[Sri Nannaguru] We sat on the floor in a small group for a while waiting for him to come, everybody absorbed in meditation. When he appeared he was dressed in an immaculate and dazzlingly white dhoti and tundu. He sat down on a chair that had been made ready for him, with the mountain behind him. His eyes were clear and sparkling, and one knew they reflected a great inner purity.
Sitting in the middle of the riverbed in the early evening: on the far side a small stream still flows, the little that remains of the river; a family has gathered there, bathing themselves and washing their clothes, beating the cloth against the rocks; and a little upstream, an old man clad only in a loin cloth sits quietly while he waits for his dhoti to dry.
Sitting on warm rocks in the middle of the sandy river bed watching the sunset: the clear sky turning pink, then a rich wine colour over the pine trees. Crows fly low over the land from shore to shore in search of their roosting tree, and their strong wings beat methodically through the air. Around the room are marsh reeds and grasses, and as night falls crickets and frogs wake, and the seeming desert of the sands is now peopled by many creatures signalling back and forth excitedly.
The temple and its worship form the centre around which the lives of the community that has gathered here now revolves. There is worship at one or other of the shrines here for eight hours or more every day, morning and evening. In the temple, which is a large, open building with many adjoining rooms and courtyards, people gather and discuss the day’s events, or sit quietly while the priest says puja, and at times assemble into groups to sing praises to God.
[Gnanananda Ashram, Tirukoilur District] Not long after I arrived here an angel came to visit me at my kutir, and when we had completed the usual introductions and formalities he proceeded to give his message:
I was sitting quietly on my verandah one day feeling at one with the peace and harmony that reigned throughout the garden, when there was a great flurry of wings and a crow landed just in front of me, quickly followed by a black drongo who dive-bombed at him, then swooped up into the air a few feet and like a trapeze artiste he suddenly changed direction and took another plunge at the crow, angrily scolding him as he did so, before flying over the trees back I should think, to his nest and the eggs or young ones he was evidently defending.
Although our friend the watchman has worked for the past twenty years for foreigners who live in this area he has never managed to learn more than scraps of the international language that prevails in this part of the country. However he has mastered a language that has a far broader application than English even, that I first discovered this unusual talent when I took over as pump house attendant. I had got fed up with the pump, which is alongside my hermitage, being switched on at any odd hour of the day or night, interrupting both my meditation and my sleep, and had decided that if I did the job myself I could regulate it more to my liking. My friend therefore showed me how it worked, how to prime it when necessary and so on, and...
The land on which this hermitage stands is part of a larger settlement that was started about a decade ago. At that time it was simply an open field, but over the years it has been planted with many types of flowering and fruiting trees and shrubs, and it now forms a sort of garden oasis in the midst of the cultivated fields that lie all around.
[Tara Nivas, Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu] The hermitage had been empty for quite some time when I moved in and it had a quiet and stillness about it that I immediately found very attractive. The watchman, who looked after the property, was fussing around, opening doors and windows, and assuring me he had given the floor a ‘full washing’ the day before, but as the light streamed in it was obvious that his attentions had not stretched so far as a ‘full dusting’ or a ‘full cobwebbing’, so after putting my bags down I set about cleaning up. One of the problems of having a thatched roof is the amount of dust that rapidly accumulates on everything below, and it took a long time, and a number of improvised dusters to clear it all up.