Dimensionally Barrett

On a Walk Six years ago, I stayed at the Divyansh Guest House and would take a back route to the Kalachakra grounds through a small village and around to the grounds' entry. I went for a nice stroll and decided to go again to check out the route and see if anything had changed. In fact, yes. Some things had. As I walked past Tergar Monastery down Sujata By-pass Road, there’s another guest house, across from which is more pronounced development; the ponds look like they have been dredged of waste (at least of the overtly physical sort) and there is evidence of other refuse, perhaps storage shacks, etc., making way for more building. At a distance, the area still preserves its rustic beauty, but if you didn’t know the area, you wouldn’t know how much building has gone up. I strolled around one of the ponds and recorded mostly bucolic beauty, but noted that once I got back onto the by-pass, a newer building and the some in the distance that weren’t familiar to me. Above...

Christmas Day, Choraha Village, Bihar, India. This was a wonderful day of delivering a little respite to the students of the LBCS, and their friends and families. Mahendra, Kapil, and I began decorating the main classroom (complete with a tree!) and found a young man to wear the Santa Claus costume that was emphatically way too small for me.  I trundled out a little ad hoc speech about Christmas being a time of sharing and caring with and for one another and that Santa Claus isn’t just a big round guy who gives toys to kids, he’s very much supposed to be the spirit of giving and everyone has a Santa inside them. To prove it, one of the older boys fit into the costume enough to render the rest of us Santa’s Little Helpers! We sang “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” (honest to God, I couldn’t think of anything other than “Jingle Bells” and a bunch of carols that I could only half remember the words to), prepped paper plates for around a hundred people with pakora, cake, co...