Christmas Letter '10

Namaste!

For five continuous years I have been drifting from continent to continent, experiencing, learning, and always growing as a person. But this year, thousands of miles from the people I love, marks my first year celebrating the holidays alone. It was a long path that brought me here to Asia, and a longer one still that caused me to travel here on my own, but although I miss my family and friends I am so grateful for the choices I made that lead me here.

Spring brings about change, and when my relationship of three years ended this past April I was suffering from my first lost love. I knew I needed something different, something new. Laying in bed one night, nursing my broken heart I was filled with anxiety and doubt about my future; where to go next, what to do with my life now that I was on my own again, but I placed myself fully in the hands of the universe and trusted that the path forward would become clear. It did, and soon I sailing away from the Caribbean bound for the Mediterranean Sea and the rest of the world, to whatever was waiting for me there.

When you live with an open heart and trust that things will all turn out alright, its easier to take risks; to leave behind all family and friends, all of the support and comfort of home, and venture off over and over again into the unknown. Although constantly adapting to new situations, making new friends is liberating and exciting, the life-blood of traveling, it can begin to wear on you.

I found this to be true as I worked my way around the Med, sailing in Monaco, Italy, France and Greece, freelancing on different yachts. I began miss the freedom, privacy and sanity that “real life” on land gives, and I was also beginning to wonder if it wasn’t time to focus on bringing a bit of balance to my life. So, I packed my bags and set out for Barcelona and an overnight ferry to the Balearic Island of Ibiza.

There I found a job at a yoga retreat set up in the hills overlooking a rocky beach in the north of the island. This fanned the spark that was beginning to grow in my heart, a wish to train my body, to heal my mind and start down a meaningful path. But again, while living in a tepee on a remote beach in Spain was amazing, it was not what I was looking for. My feet had begun to itch again. A trend for this year has been the incredible restlessness that has built up inside me whenever I have stayed put too long. This tendency to always be looking for greener pastures reveled itself again when after six weeks in my Spanish paradise I booked a ticket home to Olympia, to spend some time with the people in the world who love me the most.

Summer in the Northwest is always wonderful. Lush and green, with long bike rides and random skinny dipping missions, piles of blackberries and rainier cherries, camping trips with friends to mountain lakes and the comforting presence of home. I was able to spend time with my family, and for the first time in a long while I felt almost like staying. In fact, when I booked my plane tickets for my next foray into the world, I did so with a pang of regret.

Late summer and fall I wandered from the busy streets of San Francisco and NYC to the upper echelon of American society in the waterways of New England. The jagged mountains and giant waves of Oahu’s North Shore to a Buddhist temple in the jungles of Brazil and finally, I found my way to the quiet beaches in Southern Goa, India.

Here I delved deeper into my somewhat vague desire to pursue a path in healing and bodywork by taking an intensive month-long Yoga Teacher Training course. For nine hours a day, six days a week I sweated and stretched, learning the Ashtanga Primary Series, meditation, yogic philosophy and the anatomy of asana. Upon completion of the course, I was asked to stay and take over teaching classes at the shala on the beach, and a month later I am still here, earning a living teaching yoga in India.

I cant say how long I will spend in Goa, already my mind is wandering to the glacial wilderness of Alaska, and even daydreaming about settling down and going back to university. All I know for certain is that as amazing as the world is I have yet to find my place in it, and I will continue to search until I do.

I am so thankful to all of you for giving me the strength, love and support that makes wandering the world so safe for me, always knowing I have a home to come back to. Merry Christmas to all, and the Happiest of New Years!

Love,

Cadence Tess

Saturday

Today I woke up just as dawn was breaking. 

I laid around in bed for awhile listening to the sounds of the day beginning around me; the ravens fighting the stray cats for rights to the best garbage, dogs barking, the girls sweeping the earth outside with long brooms made of palm fronds. Finally willing myself to get up I dressed quickly, went through the complicated routine of brushing my teeth and washing my face without using tap water and went out into the world. I walk barefooted down the beach in the lovely pink light of dawn to the yoga shala, passing herds of cows sleeping in the sand, always in the company of friendly stray dogs.

