Pardon me today, I am fairly tired. The yoga classes are strenuous and I come back home ready for a warm bath and some fresh and light supper, followed by a lot of sleep in my comfortable bed. Instead, because we lost the spare house keys, after yoga I had a long walk in the rain. We have no bath in the house and the hot water system is boink. M tried to do his best by doing a bit of shopping and having already cooked part of the dinner, but he clearly underestimated my exhaustion. I accidently left the French door a little bit open, and felt cold all night. I have a flight to catch tonite, and I haven’t packed my bags…

On top of it I had an epiphany a couple of days ago, a rather unfortunate one, but one that I will have to note down in black and white, before it will let me carry on to do anything else – The best and most I ask of life is comfort. There, I said it! But what I really mean is, that when you would find me most agitated and upset, it will most likely be because I am uncomfortable; and not, for example, because I am being a burden on the world. I need to work on that.

A couple of weeks ago, on facebook, I shamelessly asked people to write an adjective to describe me… It is amazing to find that people don’t really lie even when they are trying to be polite. For instance, no one wrote I was brilliant in any way… in all, I am a mild and harmless person… except with my closest family, with whom I lose my temper rather easily (but thankfully they didn’t put it on my facebook profile!)

This morning, I was reading a blog, because I am so tired*, and came across this:

Syrie Maugham was the leading British interior decorator of the 1920s and ’30s, and yet she didn’t even launch her business until she was 42, a detail that I find inspiring. (My favorite late-life starter was Julia Child, who didn’t even enter cooking school until she was 37! Proof that you don’t have to have everything figured out by your 30th birthday.)

Read more at Design*Sponge

It would have been very nice to believe, because I am about to turn 30, and feel like I have nothing figured out at all. But Julia Child was always rather impressive, if you only read her biography, even if on Wikipedia.

Anyway, I’ll leave you today with no conclusions, and wish you a good day!

*I try not to start my day with blogs, usually.

On Robyn Davidson's two journeys

Today’s newsletter from Allen and Unwin mentions a couple of books of people going and living in midst of aboriginal people and learning their ways. While learning about an ancient, exotic and intelligent culture is always interesting; in one of these books puts the spot light is on the traveller (and not on the people towards whom he is travelling) – which if done well could be a great book.

I came across Robyn Davidson first in a magazine interview while living alone in a new city, and reading about a woman travelling alone with a dog and camels in the middle of the desert struck a chord. There was also one of those things that she said; when you are alone in just your own company “it is not what you think but how you think that matters.” This, in exactly these words, is also something that Swami Tejomayananda had said at some other point, in some other context. I could not think of absolutely any difference in ‘what you are thinking’ and ‘how you are thinking.’ It took a long chat with Br. Gautamji before it made any sense. However, I digress.

It took me a couple of years before I could lay my hands on Robyn Davidson’s first book about her travel across the Australian desert, called Tracks. My favourite thing about Tracks was how pretty much a city girl could, before the end of it, find some integrated understanding of the natural world around her – or as I like to put it - how tracks on the sand, mean a journey of a creature, mean that the weather is about to change in a particular way. How she sublimated the conversations of the mind (that pervade our waking and dream life) to be truly awake to all that was happening around her. What made Robyn Davidson also interesting, apart from her fascinating journey and excellent writing style, that is, was the fact that she, like me, listed Australia and India as places of great significance in her life.

Her other book is called Desert Places, and is about a journey with nomads of Rajasthan. It took me mere months to get the second book! However, for some reason or another, (she writes that) she never manages to get that grasp of her surroundings in this journey. At some level, she becomes a curiosity for others; at another level, I think, the communication (and here I mean, apart from the language itself, the things that get said, others that are just hinted, while others that are just simply known) is so complex, that being awake is not enough – you would need a teacher.

And, as is said elsewhere, the teacher must be wonderful and the taught must be wonderful... for all the journeys to be completely fruitful?

:P

Is it too late? Am I too tired and putting stupid things on my blog, is this the facebookification or twitterification of my blog, where every passing experience will have to be published for the three people* who read this blog sometimes?

Anyway, hysteria apart, you know I enjoyed Julie and Julia the movie on the flight, and I would most definitely recommend it too. Now the movie is based on two books - one by Julie Powells, and the other by Julia Childs and Alex Prud'homme (Alex Prud'homme is an american journalist). However, there is another person in the picture, Laura Shapiro, who wrote a/the Julia Child biography.

This is Julie Powells on the Laura's biography (in passing), and this is Laura Shapiro on Julie Powells. Good stuff... but first go and watch the movie! :)

*two of whom have commented occasionally, and the third (and here I am lost for words because I am really touched) got me a book from my wish list, when I didn't even know they were aware of the existence of the blog!!

Whats common between my mum and you?

There are somethings that only your mother knows about you, till you start writing a blog. For instance, my mother knows I am not a listless person, or more accurately, I am most definitely a LISTS person.
There are lists, lists (or more easily, lists), lists, and lists, and lists and more lists!
Now, to make this post interesting I should say something about them, but folks, that is all that I have to say about that!