We bought a car!

What I really wanted was one of these:

They are everywhere. My friend Ralf jokes that if his country had one WWII everyone would get to drive one of these. (It's a joke. IT'S A JOKE!) But the idea of no air bags, no crumple zone, no air conditioning counted against it. On the other hand, you can get one for about $1500. And when else was I going to drive a beetle.

So instead we got this:

A Toyota Yaris. It provides a number of firsts for me: first automatic transmission, first sedan (called here a saloon car). And while my eye was tempted away from the beetles by any number of exotic French, Chinese, Indian, and Korean cars that aren't available in North America, this one came with a great price and a great track record (I bought it from a friend).

Mona Monkeys

Way back in I think October we went on a road trip into the hills east of Lake Volta. Daniel, a visiting Fulbright scholar, organized a bus load of us and we set out for an eco-resort. Daniel's partner and his young daughter where visiting, and the real point of the whole trip was to fulfill his daughter's desire to see monkeys.

So the highlight of the weekend was visiting a jungle reserve rich with tourist-friendly mona monkeys. Once considered sacred, and hence protected, their new-found protection is their ability to charm tourists.

Only steps off the road, and armed with bananas, we are swarmed by about 20 monkeys ready to disarm us, who play and climb all over us until they are too full of banana, and then will have nothing further to do with us.

Video courtesy of Richmond Kwesi

A new leaf

Many of you have urged us, repeatedly, to keep up the posts. My sister, Vandy, was the first to suggest the technique of posting one (and only one, if necessary) picture a day with one (and only one, if necessary) sentence. Well, here is one picture and six sentences.

The day before I flew to Canada our adopted house cat, Little Thing, gave birth to two littler things. And the day before I returned home, Anna-Marie reports, they transformed from tiny blobs into real, honest to goodness, playful kittens.

Anna-Marie is off to Spain with the camera (and charger) for two weeks, and I didn't get a chance to upload more recent pictures of the kittens so you will have to make do with this one day old portrait.

DAY 4 THURSDAY

EXPLORING NEW BRIGHTON


I walked into the little town of New Brighton today. It has an impressive number of fish and chip shops, several thrift stores, a really great public library, and not much else. It feels a bit like new year's day there — a place where the party always seems to have happened yesterday and everyone's in denial about clean up. But I don't want to give the impression that I don't like it here because I'm quite enamoured of New Brighton. I like that its not a manicured resort town where I feel as if I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Truman Show. I like it that the library staff are not a bit interested in enforcing the rule about limiting internet use to thirty minutes, and that the backpacker's hostel serves breakfast all day. Hell, I like it that there is a backpacker's hostel. I like it that people stop to chat when I walk on the beach.

Kid's surf school.

Kid's surf school.

The very cool library.

New Brighton's main street.

Surfers head out.

*     *     *

I stopped for a haircut and asked for it short and boy-like so it will take a while to grow out. I usually feel most like "me" with short hair but in Ghana its difficult to find someone who knows how to cut obruni hair.

Me: Let’s go really short, say, something between Baby Boy’s First Haircut and a Rockstar With Bedhead.

Stylist: You mean like Justin Beiber?

Me: (Unsure if she is being ironic.) New look or last look?

Stylist: New.

Me: Oh. In Canada, I live really near Justin Beiber’s hometown.

Stylist: Gosh! How exciting! That’s really awesome!

Me: I think many of us are real tired of him.

Stylist: (Silence.)

Me: (Now that I’ve stuffed my foot in my mouth, I try not to bite down.) Uh, maybe something like Pete Doherty meets Lawrence Welk?

Call me Beiber-Marie.

DAY 3 WEDNESDAY

(MORE) COMMUNITY and the KINDNESS of STRANGERS


COMMUNITY in MICROCOSM

I lived with four other people on Mabel One, the ground floor of one of the residences our group was assigned at the University of Cantebury. This training was the most international I have attended and my floormates – an American living in Australia, one Brit, a woman from Spain and another from Australia, as well as me, a Canadian living in West Africa – were typical of the group’s diversity.

