This was a packed full weekend. On Saturday morning Chinmaya was having a celebration of the birth of Shankara that I went to. Shankara is a sage from around 788 A.D. who revitalized Hinduism and tried to unite it as one thing (advaita), so he is the founder of the smartha branch of Hinduism that I follow. The celebration was at the large temple in the area instead of the Chinmaya center. It was hard to find the group at first, since they were in the lower level auditorium area and not the main temple floor. I wore one of my saris. I love sari and there aren't enough opportunities to wear them!
Sunday morning I went to the Chinmaya service and then I stayed for several hours so I could go to the youth group's discussion in the late afternoon.
The youth group is for people 18-35, but I was the oldest there by a few years. The vast majority of people were younger than my little brother and were in college or just starting college. They also grew up together, knew the same people, and many went to the same college.
A couple of things didn't work out well for me in this group. One is that I feel like I'm at a very different place in life than they are and that they aren't able to understand my perspective, since I have now realized the foolish stubbornness of being 18!
The other thing is that there was another girl there who was new. She was a friend of one of the other girls. She was a Christian Indian. The book we were discussing was talking about being your own person (a good lesson for me!) and I spoke about the need to separate your own desires and dreams from your parents desires for you.
This girl spoke next. She said, "Well, as brown people, we really respect our parents..." She dismissed everything I said and implied that because I'm not "brown" I am a monster who doesn't respect or care about her parents.
Apparently my insight is useless because I'm not Indian. As though I don't know anything about parental pressure!
I was deeply disheartened by that. She is not, and I'm not sure anyone there is, interested in my unique struggles.
I'm going to look into finding an adult discussion group.
************************************************************************
Also on Saturday a friend came over and we discussed Hinduism. I find that I have a hard time explaining many concepts because I have believed them for so long that I'm rusty on the whys.
In essence he asked why we act in the world at all if it is ultimately just an illusion and not meaningful (as stipulated in my post on Good and Evil) (Correct me if I'm wrong about the question, J!)
This life is an illusion, and yet we have to participate in it and play our roles. Why?
I don't have a great answer for this, but I think that people are always going to do something. People will always act. If you were enlightened and you could see that the world was just a game, would you do nothing at all? I doubt it. I think that you'd have fun and do things that made you happy.
What if the things that make you happy are "bad" things (again, there is not really anything bad or good in reality, but there are things that help other souls move toward enlightenment and things that hurt). I would argue that no one actually finds joy from destructive acts. There's another reason behind an act like killing a puppy. A person might think that will make him happy, but I don't believe that it actually does.
An enlightened person gets happiness from helping others quite naturally because he can see that the others are himself. Not to start the whole Christian v.s. Advaita debate again, but my mother used to tell me that Jesus said to love one's neighbor as one's self because the neighbor really is yourself.
Fate is a very slippery concept in Hinduism. Do your actions have effects or does everything happen the way it has to based only on sanskara? Somehow, there is both fate and free will operating together in a very complex web that we will probably never understand. They say that there are certain issues that we will have to face in order for our soul to move forward, but when the problem comes up, if we are present, we have the choice. We can choose something that will move our soul forward or we can rely on a fog of habit.
In reading the Mahabharata, one of the things that you'll notice is that there's always a fate driven explanation for people's actions. For example, Kunti just happens to say to her sons that they must share what they have brought home, not knowing that it is a wife. To not make her a liar, all the brothers marry that one woman. But then Vyasa comes in and says that this woman prayed devoutly in a previous life five times for a husband, so she was fated to have five husbands. It is never clear whether Kunti caused this to happen or if it had to happen and how those two things go together. There are hundreds of examples of this in the Mahabharata.
I don't really have answers. I think is is dangerous to think that you have the answers to things already. If that were the case, I would already be enlightened. I like that Hinduism leaves a lot of things open for one to ponder and wonder about and it might take lifetimes to figure out the truth. The most important thing is to think about it, to keep wondering.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
On this razor's edge, can I learn to dance without bleeding?
There was a time when I was a lot more on the devotional path than I am now.
In my community growing up I always felt left out because everyone was on the path of knowledge and they were all very smart and able to debate and study and understand the texts. I went much more by emotion and couldn't really defend my understandings of things. (I did really enjoy listening to the Stillman brothers talk philosophy, though. Those are some smart men!).
I focused much more on the idea that you serve a master as God without questions and with total faith. In my understanding, for a woman, that would be her husband. It is still my belief that if one serves someone with absolute devotion, the soul is purified, even if the "master" is not worthy of it.
However, the older I got, the more I noticed my intellectual side. I could not put aside my tremendous curiosity and my desire to know everything about everything. (Not that I was being asked to, it just made it difficult to simply serve). Also, modern life got in the way. I was not married. I'm still not married. I lived away from home when I went to college, so my father was not there for me to practice this on.
I'm glad I moved out for college. I learned so much about myself and became a new person. There's some poetry that I wrote during that transition that I'm going to share with you today.
Even though I've always believed that God is within us and is us and is not a separate being at all, I also understand the value of worship. It is, as my paralegal class says, like a legal fiction. Something we know is not true, but we act as though it is in order to move forward. Worship and devotion is very valuable for approaching the idea of God because it can be too much for our minds to take in that we are ourselves God. In Hinduism there is the idea of a large Self and a small self. The large Self is usually called Atman (although in Sanskrit the word atman means ones self, whether the large or the small). The large Self is who we really are and the small self is who we think we are, a collection of habits and labels held together by ignorance.
So then I found some groups that focused on devotion and I discovered that I was much more "path of knowledge" than I had realized!
