I am most excited today, because on Friday I am going with Ajit (one of our teachers) and Buriya (one of our friends from the village) to Deepak Sachte’s organic farm. He has been doing small scale organic production there for the last 10 – 15 years, and we’re going to spend two weeks together learning how he does it. The environmental conditions there are a little difference, so we won’t be able to apply it directly, but we’ll learn much that is relevent, and get really inspired!

Deepak sounds like a really nice guy, most welcoming and Manish, a friend at Shikshantar, tells me that he’ll be more than happy to give me all the science behind it too, which will staisfy the demands of the pushy intellecutal part of my brain!

I also applied today for a 10 day  Vipassana course, from the 3rd to the 14th of December. I’ve been wanting to go on one for about 2 years, but have never managed to. I’m sure that the wait has allowed me to learn a lot more on my own so the process will be more beneficial than it would have been before. It’s not even entirely convenient now – I’ll be away form Hunar Ghar for a month – but I don’t want to keep delaying further, and if convenience is based on the balance of whether we need to be doing other things instead, no doubt the course will help me a lot mentally, and make my capacity forbalance and work a lot better than it is now, so an inconvenience is more than compensated for.

There were a few frustrations at the school this week, the largest being that we forgot to take vegetables in on Thursday for the kids lunch. I was really unhappy that something  so important, and simple, could be over looked, particularly as it has been the same for every Thursday for the last 6 months or so. When I found out I just went straight home and went through all the files and folders learning everything I could that should be happening at the school, so I can keep a closer eye on things. I thought we had reached the stage that I could rely on people to do their tasks completely, but it is a little further down the road and I didn’t know enough about the running of things to help them reach that point so together we let the children down.

Tomorrow Deepak and I are moving into a new house, in Rohida which is a bit closer to the school and also a bit less convinent for popping off to Udaipur, whish should help stabalise people a bit when they come and visit, and make a more genuine integration into the local society by having to think twice a bit whether they really need to go or not.  It is  a really nice simple homewith beautiful flagstone floor and carved wooden beams; I want the simplicity of our needs to be reflected in all areas of our lives, Bakhel and Rohida, and I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to further simplify my life, boiling it down to what I really need, what really matters for comfort and happiness. Very little, it would seem, and were it not for the knowledge that this is a journey rather than a state, it would make me quite ashamed of ways that I have lived before. I think one day just love, nature and art will be enough. Then I can truely live a non-violent and productive life.