My floormate Annie is lovely in all possible senses. I like it when she talks about her life because I get a sense of someone who has worked out for herself what it means to live with integrity. Annie plays Hare Krishna chants loud in her room and misses her kids a ton. So does Alicia at the other end of the hall. Miss her kids, I mean. Alicia plays bands like Maroon 5 under headphones while reading the training manual. We talk a lot about the similarities between our families and lives in Alicia’s native Louisiana and Nova Scotia, my ground zero. Both turn out to be the kind of brilliant people you can borrow cash from and talk with about what constitutes a good moisturizer while loading washing machines.

I think Tony is a kind of bodyworker wizard who can synthesize complex ideas across modalities and make it look easy. And he’s fun, too, in that zany bodyworker kind of way: one night he stuck his hand under my hip bone and pressed something that caused my whole left leg to feel as if it were being played like a fiddle. By the end of the training I was kind of addicted to the sound of Tony's laugh.

Gloria is tiny and quiet until she laughs, at which point she seems large because she laughs with her whole body, as if mirth were a static charge. I see this same charge when she dances. I admire her for several reasons, not least because English is not her first language and, demanding as the training is, I can’t imagine having to deal with the mental fatigue that comes with trying to operate in a second language.

Tony

Gloria & Annie

Alicia

I’m posting this with a shout out to my floor-mates — gold stars, you beautiful people, for being the reason our residence changed from mere accommodation to a temporary home.

The KINDNESS of STRANGERS 2

I took the bus into Christchurch today to see a show at the Museum, then walked through the botanic gardens and along Riccarton Road to the shopping mall. My camera battery died and I needed to find a place that sells Canon cameras to ask if they can charge it. At one store, I meet a guy named Adam who tells me to go to another store to ask his friend Lance to charge the battery. Lance isn’t there, but John is, and since John recommended Lance for his job, and since Lance says Adam is a great guy, and since I am friend of Adam’s, no problem. (Well, okey dokey to all that.) John mined the packaging of a new Canon for its charger and I left the battery for the night. 

When I returned the next day, I handed John a ten-dollar bill and suggested that using it to buy a beer after work might be a good idea. Based on the amount of times he said, “Really?,” I get the idea John is chuffed, just over-the-top happy about this, and I get a glimpse of what someone looks like when their instinct is to do a nice thing is completely unmotivated by potential reward, and a reward arrives anyway. 

John decides between lager and ale.

When I began this series of posts, I intended to have a new one on-line each day for seven days. I wanted them to appear as a modest yet tidy serial that mirrored the seven days of respite I had between the end of training and re-entry into life in Ghana. But, alas, I have been thwarted — thwarted! — by Vodafone, our inconsistent internet provider, and the equally inconsistent Electricity Company of Ghana. So I'm gonna dial back my ambition and aim only to make seven consecutive posts that appear, uh, sometime....Sorry about that, folks.

Day 2 Tuesday

COMMUNITY and the KINDNESS of STRANGERS 

The KINDNESS of STRANGERS 1

Here’s one thing I learned recently: When Cameron Tukapua offers you her house at the beach, well, merde, I suggest you take it. Cameron has left me clothes, poetry, an eye bag, a yoga nidra cd, tourist info, and a boffo practice space. She filled the fridge with tapenades and sauces and soy foods and stacks of fresh vegetables. It’s as if she crawled across my tongue and cried, “Yes! Yes! I understand!” I think she made sure I was safely delivered to her door in senses that are more than purely literal; I feel immensely humbled that this abundance sits with me.

My beautiful borrowed practice space. But, wait, what's this....

...there's more!!! Hel-lo. Zee beautiful tub.

How did I end up here? I went to Cameron for an acupuncture treatment during training and she asked about my plans once the three weeks were finished. My plans boiled down to spending an undefined week somewhere in New Zealand. Her house was going to be empty at the same time. Voila. I have a plan.

Cameron’s kindness to me seems pretty consistent with how she lives. She travels between homes in two communities and lately has been spending considerable time in the Christchurch area to offer support to people who are traumatized or displaced by the earthquakes and re-building projects. Her approach speaks volumes about what holism might look like if we practiced community and compassion in the widest possible sense.