The point is that I wrote some very devotional poetry. I was inspired by Mirabai. Mirabai is a poet from the 1500s. The story goes that as a child she saw a statue of Lord Krishna and was very drawn to it. She decided that he would be her lord and she wanted no one else. Nonetheless, she was married off. She was a good wife, but continued her intense devotions to Krishna. The family found it embarrassing and several plots were put in motion to murder her. Poison was put in her food, for example. And each time Krishna himself saved her. He turned the poison into honey, etc. Finally she decides to kill herself because her family is unhappy with her. She tries to throw herself into a river, but Krishna physically grabs her and brings her back. From then on she wandered streets, begging her way (as many holy people do in Indian tradition) and singing songs about Krishna. Her poetry is sensual and beautiful, speaking of Krishna as a lover and her separation from him.
These poems were all written nine years ago:
There are actually 112 of these in the notebook I found!
In my community growing up I always felt left out because everyone was on the path of knowledge and they were all very smart and able to debate and study and understand the texts. I went much more by emotion and couldn't really defend my understandings of things. (I did really enjoy listening to the Stillman brothers talk philosophy, though. Those are some smart men!).
I focused much more on the idea that you serve a master as God without questions and with total faith. In my understanding, for a woman, that would be her husband. It is still my belief that if one serves someone with absolute devotion, the soul is purified, even if the "master" is not worthy of it.
However, the older I got, the more I noticed my intellectual side. I could not put aside my tremendous curiosity and my desire to know everything about everything. (Not that I was being asked to, it just made it difficult to simply serve). Also, modern life got in the way. I was not married. I'm still not married. I lived away from home when I went to college, so my father was not there for me to practice this on.
I'm glad I moved out for college. I learned so much about myself and became a new person. There's some poetry that I wrote during that transition that I'm going to share with you today.
Even though I've always believed that God is within us and is us and is not a separate being at all, I also understand the value of worship. It is, as my paralegal class says, like a legal fiction. Something we know is not true, but we act as though it is in order to move forward. Worship and devotion is very valuable for approaching the idea of God because it can be too much for our minds to take in that we are ourselves God. In Hinduism there is the idea of a large Self and a small self. The large Self is usually called Atman (although in Sanskrit the word atman means ones self, whether the large or the small). The large Self is who we really are and the small self is who we think we are, a collection of habits and labels held together by ignorance.
So then I found some groups that focused on devotion and I discovered that I was much more "path of knowledge" than I had realized!
The point is that I wrote some very devotional poetry. I was inspired by Mirabai. Mirabai is a poet from the 1500s. The story goes that as a child she saw a statue of Lord Krishna and was very drawn to it. She decided that he would be her lord and she wanted no one else. Nonetheless, she was married off. She was a good wife, but continued her intense devotions to Krishna. The family found it embarrassing and several plots were put in motion to murder her. Poison was put in her food, for example. And each time Krishna himself saved her. He turned the poison into honey, etc. Finally she decides to kill herself because her family is unhappy with her. She tries to throw herself into a river, but Krishna physically grabs her and brings her back. From then on she wandered streets, begging her way (as many holy people do in Indian tradition) and singing songs about Krishna. Her poetry is sensual and beautiful, speaking of Krishna as a lover and her separation from him.
These poems were all written nine years ago:
The darkest night, thick with covering,
is your hand.
The warm earth I bend to touch
is your feet.
The endless sky is your forehead.
The sunset clouds are your eyes.
The opening flower bud is your mouth.
The stars are the white splendor
of your teeth.
The small, round cloud drifting through
the sky alone
is your face as you meditate.
The cold rush of the ocean onto the sand
is your touch.
The breeze that lifts the new leaves
is your breath.
The cry of birds, shrouded in vines,
is your voice.
The leaves falling from the trees
in the deep forest is your laugh.
The honey that drips from trees
is your scent.
The planets are your necklace.
Your praise trickles from mountain streams.
The trees speak your name as I pass.
The rain on my closed windows
is the sound of your fingers tapping the door.
The idea stands between us.
It is more solid than rock
and wider than a mountain.
I am little and you are great.
I can never reach you.
The idea looms and from behind it
I hear your breath.
There is nothing real in this world.
Nothing to look at but you.
Nothing to love but you.
Shimmering shadows
are the bodies.
Your voice whispers from afar
and I leap up to follow it:
to run over fields, up hills,
through forests, across deserts.
And your voice is still distant.
Because it is muffled
though my skin.
You are in my own heart.
My soul comes free of my body
soaring and tumbling
through the sky like the sea gull.
The vast planes stretch on forever,
dotted with snow.
The rhythm of life is far away.
The sun bursts through the clouds,
called forth by the perfect mantra hum,
revealing itself and reaching out gold
to cover the earth.
Thrust to new awareness
as though my soul had lived under water all these years,
seeing through only murky water.
Suddenly the world looks different
until the river pulls me back down.
I give you this flower from my garden.
I give you the last drop of water from my hair.
I give you the mornings
and the evenings.
I give you the moments.
I offer all my sorrows and all my joys.
The greatest offering is the tear wiped off
and held trembling on the fingertip.
God accepts it
and gives the gift of liberation in turn.
There are actually 112 of these in the notebook I found!
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Dance Performance
First, I have a favor to ask. I have been trying to spread this around to every Internet group I have! I want Rosetta Stone to come out with levels 4 and 5 for Hindi, but I've already requested it and I'm just one person. If they get a bunch of requests they might do it. All you have to do is follow the link and put in a request for Hindi levels 4 and 5!
Request Lanaguage
A week from Sunday I have my first dance performance with my new school! I love dance, partly as exercise and partly as a spiritual experience. I guess dance for me is what yoga is for a lot of people.
