I received a gift from a student, Brian, who recently concluded our Moving Into Balance health and awareness program. Every participant brings such gifts to the group – each brings the gift of him or her Self, all the challenges they face, and all the victories they achieve; but here was a special gift, a book about the Prayer Flags of Tibet.

One passage struck me, that I wished to share: with a gentle pen it draws the line between structure and freedom, where the flow of grace is all-important, while the form through which we are accustomed to meeting that grace is perhaps less so:

Now I know how ginger grows.

When we lived on our little farm in Brazil, we had something called gangibre falsa, “false ginger”, which was apparently a relative of the real thing. The root, when I dug it up, had neither the appearance or the smell I was looking for, and somehow during our seven-plus years there, I never did run into a ginger plant. Here in the rolling fields of Bylakuppe, some miles off the Mysore road and Kushalnagar, acres of hand-fanning leaves, slightly lower than knee height and fading green to yellow, are the ginger fields. We pass by in our autorickshaw (the three-wheeled, covered motorcycle, with a bench and a smoky 2-stroke engine – the kind where you mix in the oil, and it runs forever, like a lawnmower motor) and there is a load of the harvested root by the roadside, being spray-washed and readied for market. The scent is strong and welcome, a little spice and memory of good meals.

Yesterday we began our ride from Mysore with a driver who spoke good English, but he traded out with another (who spoke no English whatsoever) when it became clear that we would be driving through the other’s home town of Honsur. Manny and I entertained ourselves during the three hour trip, over very rough roads which were under construction most of the way; we occasionally attempted a question, but the results were invariably unsuccessful, and we sank into silence. We even missed a few of the stops we had planned with the earlier driver, able only to communicate “Kushalnagar”… so off we flew, the driver turning his music higher and higher, on a high-decibel beeline west into the Karnataka countryside.