Cameron also has a book due out this spring. Breaking Open looks at new ways of relating as community and individuals in times of collective crisis and uses the earthquakes in New Zealand as a metaphor for some serious shaking happening on a global level. Check www.camerontukapua.com for info.

COMMUNITY in MACROCOSM

To begin, please bear with me while I state the obvious: Sixty or so strangers orbiting in tandem for an intense training that probes one’s mental, physical, and spiritual domains has every potential to become an epic blind date gone bad.

In yesterday’s post I outlined some of the qualities that marked this teacher training as exceptional. Specifically why it was exceptional is something I’ve spent some time mulling. Someone suggested that, given the seriousness of the earthquakes and the perpetuity of the aftershocks (more about that in another post), people disinclined to instability didn’t come. (Okay, well, that’s not exactly how it was stated. They said the “flighty” people didn’t come. I was trying to dress that idea up.) Someone else outlined that, astrologically, our training occurred at the optimal time. I like it. Roger that.

I’m kind of down with an explanation that synthesizes karma with culinary fundamentals to produce an unforeseen telos: sixty separate karma’s, histories, intentions, DNA profiles, or personalities (pick your weapons) plop themselves down under one roof (or into one crucible, as it were) and collectively operate at a rare, refined level. It was like someone decided to make soup with sixty ingredients and each was added in just the right proportion to make very, very good soup.

Out of Africa: Seven Days of Post-Training Decompression in New Zealand

For those of you not in the know, I recently completed three weeks of yoga teacher training led by Donna Farhi in Christchurch, New Zealand. It was as intense of any of the trainings I’ve done to date, but definitely the most fun. I’m going to make seven consecutive posts over the next week that record some of the things I was doing and thinking about in the days after the training. 

DAY 1    MONDAY     AFTER THE LOVING: RECOVERY

Moonrise Over Hernandez New Brighton (and a shout out to Ansel Adams).

Tonight’s moon is robust, as if it’s wearing an incandescent sweater that is one size too small, or like it’s trying too hard during a dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s full moon. As I write, my socked feet are stacked on the window seat in the living room of Cameron Tukapua’s beach house in New Brighton, New Zealand, where I’ve been encamped more or less for 24 hours. My computer is propped on my lap and I keep stomach-typing, which is slowing things down.

The day has been like this:

Wake sluggish and reluctant but manage to peel back my eyelids anyway. Lay in bed for several hours. Eventually, tentatively, reconnoiter a vertical position, which goes well, so – feeling like a ballsy agoraphobe – I toddle to the kitchen to organize coffee. Sit in bed with coffee. Bathroom. More coffee in bed. Stare unblinking at the wall. Bathroom. Nap. Undertake furtive trip to the kitchen for food that is eaten on the bed. More staring at the wall while a rivulet of drool threads its way across my cheek. Attempt to read a book but after five minutes of that feel exhausted and nap. (In truth, the bit about the drool is manufactured but it does nicely enhance my thesis, n’est ce pas?)

To risk massively overstating the obvious, all day I’ve had about as much focus as a fart in a windstorm. I’m searching for a word that succinctly captures my state of body and mind. The one that arrives is duh.

By early evening I pulled myself together enough to venture as far as this window at the front of the house that had, heretofore, seemed far too far to travel.

Ground zero for recovery.

Lovely Anne Gregory, a friend of Cameron’s, picked me up at my residence at the University of Canterbury yesterday and kindly drove me to New Brighton. My mission is to spend a week at the beach decompressing after three weeks of teacher training with Donna Farhi, two co-teachers, eight assistants, and fifty or so other yogis.

Our practice space.

It takes balls to practice yoga. (Sorry. Couldn't resist.)

Did someone say food?

I’ve been through other intensives and expected to feel tired given the schedule and the vast amounts of information, new people, and experiences to integrate. But – and this is atypical – I felt no desire to have the training end nor for the community that formed around it to fragment. There was an effortless, affirming, and compassionate dynamic in this group. I feel both awed and humbled to have been a part of it, and aware that I just experienced something exceptional.