I dug up some pictures of myself from my previous dance school. This is a classical south Indian style called Bharat Natyam. It tells stories about the gods mostly. You use your hands and face to express the story and your feet keep rhythm. Most of the dance is done in a squat position like a ballet plie (no idea how to spell that, sorry!). You'll see me squatting in these pictures, but not nearly as much as I should be. It's tough on the legs. To emphasize the stamps of the feet, we wear anklets that are covered in bells. The squat looks particularly nice with the costume, where you see the layers of fans going down the front.
And here are some YouTube examples of other people doing Bharatnatyam (i.e., people much better than me!)
One of the spectacular things about this dance is that it involves every part of the body. Where your eyes are looking is very important. The eyes follow the hands usually. There is a saying that goes, "Where the hands go, the eyes go; where the eyes go, the mind goes; where the mind goes, the heart goes. There love arises."
Request Lanaguage
A week from Sunday I have my first dance performance with my new school! I love dance, partly as exercise and partly as a spiritual experience. I guess dance for me is what yoga is for a lot of people.
I dug up some pictures of myself from my previous dance school. This is a classical south Indian style called Bharat Natyam. It tells stories about the gods mostly. You use your hands and face to express the story and your feet keep rhythm. Most of the dance is done in a squat position like a ballet plie (no idea how to spell that, sorry!). You'll see me squatting in these pictures, but not nearly as much as I should be. It's tough on the legs. To emphasize the stamps of the feet, we wear anklets that are covered in bells. The squat looks particularly nice with the costume, where you see the layers of fans going down the front.
And here are some YouTube examples of other people doing Bharatnatyam (i.e., people much better than me!)
One of the spectacular things about this dance is that it involves every part of the body. Where your eyes are looking is very important. The eyes follow the hands usually. There is a saying that goes, "Where the hands go, the eyes go; where the eyes go, the mind goes; where the mind goes, the heart goes. There love arises."
Women and Hinduism
The issue of women in Hinduism for me is as conflicted as the issue of arranged marriage (Arranged Marriage). On the surface it is easy to see that women are often treated as less important than men and leave it at that. The truth is much more complicated.
So, on the one hand: Within society women are often treated as less important, lower souls, whose only purpose in life is to cook, clean, and obey their mother-in-laws. For some reason an idea came up that to be born as a woman is a lesser embodiment and that all souls strive to be men in their births. (This is completely ridiculous, seeing as how we need both genders for the world to keep functioning. A human birth is the highest, but there is no distinction between what gender or race of human birth). Women are sometimes treated quite terribly in India. Families they are marrying into might require a crippling dowry from her family (even though dowries are now illegal) and sometimes young brides are killed by their new families for being "disobedient."
There is an ancient tradition called sati in which women would throw themselves onto the funeral pyres of their husbands and burn alive. This was seen as such a beautiful devotion that sometimes girls have been forced into funeral pyres. This practice is also illegal. Historically widows have been treated very poorly in society. It is sometimes seen as their fault that their husbands died, some bad karma of theirs. Until recently they would be forced to live secluded in "widows houses" for the rest of their lives and forbidden to wear nice clothes or jewelry.
When a young bride first goes to her new home, in some places it is tradition for her to be taken straight to the kitchen to cook a perfectly round roti (like a tortilla) to prove her worth in household duties.
All this from a culture who worships goddesses. A very mixed message, to be sure. I think the pure ideals of Hinduism have been somewhat corrupted by human thought. This idea of the man being superior is not part of the religion, it's just a habit of men to think that way because they have the power. There is such a strong ideal for a woman to worship her husband as her Lord, but too often people forget that the husband is also to adore his wife as the goddess.
The perfect marriage in Hindu tradition is that of Rama and Sita. Women are taught to strive to be like Sita, who is perfect in devotion. When her husband, a prince, chose exile in a forest, she willingly followed him in all his hardship. But he also cares for her and goes to the ends of the earth to rescue her when she is kidnapped. Even in hunting the golden deer for her, he always wanted to make her happy.
Being a modern and independent woman has been a tremendous struggle for me. I still have in my mind all the stories of good women who were meek, obeyed their husbands, and were phenomenal at housework. I was taught to always cook fresh food, never serve my family leftovers, to do housework with no expectation of praise or reward. I expected to be a housewife when I grew up and adjusting to the fact that I have come into a modern life and have to work has been difficult.
Sometimes I want very much to be strong and independent and capable and self-sufficient and all these things that women in the west are praised for. I am learning how to do that because I'm dating a modern American man and my plans for an arranged marriage did not work out at all. But sometimes I feel guilt over not being better at the housework. My instincts are still strongly traditional and old-fashioned. That is something that I will struggle with for a long time, I'm sure.
But my role model is no longer the woman who lit her husband's oil lamp for so many years that he forgot who she was, I strive now to be like the great princess Draupadi.
The most famous story of Draupadi is the dice game. For those who don't know it: Draupadi was married to five brothers (yes, at the same time). One of them was in a dice match with an evil Uncle who was cheating. As the brother became more and more involved in the game he was unable to stop wagering things and he staked and lost all of his brothers and himself and finally their wife.
Draupadi was dragged into the hall by her hair, while in her period. She looked to her husbands to defend her honor, but they were gambled away and were only slaves now. The evil cousins tell Draupadi that she is also a slave now and to take off her clothes. They call her a slut for having five husbands (there's a story behind that, it was her destiny and had to happen that way). She argues that because her husband had already lost himself before staking her that she no longer belonged to him and could not be gambled away. "Can one belong to someone who has lost himself?"
The king, presiding over this, says that it does not make a difference and she has been lost. One of the evil cousins comes over to strip off her clothes and she prays to Krishna. Her sari will not end. He pulls and pulls and pulls on the pallu and it just keeps going, never disrobing her. Soon he is in a mountain of cloth and she is still clothed. She raises her hands in prayer and a jackal cries.
