Had to cancel visa-getting trip to Sri Lanka – Tamil Tigers attacked airport, burned nine planes on ground, gun battles in the terminal – travel problem. Now my Indian visa expires in two weeks so I have to head north and fast.

Tonight David made dinner for all of us here in Adventure Community. He is a British thirtysomething architect who is funny and has a difficult mother. Cooks some nice yellow chick pea curry. Kathy, Australian thirtysomething, Abby, fourtysomething Vermonter, and I all ate then watched the movie ‘Holy Smoke’ with actors Kate Winslet and Harvy Keitel (about a man who goes to get a Aussie girl back who loses it to a guru, then he himself loses it to her sexuality) – cool & very disturbing – not something for Mom and Dad.

Ugh, just let the baby peacock out of the cage and it insists on flying up in a panicky hurry to roost on my shoulder, Like my old cat Lilly, it demands attention and seems ticked that I am focused on writing instead of her. Damn hard too with it scratching, pecking, and rustling in the small of my neck (ticklish), jumping down on the page to examine my pen and then wandering back up my left arm to roost at my neck – I just hope it doesn’t bless me with one of its blobs of poop.

Anyway, the movie made us feel the amazingly debilitating power that a woman spending 24/7 with a man can have over him – how he can become weak and pitiful – I could relate: what is this amazing shakti (universal female power in Hindu tradition) that breaks a man down? Pretty princess cold heart be kind! Now it’s on my head – which with my curly hair makes a nice nest for the little pest – back in the cage.

Last night Minh (a Vietnamese French master of strategy and writing grants who is living his “pledgship” year here in Adventure Community) and I discussed a bold plan to get me back to Auroville in a year with the help of Peace Corps – I followed up with my neighbor and family friend Mrs. Brest van Kampen back in Evanston (she works with Peace Corps) by email but no reply yet. More and more I am thinking that I might not have to do this ‘big thing’ when this journey is over. There is a passion network too and I just need to find a nice place to enter the stream and then once I am in - I always stay in the moving water and don’t get stuck in some murkey bank or attempt a ‘short cut’ over land.

Sat in on a nice brainstorming session with Auroville’s web team – 75% young and Aurovillian-born people with an odd, Indian way of speaking English noticible around the edges. They are making an intranet and wanted to establish how all the information sections can roll up to five major categories (for easy navigation & design structure).

Looks like I will have to take some epic train journeys straight to Bombay from Chennai (the city of Madras), get the Iran visa, and then mission it through Rajasthan. I told the hotel men in Dehli I would be back for my bag over a month ago – time will tell whether not calling them proved the best policy.

India has proven to be master’s level travel. The Indian Subcontinent – one lifetime is not enough: Assam, Mizoram, Leh, Manali, Kerala, Andaman Islands, tribal music – I will miss them all on this trip.

Now I am not so worried about what Auroville is and isn’t, I just think that it would be fun to return, stay long enough to get some work done and learn something.

I ran into an excellent book about how all the contacts that enter through our six sense doors (five sense and the sixth sense being our mind itself) that we are not concious of have an impact. All of these contacts both noticed and unnoticed make up our individuality. Title is “The Secret Oral Teachings In Tibetan Buddhist Sects” by David Neel (published by the Maha Bodhi Society of Calcutta).