I taught 8am class to 15 students, most of who have now become my friends, demonstrating for 90 minutes how to correctly do sun salutations and the proper alignment of paravita trikonasana or marichiasana. Its hard work, teaching an hour and a half long yoga class twice a day. Keeping up an almost constant dialog without repeating yourself too many times, remembering to mention dristi, bandhas and breath counts, adjusting students both physically and verbally, and maintaining a pace that challenges advanced practitioners without killing the beginning students. I love the challenge, however, and am so proud of myself when after class I have people coming up to me saying it was the best class they have ever taken. 

Afterwards, a group of us always go for breakfast at the Little Fatima’s General Store. It’s a tiny hole in the wall run by Agonda’s longtime matriarch Fatima, a little old woman who everyone (westerners included) respectively addresses as “Antie”. The room’s three small tables are always full and so we stand outside chatting in the sun and waiting for some of the Indian laborers to finish their puji (chickpea and lentil breakfast) and file out to wash their hands at the outdoor sink. I order the same thing ever day, water porridge and fruit salad, but I can’t resist grabbing a few hot, fresh veg samosas wrapped in pieces of newspaper to munch while we wait. This spot is the main hub for anyone who has been in Agonda for more than a few weeks. It takes that long to realize that the cramped and kind of dirty little store is really the best place for breakfast and lassis in town, and as we eat there is a constant stream of friends and familiar faces passing by. Mounted on the walls all around the room are shelves overflowing with packets of biscuits and bags of oatmeal sugar, and dry goods. While you sit there is always a little old Indian woman dressed in a sari reaching over your head to grab something off the shelf, or a boy in his brown school uniform asking you to pass him some biscuits he cant reach. Everyone shares tables and benches as there is so little room, and the conversation usually includes everyone in the restaurant. After paying R60 for my entire breakfast I wander back to my room, only a minute’s walk away, and change out of my yoga clothes.

The only real thing I have against Fatima’s is that all the coffee they serve is instant, so I order a cup from the bar at my place and sit down, chatting with the Nepalese guys who work here and have all become my friends. Its already 11, in between the breakfast and the lunch rush at Jardim a Mar, so about ten of them are all grouped around the bar, smoking, drinking coffee and reading the paper, laughing and talking in rapid Nepalese. Kumar, the head chef challenges me to a game of chess and the next hour is spent locked in a serious and bloody battle, with the rest of the guys looking on and shouting advice. Miraculously I end up forcing a draw.

A good way to spend the morning.

There were dolphins in the bay today and I lounged on the beach for a while watching them, soaking up my daily does of sun, and swimming when I got too hot. Getting to the water is sometimes an ordeal however, as the midday sun turn the sand into a bed of coals and if you walk too slow you burn the hell out of your feet. To be safe I take the 20 yards or so at a healthy trot… 

By mid afternoon I am getting hungry again, and for the last two weeks have had a standing lunch date with a group of young travelers like myself at a place just down from my house. At 2 pm when I show up they are already there and we all order the same, veg thali. Thali is a serving of day fry (lentils) and three or four tiny portions of different vegetables always served with rice, a chapatti and a papadom. They all come in individual containers resting on a tin platter about a foot across, and a banana on the side for desert. You dump everything together onto the platter, mix it together with your hands and have fun eating the messy rice with your fingers and scooping the particularly soupy bits up with chapatti. I’m sitting with two American cousins, Steve and Bobby, who run a tour company in India and have been staying in Agonda for the last few months while they scout out the best places to organize trips to in Goa and make contacts with reliable taxi drivers. There is a pair Australian girls next to me who I met in my yoga class and not only work on yachts in the Caribbean and Med, but remember me from when I was bartending in SXM. John, a sweet pothead from the UK who has no plans ever to return to his homeland and Benny, a lovely young gay man on a spiritual journey around India for six months. The last person at our table is Eloise, an incredibly a beautiful young Italian woman who came here on holiday months ago and fell in love with a gorgeous Indian lifeguard. His parents don’t approve, but they are going to get married. While we eat our thali, we trade travel stories and talk about spirituality and our previous lives, the ones back “home” that just do not seem real anymore. Somehow, every day we always end up discussing how big the world is, how many corners of the globe there is still to explore. 