The king is so freaked that he tells her to choose a favor. She asks that her husbands be free. The king does so and offers another favor, but she refuses. He asks her why she wants nothing for herself.
"Greed destroys all things," she replies, "I refuse greed. Save my husbands."
One cousin comments, "Husbands were drowning and Draupadi is the raft that saves them."
(all quoted dialogue is from the translation in the Peter Brooks' Mahabharata).
Now there is a fierce, strong role model for women. Still a great wife, but also confident and sure in herself. They needed her and she saved them.
It is my hope that Hinduism will move more toward revering women as goddesses and respecting their unique power to create life. I think the scriptures support the idea that all are equally divine. It is not just the female saints like Amma and those who call to mind the divine mother, it is all females. They deserve respect and love and to be cherished by their husbands and their husbands' families.
So, on the one hand: Within society women are often treated as less important, lower souls, whose only purpose in life is to cook, clean, and obey their mother-in-laws. For some reason an idea came up that to be born as a woman is a lesser embodiment and that all souls strive to be men in their births. (This is completely ridiculous, seeing as how we need both genders for the world to keep functioning. A human birth is the highest, but there is no distinction between what gender or race of human birth). Women are sometimes treated quite terribly in India. Families they are marrying into might require a crippling dowry from her family (even though dowries are now illegal) and sometimes young brides are killed by their new families for being "disobedient."
There is an ancient tradition called sati in which women would throw themselves onto the funeral pyres of their husbands and burn alive. This was seen as such a beautiful devotion that sometimes girls have been forced into funeral pyres. This practice is also illegal. Historically widows have been treated very poorly in society. It is sometimes seen as their fault that their husbands died, some bad karma of theirs. Until recently they would be forced to live secluded in "widows houses" for the rest of their lives and forbidden to wear nice clothes or jewelry.
When a young bride first goes to her new home, in some places it is tradition for her to be taken straight to the kitchen to cook a perfectly round roti (like a tortilla) to prove her worth in household duties.
All this from a culture who worships goddesses. A very mixed message, to be sure. I think the pure ideals of Hinduism have been somewhat corrupted by human thought. This idea of the man being superior is not part of the religion, it's just a habit of men to think that way because they have the power. There is such a strong ideal for a woman to worship her husband as her Lord, but too often people forget that the husband is also to adore his wife as the goddess.
The perfect marriage in Hindu tradition is that of Rama and Sita. Women are taught to strive to be like Sita, who is perfect in devotion. When her husband, a prince, chose exile in a forest, she willingly followed him in all his hardship. But he also cares for her and goes to the ends of the earth to rescue her when she is kidnapped. Even in hunting the golden deer for her, he always wanted to make her happy.
Being a modern and independent woman has been a tremendous struggle for me. I still have in my mind all the stories of good women who were meek, obeyed their husbands, and were phenomenal at housework. I was taught to always cook fresh food, never serve my family leftovers, to do housework with no expectation of praise or reward. I expected to be a housewife when I grew up and adjusting to the fact that I have come into a modern life and have to work has been difficult.
Sometimes I want very much to be strong and independent and capable and self-sufficient and all these things that women in the west are praised for. I am learning how to do that because I'm dating a modern American man and my plans for an arranged marriage did not work out at all. But sometimes I feel guilt over not being better at the housework. My instincts are still strongly traditional and old-fashioned. That is something that I will struggle with for a long time, I'm sure.
But my role model is no longer the woman who lit her husband's oil lamp for so many years that he forgot who she was, I strive now to be like the great princess Draupadi.
The most famous story of Draupadi is the dice game. For those who don't know it: Draupadi was married to five brothers (yes, at the same time). One of them was in a dice match with an evil Uncle who was cheating. As the brother became more and more involved in the game he was unable to stop wagering things and he staked and lost all of his brothers and himself and finally their wife.
Draupadi was dragged into the hall by her hair, while in her period. She looked to her husbands to defend her honor, but they were gambled away and were only slaves now. The evil cousins tell Draupadi that she is also a slave now and to take off her clothes. They call her a slut for having five husbands (there's a story behind that, it was her destiny and had to happen that way). She argues that because her husband had already lost himself before staking her that she no longer belonged to him and could not be gambled away. "Can one belong to someone who has lost himself?"
The king, presiding over this, says that it does not make a difference and she has been lost. One of the evil cousins comes over to strip off her clothes and she prays to Krishna. Her sari will not end. He pulls and pulls and pulls on the pallu and it just keeps going, never disrobing her. Soon he is in a mountain of cloth and she is still clothed. She raises her hands in prayer and a jackal cries.
The king is so freaked that he tells her to choose a favor. She asks that her husbands be free. The king does so and offers another favor, but she refuses. He asks her why she wants nothing for herself.
"Greed destroys all things," she replies, "I refuse greed. Save my husbands."
One cousin comments, "Husbands were drowning and Draupadi is the raft that saves them."
(all quoted dialogue is from the translation in the Peter Brooks' Mahabharata).
Now there is a fierce, strong role model for women. Still a great wife, but also confident and sure in herself. They needed her and she saved them.
It is my hope that Hinduism will move more toward revering women as goddesses and respecting their unique power to create life. I think the scriptures support the idea that all are equally divine. It is not just the female saints like Amma and those who call to mind the divine mother, it is all females. They deserve respect and love and to be cherished by their husbands and their husbands' families.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Why I'm thinking about children
Several of my posts have been about the ways in which I want to pass Hinduism to my own children. Thinking about children is a new thing for me. There was a while where I thought I wouldn't have any because of the desires of the man I was with at the time. Suddenly that biological clock that people talk about has kicked in. There have been a few things that have happened to trigger it, but one in particular...
