334, 333, 332, 331, 330, 329, 328

Wrote something on LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/technical-writing-2-your-technology-without-content-back-mukta-raut?trk=prof-post

336, 335: I will read Eat, Pray, Love again

On Facebook, I follow Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of a moving portrait of an adventurer called 'Last American Man'. She also wrote 'Eat, Pray, Love' which is the book she is most popular for. I loved that. I also loved her novel, 'Signature of All Things' as well as her TED talks. Overall, I really, really like whatever she writes or says.

In her memoir, 'Eat, Pray, Love', Gilbert falls in love with a man in Indonesia. In 'Committed', she explores their journey as a couple before they get married. In her interviews on 'Signature of All Things', she talks about how nourishing their partnership was. He would cook for her and wait for her to finish a chapter so that she could read it out to him.

Her page on Facebook is such a wonderful repository of beautiful, kind messages of how to live in joy, how to keep being creative, how to stay in the light.

Yesterday, she wrote that she and her partner of 12 years were separating.

I took that pretty hard. I have just returned from a holiday in the mountains and was all fresh and everything. Yet, when I read that message on the wall, my stomach twisted into knots and I felt the same fear and pain that I had felt at the time of my divorce. (Thankfully, the memory is very faint now.) Yet, I wished that I could unsee that message and hope that I had dreamed it up.

But who knows why any two people get together or why they drift apart? I just know that the journey Gilbert went on in 'Eat, Pray, Love' had resonated so hard and deeply with me, that any news of her life seem to trickle into mine. Maybe that's what Holden Caulfield meant when he says in 'Catcher in the Rye': '“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” 

I'll read Eat, Pray, Love again as a friend, then.

339, 338, 337: One night in Kasol

I am back.

I have to start work in a little while but before I get down to that, I wanted to write about a perfect night in Kasol.

It was late. Some friends had gone off to sleep. I was having a drink with a friend. We weren't really talking much. Maybe a little about life gone by (which, again, in the hills, may simply have been the memory of the last meal.) We could see the haze of the moon, feel the chilly wetness of 'almost-rain', and sat in the hush of the hills. We breathed. And sipped dark rum that felt delectable. We could hear the roar and rush of the Parvati river, faint voices of other guests at the homestay and some distant music from a car really far away.

I think we talked a little bit about mistakes. The silhouette of a large mountain makes it easier to talk about mistakes because, really, what's a little foible in front of that. Just as we were settling in the comfortable satiety of self-pity, we noticed something. The green apples that hung from all the trees in the orchard were glowing. The moonshine kissed them and softened them and there they were, hung like little orbs of light.

Between the silhouette of the mountain and the talks of mistakes, there were golden glows of apples that lay suspended like broken beads of a phantasmagorical rosary.

I don't know about my friend. But I prayed on reflex.

My time in the Himalayas have taught me something. That maybe it is not just the myth of Shiva or the lore of Parvati or even the mysticism of the kinds of energy circles you find there. Maybe it just the simple ways in which the spectacular finds you. Maybe we formed the very first religion because we were humans and as humans, we instinctively do only this: we bow to beauty.

342, 341, 340

Was among artists during this trip. So started sketching some stuff.  I look up something easy and fun on Pinterest and then I try and sketch it. It's feeling good.

349, 348, 347, 346, 345, 344, 343: Trip to Kasol, Himachal Pradesh

The first time I saw the Parvati river, I had tears in my eyes. The unfettered power and peace of a river that is named after a woman who prayed for Shiva is visceral. May all our prayers be that way.

Some more pictures of the rain, mountains, mist...