Travel Day 936 – Amritapuri Ashram, Kerala, INDIA
After my quite disappointing and somewhat mechanical hugging experience yesterday, today was finally my day of getting involved and doing my Seva at the compost plant…
Compost Seva at the Ashram, Amritapuri
Again I didn’t make it out of bed for the early morning program, because I ended up watching Amma doing her staged hugging until 1am in the morning. By that time I called it quits while the Hugging-Mother was still going for another hour or so. It was all a bit crazy I thought while I was scooping my watery rice and vegetable curry for breakfast…
Actually every single meal so far had been watery rice and vegetable curry. I guessed that the Hugging-Amma thought it would be beneficial for my spiritual growth if I had the watery rice for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner on any given day. But while I was scooping the rice water off my plate, I was looking around and I couldn’t help but think that this whole ashram was a bit of a spiritual Disneyland…
Whole families had come to spend their vacations here on the pink campus, between the living towers and all the attractions on offer, but Amma was certainly the main draw card or the star attraction of this spiritual theme park. It was a bit of a strange thought, but at least it made very clear to me that it would not be really easy for me to get the entire vibe of this place, no matter how hard I tried…
Funny enough, but I was at least trying within my own abilities. I was wearing my white dhoti to match the white attire of all the devotees and I was on my way to do my volunteering duty, my composing Seva and when we arrived at the composting facility, we were greeted by two things, bad smell and nice people…
Our new job was to dump smelly buckets containing yesterday’s food waste onto a table, sort out the non-organic particles and then mix everything with cow-shit and half rotten wood chips. Of course this work had to be done by hand and so we found ourselves resisting the temptation to vomit while we were mixing all the smelly parts together…
Luckily the other guys on compost Seva duty were really cool and so we made certainly the best out of the situation while playing with the cow-shit and cracking as many jokes as humanly possible. If hugging wasn’t doing the trick, maybe the shitty work would put me on the right spiritual path and if not, well, at least I had a really fun morning, doing something that I probably wouldn’t be doing otherwise on a daily basis… : )
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