I have never been good at making friends. I lack the ability to small talk and I end up starting such serious conversations that only a few people become close. I am still friends with my two childhood friends and in college I added one more. Her name was Ilana and she was in two of my classes my freshman year. We got along fantastically right from the start. We had such similar thoughts on everything. She really understood me. She was talkative and passionate about life and she had plans. She wanted children more than anyone I have ever met. She talked to the campus Rabbi about issues of children long before she was married. She told me how she had longed to be a mother from the time she was a toddler. When her sister was born, she thought the baby was a gift to her.
Ilana had patience. As hard as it was, she waited to finish college, to marry her college sweetheart (the first guy she ever kissed), to get settled into her job as a biology teacher, and to buy a house (well, a condo, the economy being what it is). We continued to talk on the phone and visit with each other. When I told her that I wasn't sure I wanted kids, she said, "But who will look after you in your old age?" I said, "Your kids will!"
Ilana always gave me great advice and I depended on her to give me helpful feedback on every kind of issue I might have. There was nothing we didn't talk about.
This past summer Ilana was finally ready to start trying to get pregnant. She was so excited. I called her in late winter and she told me that she was three weeks pregnant, but not to tell anyone. She was waiting to share the news until she was sure the pregnancy would stick and past the point of frequent miscarriages.
A week later she was killed in a car crash.
One of the very intense emotions that came over me was a very strong desire to have children because she couldn't. It felt as though as she was dying she passed on to me that craving for a baby. I hated that she had been so careful and waited for life to be just right before getting pregnant. Even if she had to die, I wish that she had left behind a child of her own. I know it's crazy to wish there was a child without a mother, but I know Ilana's family, friends, and husband would take such good care of it.
These feelings have made it extremely difficult for me to wait to have children. However, I know that there are things that need to be in place first (though if you wait for the timing to be too perfect, then you never start). In order to give myself patience and help me to wait, I started putting together a Hope Chest of sorts.
I have a plastic box and I'm gathering baby items to put into it. I'm also collecting books and toys for children that I want mine to have. That includes several Hindi books, some picture books about Indian festivals, some DVDs about Krishna and Rama, and some things I've been knitting.
My favorite toys I found so far are linked to in my Chinmaya post. Also, I had a hard time finding Hindi nursery rhymes and songs on CD. Finally found this: Nursery Rhymes It is really high quality and many tracks. I'm listening to it now!
Another thing I found was a set of computer games for toddlers and young children to play games to learn Hindi. Those were at www.matrubhasha.com There are some problems with some of the games, but I'm still happy with them.
So, that's just so you understand where I am in life and what I'm thinking about, because those thoughts are influencing the blog. I promise to very soon do a post on women and Hinduism, as Basu requested!
I have never been good at making friends. I lack the ability to small talk and I end up starting such serious conversations that only a few people become close. I am still friends with my two childhood friends and in college I added one more. Her name was Ilana and she was in two of my classes my freshman year. We got along fantastically right from the start. We had such similar thoughts on everything. She really understood me. She was talkative and passionate about life and she had plans. She wanted children more than anyone I have ever met. She talked to the campus Rabbi about issues of children long before she was married. She told me how she had longed to be a mother from the time she was a toddler. When her sister was born, she thought the baby was a gift to her.
Ilana had patience. As hard as it was, she waited to finish college, to marry her college sweetheart (the first guy she ever kissed), to get settled into her job as a biology teacher, and to buy a house (well, a condo, the economy being what it is). We continued to talk on the phone and visit with each other. When I told her that I wasn't sure I wanted kids, she said, "But who will look after you in your old age?" I said, "Your kids will!"
Ilana always gave me great advice and I depended on her to give me helpful feedback on every kind of issue I might have. There was nothing we didn't talk about.
This past summer Ilana was finally ready to start trying to get pregnant. She was so excited. I called her in late winter and she told me that she was three weeks pregnant, but not to tell anyone. She was waiting to share the news until she was sure the pregnancy would stick and past the point of frequent miscarriages.
A week later she was killed in a car crash.
One of the very intense emotions that came over me was a very strong desire to have children because she couldn't. It felt as though as she was dying she passed on to me that craving for a baby. I hated that she had been so careful and waited for life to be just right before getting pregnant. Even if she had to die, I wish that she had left behind a child of her own. I know it's crazy to wish there was a child without a mother, but I know Ilana's family, friends, and husband would take such good care of it.
These feelings have made it extremely difficult for me to wait to have children. However, I know that there are things that need to be in place first (though if you wait for the timing to be too perfect, then you never start). In order to give myself patience and help me to wait, I started putting together a Hope Chest of sorts.
I have a plastic box and I'm gathering baby items to put into it. I'm also collecting books and toys for children that I want mine to have. That includes several Hindi books, some picture books about Indian festivals, some DVDs about Krishna and Rama, and some things I've been knitting.
My favorite toys I found so far are linked to in my Chinmaya post. Also, I had a hard time finding Hindi nursery rhymes and songs on CD. Finally found this: Nursery Rhymes It is really high quality and many tracks. I'm listening to it now!
Another thing I found was a set of computer games for toddlers and young children to play games to learn Hindi. Those were at www.matrubhasha.com There are some problems with some of the games, but I'm still happy with them.
So, that's just so you understand where I am in life and what I'm thinking about, because those thoughts are influencing the blog. I promise to very soon do a post on women and Hinduism, as Basu requested!
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Family
I love my extended family very much. I'm lucky that there is no one in my entire family that I dislike. I'm always excited to spend time with them all.
This weekend my boyfriend and I are in North Carolina, celebrating my brother graduating from college.
I was thinking about having a confrontation with my mom and my dad's extended family here about the Hindu stuff by wearing a bindi, but I called to ask my brother how he felt about it and he asked if I could please not cause drama over his graduation weekend. So that idea is post poned.
