Hm. The face of India changes yet again, and we poor freshmen have to shift our energies to make space for it.
The beach at Palolem, in southern Goa, is every bit as riveting as we had heard it would be. The essential coconut palms providing shade overhead, the incredibly gentle surf that is warm as a baby's bath, the island just off shore that adds energy and interest to the view, the water and sand cradled in the arms of two rocky points, that reach out into the Arabian Sea.
The beach we visit today, however, is not the same beach visited by our friends a few years back. The map in the guidebook shows a few scattered beach-front huts on an expanse of open sand: the reality today is that every inch of beach has been built out into varying qualities of lodgings, from southern tip to northern edge, from shanties to high-end cabins. The beach is still as beautiful, but the palms has been filled in with wall-to-wall reeds, bamboo, wood, brick.
While I work to incorporate this, another scene plays itself out in the shallow surf, where a western woman is screaming at a man with a cane, whose dog on a leash has apparently been mercilessly beaten the day before. She is determined to get the dog away from him; her words are incoherent (to me); all I can make out from him is "I call police! Is my dog! No touch me! I call police!"
This on top of the morning's argument between locals, just outside the hotel grounds, which I involuntarily tuned in to after my morning yoga, and during my morning meditation. Long ago we left Tamil, and even had I been able to tap into a little of Karnataka's Kannada language, we left that behind as well. Now it is Konkani, and of course I understand nothing except the younger man's finger pointing at the heavy-set woman's face, and the heavy-set woman pushing in toward the younger man with a steadily rising voice and harsher glare. This is the first altercation of any volume I have witnessed in India — of course not implying there is none, but making it quite clear that the energy of this place, compared even to the cities we have visited, is in my experience ugly, petty, and distorted. The travelers have not come to tap into a spiritual core, and there is none of the protection that an ashram or a community brings to allow softness to grow here.
Sad. Maybe Manny will have a different experience and will write a better review of the locale for you all. But at this point in my life, I have little time or patience for this kind of disconnection. I feel as though I have dropped into a bar near closing time, and not a very fine bar at that.
All that being said, I take it all in stride, as I must, and use it as a tool to firm up the practices and thoughts the past travel has afforded. Should I return home and not be able to hold these beautiful truths against the daily, that would be far sadder than any dashed expectations at a foreign tourist beach. So 5.30 this morning saw a good, quiet asana practice, some fine writing, a well-made south Indian meal… and opening to another day of discovery, with a good solid hotel to fall back to — as long as we find it right to be here.
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