luxury high up in the sky feeling like the Queen of Sheba (no glass floor or hairy cloven foot, thank you Miss B) and I’m a little sanguine.

I get very close to India each trip, and the occasional luxuries I allow myself become more incongruous each time. We’ve talked about change and India in the IT age is different but it’s not the India I love and seek. The ordinary people I come here to encounter, Malar and Yoda, the people in the villages and temples and markets, they would never see inside a place like this. And from here I cannot hear their voices. After 3 weeks in their world the pretension here chafes.

Today as I ate a 2500 rupee ($45) lunch in splendid isolation, Karthik waited in the car outside the hotel. On the road he lives on a 500 rupee per day allowance. I used the words of Monty Python on Facebook: “Luxury! We had box in middle of road!” He has a car by the side of the road, and even that is not his.

At 3pm Karthik collected me for our afternoon walk (I took him the fruit bowl from my hotel room to ease my conscience) and we went to the beach. Just walking and watching for a couple of hours outside my golden handcuffs… come, walk with us:

There are breakers crashing on a long white beach, the air pregnant with salt and spray. The sun lowering in the sky creates long shadows, we slide away from profane time through the shimmering mists to another between world.

Let the salty mist cloud your harsh vision and tint your dark glasses. Stop looking at the rubbish and poverty. See the human not the beggar. Slide out of knowing on a beach on the edge of time. Feel with your soul.

Not in my castle on a cloud

Through the mists the hotels to the south flatten into a single silhouette turreted by a/c towers and elevator blocks. The radar post looms a high watchtower over the mists. Sand castles guarding, watching the sea.

What horrors they watched on 26 December 2004 as tsunami ripped this beach clean… on the feast of Stephen, when the sand lay round about, deep and crisp and even, uncountable beggars and slums washed away.

For millennia we have been drawn to the edges, to the deep, above the waves, beyond these shores. Into the unknown. Here we pause out of time. In the interstices, the beginnings of life.

I feel safer out here with Karthik than in the locked hotel with its security gates and guns.

Stay out of time with us: boys ride bareback on horses along the beach, gallant knights their sand castles fallen into the sea. Off to find a princess or a kingdom to save. The shell seller blows his conch, troubadour echoing a haunting call across ages, percussion by the thump of the waves. There is a castle on a cloud.

The fairy floss seller a splash of color. Madam madam, Karthik gives a few rupees to a small girl begging with a monkey. Is he thinking of his own little daughter?

Rubbish and crows. Wind all wind. Coconut shells tangled in red cloth, “From cremation” Karthik says. People put the ashes in a mud pot, inside a coconut shell. Wrap it in red cloth and cast it into the sea. Fly, be free… I like that.

Walkers make their way around colored fishing boats pulled high onto the sand. Nets formed in tidy piles like a thousand tumbleweeds frozen in the moment. Men sit and talk, repairing nets by hand. Stand on the sand cliff between the boats and lean into the wind. Embrace the spray. Timeless, safe, at home on the shore, the space between. On one side a road of cars and motorbikes and took tooks race, humanity seethes. On the other the sea roads take massive container ships stately plying the eastern ocean, waves crash and propellers drive. Both made Other in the spray filled mists. Stand safe in the space between, be the liminal. Lift your arms into the wind, for 20 rupees hold a balloon above your head and fly.

Drink the spray. Inhale the timelessness. Stalls and chairs available for the serious moneyed consumer. But drink time not cola. Breathe.

We perch on the side of a small fishing boat. No more than 5 logs lashed together. Laughing as our weight tips it over and us off onto the sand. We sit. Silent. Different worlds, separate, souls touching. Alive.

The sun breaks through a hole in the sky, spotlights girls dancing along the edge of the waves, sari ends like froth on the waves.

Breathe. A chai wallah walks past. Then ice cream wallah. Coconuts and driftwood litter the beach. Even the rubbish glistens in piles on the sand.

Walk, walk with wind in your face, sun on your back. Walk north. Walk.

The inland flattened hotel castle-scrapers are replaced, now behind the cars and busses and haste are crazy, voluptuous, ice-cream shaped exotica of silhouetted Victorian British architecture, the railway station and university. More continuous motion frozen out of our still silent space. Their world of knowledge, progress and speed. Here all is timeless and without form, slipping in and out pulsing with the waves, adrift on the spray.

A group of fully clad swimmers laughing and giggling full of joy and salt. Splashing at play. Beach cricket on the edge of the world. “Water is very wet” says Karthik.

Wind blows away words. Wind and tide and time. Shadows lengthen. Long shadows. Walk, walk. Time to turn madam. Which way? Follow the tractor tracks back to the real world. What is real? What is dream? What is in between? He is my guide, and nothing will ever be the same.

I know a place where no one’s lost,
I know a place where no one cries,
Crying at all is not allowed.
Not in my castle on a cloud.

Though I feel inadequate,
my heart not big enough for the love, the pain,
the hope…

I can’t keep quiet, for anyone, not anymore

There’s no place like home… India

India is the land of my soul, the place where I feel so at home my heart aches with joy. No, you smarty-pants people, not indigestion, it’s heart-warming joy and belonging. I know every trip is different, it was just that leaving Brisbane this time was so rushed with preparations and distractions it hardly felt like I was supposed to be enjoying myself. But when the plane tilted turning to come into Bombay Airport and I caught my first glimpse of India, well my heart soared as Mata ji, Maa Durga, mother earth goddess, welcomed me back. I was grinning like, well a lot! Couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.

When the plane touched the tarmac I realised the random selection on my phone was colluding with the universe: it was Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral that was reaching it’s enormous, brass filled crescendo in my ears, reverberating in my being. I knew I was not alone.

After a couple of hours in Mumbai meeting a dear sister-friend in person for the first time, it was into a car for the three hour drive to Pune, and the 6th National Bioethics Conference.

No the traffic hasn’t become any less traumatic, I just photographed a quiet bit!

To be honest I didn’t see too much of Pune, and not only because of the terrible pollution that shrouded everything and made breathing a chore. I spent a huge amount of time eating dhosa for breakfast, preparing for the conference, or at the conference, or getting to and from the conference in took tooks. In some ways, after 12 or so trips to India, this has been a trip of firsts. It was my first time in Pune. It’s my first time here “alone.” I’ve always been here for work or as an affluent tourist, and in both cases have had a hired a/c car and a driver. And now here I was standing on the road flagging took tooks, giving directions in my limited Hindi. When I went out of the hotel there was no uniformed Karthik (name changed) waiting for me, I just walked off into the surrounding streets to explore. Continue reading “There’s no place like home… India”