I did talk to my dad about it briefly a week or so ago. He accknowledged that he hasn't seen me as a Christian in years, but he still thought of me as an Advaitan. I told him that I am an Advaitan. Advaita is a branch of Hinduism. He's concerned that I'm being too narrowly focused and I need to see the Advaita within Christianity. I just can't do it anymore. I know it's there, but it is burried so deep that I don't see why I shouldn't just follow a religion that has Advaita (non-duality) right on the surface. I know that he doesn't want to deal with his mother finding out about all this. I told him it's going to have to happen at some point (in my mind knowing that that point will probably be when my boyfriend and I decide to get married).
Yesterday I had some alone time with one of my dad's sisters. She is one of my favorite people in the world and someone I really aspire to be like. I realized that I almost never interact with my dad's family without a filter from my mom. She is always there at the same time, and telling me not to say certain things and not to rock the boat. When I was talking to my aunt alone I discovered that some of the things mom has been insistent that I shouldn't talk about, she actually doesn't have a problem with.
I was tremendously tempted to tell my aunt right then and there about my religion. I converted almost seven years ago now and my extended family doesn't know. But I couldn't bring myself to do it.
I'm afraid that it will hurt her and confuse her. This is an area where it is pretty hard to imagine someone being not Christian. In fact, I was talking to my brother's Jewish girlfriend about it and she said when she was growing up here, kids at school didn't know what Hannukah was and asked her if her people were "the ones who killed Jesus." There just isn't much diversity. My family here is quietly and happily Lutheran and I don't know if they've given it much thought.
I decided that I need a reason to bring up this topic with my family and also I promised my brother not to cause trouble during his time. So, my boyfriend and I agreed that when we get engaged, we'll make a trip to North Carolina without my parents and talk to my family here about my conversion and the fact that the wedding will be mostly Hindu (though not completely).
It pains me a lot to think of the years that I might have talked honestly with my beloved aunts and I didn't have that chance because of my mother's fears about what they might think.
This weekend my boyfriend and I are in North Carolina, celebrating my brother graduating from college.
I was thinking about having a confrontation with my mom and my dad's extended family here about the Hindu stuff by wearing a bindi, but I called to ask my brother how he felt about it and he asked if I could please not cause drama over his graduation weekend. So that idea is post poned.
I did talk to my dad about it briefly a week or so ago. He accknowledged that he hasn't seen me as a Christian in years, but he still thought of me as an Advaitan. I told him that I am an Advaitan. Advaita is a branch of Hinduism. He's concerned that I'm being too narrowly focused and I need to see the Advaita within Christianity. I just can't do it anymore. I know it's there, but it is burried so deep that I don't see why I shouldn't just follow a religion that has Advaita (non-duality) right on the surface. I know that he doesn't want to deal with his mother finding out about all this. I told him it's going to have to happen at some point (in my mind knowing that that point will probably be when my boyfriend and I decide to get married).
Yesterday I had some alone time with one of my dad's sisters. She is one of my favorite people in the world and someone I really aspire to be like. I realized that I almost never interact with my dad's family without a filter from my mom. She is always there at the same time, and telling me not to say certain things and not to rock the boat. When I was talking to my aunt alone I discovered that some of the things mom has been insistent that I shouldn't talk about, she actually doesn't have a problem with.
I was tremendously tempted to tell my aunt right then and there about my religion. I converted almost seven years ago now and my extended family doesn't know. But I couldn't bring myself to do it.
I'm afraid that it will hurt her and confuse her. This is an area where it is pretty hard to imagine someone being not Christian. In fact, I was talking to my brother's Jewish girlfriend about it and she said when she was growing up here, kids at school didn't know what Hannukah was and asked her if her people were "the ones who killed Jesus." There just isn't much diversity. My family here is quietly and happily Lutheran and I don't know if they've given it much thought.
I decided that I need a reason to bring up this topic with my family and also I promised my brother not to cause trouble during his time. So, my boyfriend and I agreed that when we get engaged, we'll make a trip to North Carolina without my parents and talk to my family here about my conversion and the fact that the wedding will be mostly Hindu (though not completely).
It pains me a lot to think of the years that I might have talked honestly with my beloved aunts and I didn't have that chance because of my mother's fears about what they might think.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Sounds of Hindi
Quite a while ago now Katie asked me in the comments about the pronunciation of the Indian words I use. I call them Indian because some are Hindi and some are Sanskrit. They are closely related, but not at all the same. India has many, many, many languages as well as many dialects. Some use the devanagari script of Sanskrit and others use completely different scripts and some use a variation of devanagari.
Sanskrit is not my specialty. I learned the alphabet and some prayers when I was growing up and I took one semester of it in college, which I barely got through. The grammar in Sanskrit is very intense. If you're familiar with Latin, it's much more complicated, with more declensions, etc. It also has something called sandhi, where words run into each other. It's sort-of like a contraction in English, how you can put "It" and "Is" next to each other and turn them into "It's." In Sanskrit, almost all the words run together in this way and there are rules about how they combine, depending on the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the second word. My mom is currently taking a Spoken Sanskrit class and I can't even imagine how that works.
Hindi, being a modern and still living language, is about the same complication level as English. No sandhi, but it does have gendered nouns and case endings on words. Like the vast majority of languages in the world, it is not dependent on word order and it uses a sentence construction with the verb at the end of the sentence.
Hindi (and Sanskrit) have sounds that do not exist in English. I studied linguistics in college, particularly the development of language in children and something interesting I learned was about how we make distinctions between sounds. If you sound an "ah" out loud and then continue to sound as you shift it to an "ooo," there are a near infinite number of sounds in between. Your brain decides where to draw the line, where to consider something the same sound and where to transfer the meaning to a new sound. It will sound to us like there is a sudden shift between about four or five sounds in that sequence.