I have to excuse myself hours later to get to my evening yoga class, teaching five more students in the baking late afternoon heat. We do a mellow practice, its just too hot for the full primary series. By the time I get home its almost sunset, but there is still more than enough time to join the Nepalese guys for a game of volleyball on the beach. I’m useless, but they tolerate my company anyways (most likely because I am wearing ali baba trousers and a string bikini top). However the game transforms from volleyball to soccer and in the light of the setting sun I surprise them all by stealing the ball and scoring about a million times. Its almost dark when, sandy, sweating and  soaking wet from getting slide tackled in ankle-deep waves, I make it back to my room.

Every time I walk in my door I light a stick of nag champa and now I have come to associate the smell with comfort, privacy, with home. Freshly showered and dressed in fairly clean clothes I walk down the road a ways to a plywood stand sagging under the weight of fresh fruits.  A tiny woman with a huge gold ring in her nose smiles and wiggles her head at me, I wag mine back in poor imitation of the famous Indian gesture and look to the piles of papaya, stacks of coconuts small round watermelons and sweet melons, pomegranates and avocados, big baskets of sweet limes and bananas, and the very first small and stunted mangos of the season. After a thorough examination of every single papaya on the stand I finally select one I like and pay her R20. It’s the best dinner I can ask for on a hot night after a long day of living the life that I do on the beach in Goa.

Calvin and Hobbes

So in this one Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, the boy and his tiger are walking around in the foods during fall, when the boy starts talking about how much he hates love because people are jerks. They look around and Hobbes replies, "Yeah, sometimes people are jerks, but look at the colors of the trees today. I think its more fun to see something like this WITH someone than by yourself".

This is how I felt today, this is how I feel often.

Today after teaching my morning 90-minute yoga class I took a long walk by myself down to the other end of the beach. It ends with a fresh water river running into the sea, and a mass of huge boulders tumbled together stretching around the point. I took off my shirt and shoes, hid them in the bushes, and scrambled from rock to rock for hours. Its one of my favorite things to do, missioning on rocks, climbing, jumping, sliding, scampering even. Every time I climbed up onto another rock, or rounded another corner I discovered more boulders in my way, and had to figure out how to get passed them. It’s like a kind of puzzle you must solve to get to the treasure or end or something, and every time I play on rocks I feel like a little kid again. I went on until I was too hot and tired in the midday sun, and found a huge rock shaped like a head from Easter Island, Where it’s chin would have been, was a kind of overhang that gave the perfect amount of shade for two, but I was only one. I sat down, resting my scraped and burning feet and looked out at the greenish-blue of the Arabian Sea, the hills of the jungle and remote points across the bay, shrouded in mist, and it was so beautiful. But, I couldn’t help but notice that it was the kind of beauty that was almost meaningless, because there was no one to point it out to, no one to share it with. Being single is wonderful and freeing, I can do anything I want! But there is a difference between being single and being alone.

But don’t think I was feeling sorry for myself! I was actually enjoying the solitude, the sun and it was almost a kind of moving meditation. Later, I walked back up the beach toward my hut and passed by a group of people I had briefly met a few days before, and they invited me for a sit and a swim and later for some thali at my favorite restaurant. It’s great making friends, and while traveling it is so easy to do because everyone else is as lonely as you are. However, the friends you make abroad are a different breed usually, it’s the kind of friendship that burns hot and bright and then is suddenly done, and you don’t ever see them again. That’s both good and bad. I mean, on one hand you are instantly best friends, not wasting any time feeling each other out or on all the petty differences. But on the other, in a day or two (or week) you exchange email addresses and go your separate ways, and then must do it all over again in the next spot… Again, not complaining really, just observing.