Monkeys & Winter & November is the best....

It's Monday. Or it was a couple of days ago, I'm behind. And, you guessed it, Monday means something completely different over here than it does over there---wherever you are. Monday means moon day, and it's Shiva's day. Not because he's the demigod of the moon. That's Chandra. See? This is easy if you just know how....so say good morning to Shiva and his good wife Parvati, goddess of material creation -----> Yes, they're a two-career family and they're busy. You would be too if the entire cosmic creation was yours to pl....ok I'm getting out of this while I can.

Winter is on its way. Nowadays the southerly breeze doesn't blow in from the fields through my back window with warm-day scents and the sound of long grass and summer attached to it; now it comes in silently and slowly from the north, the only time of year the snow-capped Himalayas share themselves with us. And, of course, it's the wrong time of year: where were those cool, frost-winged breezes in the melting, melting, month of May? No doubt those winds reached out, eager to spread their love, but were hurled back to their mountain by the oven-door blast of heat that radiated from the plains of the country they dwell above. No one is free to move in the summer here...not even the wind.

Everyone talks about the weather here: it is a hot topic, possibly because it changes so often. We actually have six seasons here, so if you don't like the weather just hang around and it will change after two months, like clockwork. We bitch about the heat, then the cold, then the rain. We do not bitch about November as it is the stellar month, the month of all months, the month that is tightly packed in between October, where memories of the heat might still linger, and December, where those memories are replaced with thoughts of how cold the marble is to the touch, the marble that you can't escape from: the floor, the bathroom, the desk top, the kitchen, or when your outstretched arm goes beyond the boundaries of your yoga mat and the chill ruins your savasana. Summer is a long, long way away. And we like that. (that pic there is the view from my back window, incidentally....)

Outside the birds have gone absolutely nuts, the monkeys are providing a sideshow spectacle outside the neighbor’s house, bouncing up and down on the tin-shed huts outside their window, and someone is doing a cross between a Krishna-influenced love ballad and a Southern jig on a flute in the near distance.

It's pretty quiet for a Monday, and I'm suspicious. Even if it is Wednesday...