A famous example is Japanese people learning English. In their language there is no distinction between an "l" sound and an "r" sound. Our brains learn how to draw these dividing lines by the time we are one year old. By that time, we know the sounds of our language and it becomes increasingly difficult to hear distinctions that other languages draw. So, as distinct as "l" and "r" sound to an English speaker, they will be completely unable to hear the difference between a dental "tha" and a retroflex "tha" (and I have to show them with the same characters because the Roman alphabet does not make that distinction. This has to do with where the tongue is in the mouth when the letter is sounded).
In Hindi there are four different "n" sounds, four different "t" sounds, and (I think) five different "d" sounds. They also distinguish between an aspirated and un-aspirated sound. This is called the "puff of air." It is extremely hard for English speakers to hear the difference because it is not a morphemic difference to us. What that means is that if you say the word "kite" with no extra air on the "k" or if you say it with a puff of air on the "k" (which we almost always do, our language being very lazy in terms of sound production), they are the same word, there is no meaning difference. However, in Hindi, that word might mean two totally different things.
My online Skype teacher was trying to get me to say a word with an un-aspirated "p" in the beginning. Every time I tried, she kept telling me I was aspirating it, but I couldn't tell how not to. The reason is, in English every word that starts with "p" gets aspirated, but words that end in "p" do not. If you say the word "pull" and the word "stop," can you hear that there is a difference between the "p"s?
That is probably going to take me a long time. I have to really practice to make my mouth more acrobatic. I am starting to be able to hear the different sounds when pronounced by others, though not always. Producing them myself is proving extremely difficult.
There are characters in Hindi that don't exist in Sanskrit, because there are new sounds that Hindi has incorporated based on borrowed words from Arabic and English. It's easy, as monolingual English speakers, to think that all languages are taking so many words from English, it must be the best language. It is not actually like that at all.
First, because different languages have been favored at different points in history and during that period, that language gets incorporated into lots of other languages. Also, because all languages borrow words from lots of others. There are words in the English language that came originally from Sanskrit (yes, the language trees are related). There are also French words and German words. For example, think of the word "fiancee." To us native English speakers, that is an English word. That's exactly how a word like "komputr" in Hindi is a Hindi word, though the sounds come from English.
When my cousin first went to live in India, she started learning Hindi (and Kannada) from the household servants. One girl help up a plate and told her, "In Hindi we call this 'plate.'" She did not know it was called the same in English! I don't know off hand which words in English started in Indian languages, but I'll keep my eye out for some. (UPDATE, Basu pointed out two great examples: Jungle and Pajama. Those are both Hindi words that have been taken into English)
There is a movement now to incorporate more Sanskrit derivative words into Hindi. Also, I think the classes springing up in temples around the country for Spoken Sanskrit are a similar phenomenon. It appears to be a rebellion against Arabic (and therefore, Muslim) words in Hindi. I think that tinkering with a language is very unnatural and will probably not stick. How words get created is a very organic process. I also hate to see the world dividing along religious lines like that. But anyway, that is off topic.
I want to show those of you who are not familiar with Indian languages what Hindi looks like. We'll see if the characters come out in a way that you can see them:
मेरा नाम आम्बा है (This says "My name is Aamba). The script is so beautiful that I can't imagine why anyone would want to write out Hindi words in Roman characters. (I also find it extremely difficult to read Hindi words written in Roman characters because there are so many sounds that English doesn't have, they get represented in different ways in different places).
In religious circles people will often say that the line that runs across the tops of the letters represents God, always present in all things (this, however, does not explain why some letters have a gap: धू थ ). Every character has an automatic "ah" attached to it, unless it comes at the end of a word. There are little markers that indicate when it changes to another vowel, and if two consonants are next to each other, part of the first one is removed and squashed into the second one. It is a very phonetic language, and unlike English, every character makes only one sound. Thus, once you learn the alphabet, you can pronounce any Hindi (or Sanskrit) word even if you don't know what it means.
When I was growing up, there were several Sanskrit words that were just a part of my everyday English vocabulary in the same way that "karma" is a part of many people's English vocabularies.
If you want to try to pronounce a Hindi or Sanskrit word, it's a good idea to err on the side of long "a"s. "Ahh" is a very common sound. In order to get the emphasis and the rhythm, you would really have to listen to speakers. If you try Bollywood movies, you'll hear how the language sounds. If you are unfamiliar with Bollywood movies, I recommend Swades as a good one to start with (that is, surprisingly, actually pronounces "Swa-desh").
I recently got some flashcards (Tuttle's Hindi in a Flash) and on them each word has related words and phrases, including expressions. I am delighted to be learning some idioms and expressions. An example of how different languages look at the world in different ways is that in Hindi you drink soup and you drink cigarettes. Interesting, eh?
I love language, clearly. I love how language shapes the way we think and how we see the world. The journey of expanding my brain with a second language has been amazing. This June some time I'm going to do a post on what I've learned in one year, since that's when I bought Rosetta Stone and started that journey. I had better stop now, since this post is already extremely long!
Someone just sent me this video on writing devanagari letters:
Sanskrit is not my specialty. I learned the alphabet and some prayers when I was growing up and I took one semester of it in college, which I barely got through. The grammar in Sanskrit is very intense. If you're familiar with Latin, it's much more complicated, with more declensions, etc. It also has something called sandhi, where words run into each other. It's sort-of like a contraction in English, how you can put "It" and "Is" next to each other and turn them into "It's." In Sanskrit, almost all the words run together in this way and there are rules about how they combine, depending on the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the second word. My mom is currently taking a Spoken Sanskrit class and I can't even imagine how that works.
