Water Is Not Enough

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Hey everybody,

So it’s been almost 3 weeks since my first blog-post. By now I can say I’ve settled in quite nicely out here. Malvikaa left to the US a few days ago though she left the land last Sunday morning, so since then I’ve been ‘alone’ with the guys from Auroville. I hope to be travelling a little bit with them when they leave but it depends on whether there’s space in the cars.

Anyway, that’s all in the future. In the past so many days I’ve only been off the land twice – once to visit a local furniture maker who’s ‘factory’ is just down the road and another time to the town of Gundlupet to buy groceries. It’s good to be with some other white people who can show me how they do their everyday activities, since English isn’t actually that common around this area.

Most of my days have looked like this: I wake up in my tent around 5.30 and get out about 10 minutes later to go over to the house to switch off the electric fence so Nagappa can come in and bring fresh milk. Then I go back to bed and sleep until the heat forces me out again between 8 and 9am. I wash my clothes in a bucket and wash my bum with with my left hand, leaving the right available to eat with. I wash the rest of my body with a ‘bucket bath’, though perhaps this should be called a bucket shower since there’s no actual bathing in anything. Breakfast is around 9am, lunch usually 2pmish and dinner... 9pmish. At least that’s how it’s been the past week or so.

The work I do tends to involve a lot of water – watering plants, filling up tanks and barrels and curing cement. I’ve also helped the auroville guys a few times though, including making a treehouse (during which we saw a miniature tornado cruise through the land!) and doing various other things. Yesterday Philip helped me make ‘my first steps in natural building’. Literally, I made some steps with just sticks, rocks and soil from the bund down to where my tent is and I feel quite proud of it. Pics will have to come later though. Also, today I made cement!

I’ve also been working together with Nagappa and Nagesh, usually digging things or assisting the laying and connecting of water pipes. We recently finished installing the 5000 litre water tank though! This will make the whole land more resistant to anything that might go wrong, like the few days when we didn’t have much power so we couldn’t pump water and had to have Nagappa bring some drinking water from the village, just in case...

I’ve also just about read all of Brad Warner’s excellent book ‘There is no God and He is always with you’ (highly recommended, regardless of what your thoughts about God are, or aren’t) and been doing zazen almost daily, which has really helped me focus on being where I am. Especially the first 10 days or so I was experiencing some mood swings and missing some things about home, especially people and certain luxuries. But I feel much better now. Not to say I don’t miss hanging out with my friends back home and I spend quite a bit of time thinking about my band or what kind of cool things in Wageningen and Utrecht I’m missing out on!

But I also feel that being here is in line with what I want to be doing. Perhaps not forever, perhaps not in India, or the US, but I like the concepts of land restoration and permaculture and I’m noticing how much of a difference to the land (and to the people working on it) a place like Swayyam makes and how damn important it is that we all take better care of ourselves, each other and the environment (it’s all one thing really anyway).

So to add something ‘educational’ to this blogpost, here’s how I understand some of what’s happening here: There’s only a small amount of usable fresh water on the planet (less than 3%!,(MISSING) look up peak water) and in many places it’s used tremendously stupidly and a lot of it runs off into places we can’t reach it, it gets polluted, or it goes into the oceans where it becomes salt water and therefore not so useful to us humans, who depend on fresh water to survive (like many, if not all, other species). Desertification (the process by which a fertile piece of land degrades until there is only desert left) happens for a variety of reasons, not in the least because of humans causing deforestation (particularly for agricultural purposes, though also for instance to build fleets of ships in Europe, back in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and so on). Trees retain moisture deep in the soil, allowing water to stay in one place, feeding the micro-organisms in the soil and allowing other plants and animals and so on to live as well. So a major step in land restoration is to plant trees, which is why I carry so much water around to make sure all the planted saplings and things get to survive out here in the dry, dry sun. From about May til about July there will be lots of rain (the monsoon period) here and then it will be important to try to keep as much of the water as possible here on the land. For this there are also certain techniques, such as the building of swales, check dams and placing rocks lower than the plants and digging higher than the plants so as much of the water will stay around the plants as long as possible. It’s all a matter of designing things so that the natural occurrences will ‘automatically’ allow the area to restore itself.

So, that should also sorta explain the title of this blogpost. That and the fact that Neurosis are an amazing band and you should all check them out even though 95%!o(MISSING)f you will probably hate them. Oh well. Also check out Shrinebuilder, and Pelican, and The Pixies, and Dead Meadow and Sleep. All excellent desert music.

Kthxbai!



Kris

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