Hindi, being a modern and still living language, is about the same complication level as English. No sandhi, but it does have gendered nouns and case endings on words. Like the vast majority of languages in the world, it is not dependent on word order and it uses a sentence construction with the verb at the end of the sentence.
Hindi (and Sanskrit) have sounds that do not exist in English. I studied linguistics in college, particularly the development of language in children and something interesting I learned was about how we make distinctions between sounds. If you sound an "ah" out loud and then continue to sound as you shift it to an "ooo," there are a near infinite number of sounds in between. Your brain decides where to draw the line, where to consider something the same sound and where to transfer the meaning to a new sound. It will sound to us like there is a sudden shift between about four or five sounds in that sequence.
A famous example is Japanese people learning English. In their language there is no distinction between an "l" sound and an "r" sound. Our brains learn how to draw these dividing lines by the time we are one year old. By that time, we know the sounds of our language and it becomes increasingly difficult to hear distinctions that other languages draw. So, as distinct as "l" and "r" sound to an English speaker, they will be completely unable to hear the difference between a dental "tha" and a retroflex "tha" (and I have to show them with the same characters because the Roman alphabet does not make that distinction. This has to do with where the tongue is in the mouth when the letter is sounded).
In Hindi there are four different "n" sounds, four different "t" sounds, and (I think) five different "d" sounds. They also distinguish between an aspirated and un-aspirated sound. This is called the "puff of air." It is extremely hard for English speakers to hear the difference because it is not a morphemic difference to us. What that means is that if you say the word "kite" with no extra air on the "k" or if you say it with a puff of air on the "k" (which we almost always do, our language being very lazy in terms of sound production), they are the same word, there is no meaning difference. However, in Hindi, that word might mean two totally different things.
My online Skype teacher was trying to get me to say a word with an un-aspirated "p" in the beginning. Every time I tried, she kept telling me I was aspirating it, but I couldn't tell how not to. The reason is, in English every word that starts with "p" gets aspirated, but words that end in "p" do not. If you say the word "pull" and the word "stop," can you hear that there is a difference between the "p"s?
That is probably going to take me a long time. I have to really practice to make my mouth more acrobatic. I am starting to be able to hear the different sounds when pronounced by others, though not always. Producing them myself is proving extremely difficult.
There are characters in Hindi that don't exist in Sanskrit, because there are new sounds that Hindi has incorporated based on borrowed words from Arabic and English. It's easy, as monolingual English speakers, to think that all languages are taking so many words from English, it must be the best language. It is not actually like that at all.
First, because different languages have been favored at different points in history and during that period, that language gets incorporated into lots of other languages. Also, because all languages borrow words from lots of others. There are words in the English language that came originally from Sanskrit (yes, the language trees are related). There are also French words and German words. For example, think of the word "fiancee." To us native English speakers, that is an English word. That's exactly how a word like "komputr" in Hindi is a Hindi word, though the sounds come from English.
When my cousin first went to live in India, she started learning Hindi (and Kannada) from the household servants. One girl help up a plate and told her, "In Hindi we call this 'plate.'" She did not know it was called the same in English! I don't know off hand which words in English started in Indian languages, but I'll keep my eye out for some. (UPDATE, Basu pointed out two great examples: Jungle and Pajama. Those are both Hindi words that have been taken into English)
There is a movement now to incorporate more Sanskrit derivative words into Hindi. Also, I think the classes springing up in temples around the country for Spoken Sanskrit are a similar phenomenon. It appears to be a rebellion against Arabic (and therefore, Muslim) words in Hindi. I think that tinkering with a language is very unnatural and will probably not stick. How words get created is a very organic process. I also hate to see the world dividing along religious lines like that. But anyway, that is off topic.
I want to show those of you who are not familiar with Indian languages what Hindi looks like. We'll see if the characters come out in a way that you can see them:
मेरा नाम आम्बा है (This says "My name is Aamba). The script is so beautiful that I can't imagine why anyone would want to write out Hindi words in Roman characters. (I also find it extremely difficult to read Hindi words written in Roman characters because there are so many sounds that English doesn't have, they get represented in different ways in different places).
In religious circles people will often say that the line that runs across the tops of the letters represents God, always present in all things (this, however, does not explain why some letters have a gap: धू थ ). Every character has an automatic "ah" attached to it, unless it comes at the end of a word. There are little markers that indicate when it changes to another vowel, and if two consonants are next to each other, part of the first one is removed and squashed into the second one. It is a very phonetic language, and unlike English, every character makes only one sound. Thus, once you learn the alphabet, you can pronounce any Hindi (or Sanskrit) word even if you don't know what it means.
When I was growing up, there were several Sanskrit words that were just a part of my everyday English vocabulary in the same way that "karma" is a part of many people's English vocabularies.
If you want to try to pronounce a Hindi or Sanskrit word, it's a good idea to err on the side of long "a"s. "Ahh" is a very common sound. In order to get the emphasis and the rhythm, you would really have to listen to speakers. If you try Bollywood movies, you'll hear how the language sounds. If you are unfamiliar with Bollywood movies, I recommend Swades as a good one to start with (that is, surprisingly, actually pronounces "Swa-desh").
I recently got some flashcards (Tuttle's Hindi in a Flash) and on them each word has related words and phrases, including expressions. I am delighted to be learning some idioms and expressions. An example of how different languages look at the world in different ways is that in Hindi you drink soup and you drink cigarettes. Interesting, eh?
I love language, clearly. I love how language shapes the way we think and how we see the world. The journey of expanding my brain with a second language has been amazing. This June some time I'm going to do a post on what I've learned in one year, since that's when I bought Rosetta Stone and started that journey. I had better stop now, since this post is already extremely long!
Someone just sent me this video on writing devanagari letters:
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