June 11, 2021 | Leave a comment Life will always connect the dots if you choose the draw the lines yourself. Day 1221 11 June 2021 Himachal Pradesh, India Just like that, nearly half of 2021 is behind us, never to be had again. After a month of heavy lockdown mode, I am able to sit in my favorite working cafe. Writing this post merits coffee sips. As of late I grind and brew my own beans, but this morning the foamy cappuccino poised to the left of my keyboard is the first one I’ve ordered in Dharamshala. When I try to remember where the last month went, I can hardly convey it. I decide to categorize my mostly-solo activities. Himachal Pradesh, India. Monthly Mood: I Feel Love And Pain “i’m either romanticizing the pastor i’m busy worrying about the futureit’s no wonderi don’t feel alivei’m not livingin the only moment that’s real -present” —Rupi Kaur Vivian the Trekker It has become apparent that I go on an outdoor excursion about once every three weeks. I often attribute this to being lazy, but it’s more that I am a home hermit, working on something (most probably on myself). One clear morning before the villagers have served the day’s first chais, I am already on my way to the Gallu Waterfall. I hope to run into some pheasants during these lonesome hours. The closest I get is the sight of a brown chicken shape dashing across the path in front of me, legs kicking up like two propellers in a mad sprint to safety. I am no longer that 20-year-old girl leaping with laughter into glacial lakes at altitudes of 4,650 meters. I lower myself into these pools anyway. My stomach is devoid because the popular Sunset Cafe is closed for pandemical reasons. The hypothermic sting of the Himalayan water electrocutes my entire system. All appetite vanishes in an instant. Relevant read: Laguna 69 And Santa Cruz In Four Days: A DIY 2-In-1 Trekking Combo Luckily the chai stall has opened by the time I head back. I am reluctant to pay more than the national standard of 10 rupees for a cup, but this hot mug of milky elixir is well worth the 40-rupee splurge. A puppy’s gaze bores into me while I dip into my drink the two rusk biscuits I’ve brought from home. He begins chewing the stale rice cake directly through the mesh pocket of my drawstring bag. The cake is meant for a goat or cow, but I relent and break off a piece for him. No dog lusts after random carbohydrates more than an Indian dog. Vivian the Birder The next hike I embark on takes me to the Tibetan Flags Temple, looped up to Gallu Temple. The Flags is the meeting point for my friend, a fellow birder, and I. Prayer flags are strewn profusely among a patch of pines, coloring the scene with the five colors of the Tibetan elements. Two Eurasian jays greet me. We encounter the typical species as they enjoy themselves in their favorite branches. My friend spots an elusive bird with a brilliant blue cap. We have a dispute. He says it’s the blue-fronted redstart. I insisted it’s a niltava. He retorts that the niltava doesn’t have any orange on it. The bird was indeed a rufous-bellied niltava. He was thinking of the less colorful niltava he had seen in West Bengal. I am overjoyed that on my friend’s final day in the mountains, my foreigner eyeballs could identify for him a species which he had never seen before. The only other time we’d met, he identified seven or eight new species for me, each of which he was positively bored of. We see two more niltavas in the next hour. Aside from this morning, I observe the birds at home. The rosefinches and greenfinches have left. Oriental turtle doves and Indian white-eyes are common visitors. Parakeets, jays, sparrows, thrushes, bulbuls, and barbets continue to inhabit my surroundings. Vivian the Rosetta Stone “Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.” —Trevor Noah, Born A Crime Hindi lights up my life. My brain hosts a small army of spoken vocabulary, mostly edible nouns, amassed from a year of street slang exposure. Learning the Devanagari alphabet allows me to sound out those words and turn them into writing. Sometimes some words painted on a bench or a sign pop out at me. I also work on Hindi’s basic grammar rules. The genders of the nouns need sifting. The three forms of the “you” pronoun and their conjugations are juggled continuously. I must add that for all my Hindi fanaticism, it is not the first language of many Indians. In my host village here in the state of Himachal Pradesh, the home language is Gaddi. Therefore, instead of asking kaise ho? for “how are you,” it is more appropriate to ask, tu eh kinin? Historically the Gaddis were casteless, nomadic shepherds. The ancestors of the families around me once roamed the Himalayan pastures with their goats and sheep and basic belongings. Switch valleys in this same state and over in Parvati, the inhabitants sit around tandoori stoves chatting in Kulvi. When they do use Hindi, their accents are thicker than mine. It would be unfair if I didn’t mention the essential Tibetan community here in Dharamshala. My ear recognizes the Tibetan language, I know tashi delek, and sometimes Tibetans flip through Tik Tok near me and I hear that the video is in Chinese (with Tibetan subtitles, I can only imagine). Relevant read: 24 Hours In A Tibetan Tent The only other alphabet I know is the Latin one. Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet. Hindi is the first non-Latin-based language I am teaching myself. Chinese was one of my first spoken tongues, and like English, I never had to teach myself the core of it. English (1.3 billion speakers) and Chinese (1.1 billion) do not attribute genders to their nouns. Spanish (543 million speakers), Italian (70 million), and Hindi (600 million) do. A feminine noun in one language may be masculine in another. Everything is gonna be fine. Latin letters allow me to read basic sentences in Portuguese (270 million speakers), Italian (70 million), and occasionally a drop of French. Devanagari (Hindi) letters will let me access an inkling of Sanskrit, Nepali (17 million speakers), and Marathi (83 million). What pleases me equally is that I finally confronted the le les la lo las los shit show of the Spanish language. It was a big block in my brain’s Spanish wiring that I had managed to procrastinate for years. I spend the entire Wednesday refreshing the principles of indirect and direct objects, and suddenly feel much better about the schizophrenic pronouns. This leaves Chinese on the back burner. For the first time in 18 months, I was able to speak Chinese face to face with someone. A businessman from Sichuan who lives here picked me up on a hitchhike not long ago. I had spoken to him in Hindi, he had responded in Hindi and later asked me, in English, if I was Japanese. Finally we figured out we were both as Chinese as Chinese gets, and switched to our greatest common denominator, mandarin. Vivian the Hitchhiker I do frequently hitchhike with a mask on. It’s reflexive. I cannot walk down the only road connecting two neighboring hamlets without sticking out a thumb. While it’s safe to assume my driver will be Indian, yesterday I got a foreigner-mounted Royal Enfield Bullet on the way down. It was my first Bullet. I got another foreigner on another Bullet on the way back up. Vivian the Food Traveler Paranthas at Vikram’s stall with a chai from his neighbor Adu continues to be a ritual. They were closed for a solid three weeks due to Covid restrictions. The street food drought left me parched. Near Bishnu and his kidney bean rice there’s a sweet Tibetan woman selling spicy cold noodle salads that are indistinguishable from the Chinese kind (liang pi). She operates a little cart and serves monks and teenagers alike. I order something unfamiliar from the noodles lady. A yellow gluten sheet that she puts spongey gluten inside is rolled up and chopped so that it looks like sushi. Today I had mutton moktuk with homemade Tibetan flatbread in a dive where I was the only one who wasn’t speaking Tibetan. The day I went birding I had soft gnocchis drenched in tomato sauce, and later that same day I had a sabich lafa. That’s Dharamshala for ya. Vivian the Writer Poems escape from my fingertips here and there thanks to the large amount of poetry I’ve recently ingested, but my whole heart has been put into researching and writing about the chocolate industry’s exploitation of West Africa and the racial and colonialist implications that come with it. An in-depth post should be out any day now… Vivian the Yogini My interpretation of “yogi” has changed drastically within Indian borders and my connotation of the word is now more like an ascetic in a cave. A very silent person who lives off of what others may offer him. I picture someone deep in pranayama techniques more than someone doing sun salutations on a mat. You have permission to be cringing at my use of the word yogini, a female yogi, because I am too. Bear with me. I only use it to continue the fun of these headings. Relevant read: Flowing Flowing Flown A yoga teacher who I appreciate has helped my peers and I contort our bodies into interesting forms. Ashtanga and hatha return strength to my muscles, but I also hold a deep respect for the minutes on end staying in a single asana during the yin classes I have attended. Yet what I really want to say under this category is that in the latter half of this past month I have regained an ounce of stillness and control over the poison of my overthinking mind. Sometimes I drop into a cross-legged position out of sheer need, taking me back to my months in Varanasi when India first closed itself to the pandemic. This practice has been grounding. This practice has brought me love, gratitude, and pain. Vivian the Chef The latter chunk of May is a blur of trying to rebalance myself through the volatile mountain weather and inconsistent, sporadic closures of the businesses that keep me fed. Having no kitchen reaches the point of me figuring out how to cook cabbage, carrots, bok choi, and full blown savory oats topped with coconut mint chutney inspired by Morocco, and garlicky lemony tahini sauce inspired by Israelis. All with a metal rod that boils water when you plug it into a power outlet. Wasn’t kidding. Then there was even more of that good old bliss ball saga. Don’t try. That’s what I always have to insist upon myself. That’s the mantra that kept me afloat. Don’t try don’t try. I am so passionate about artistic expression through my food that it consumes me to the point of torture. The clashing of ideas replaces sleep. I never fail to underestimate how long it takes to acquire quality ingredients in a rural, high-altitude location, gain access to different kitchens and appliances, receive permission from a cafe to put my bliss balls there, abide to the lockdown rules that constantly change, eat all the ingredients before I even make anything, find all the ingredients again, show up with a backpack heavy with nuts and dates and glass jars to cook at the agreed time only to be cancelled on, multiple times, adapt my procedure to a different strain of dates because that’s all there is out here, tweak the recipe, actually make the bliss balls but evacuate the kitchen before the final touches in order to yield space for pizza and juice orders, return hours later to top with dried flowers and insert handwritten signs, and finally sail the delicate ensemble safely and soundly into the glass cake cabinet. Only when I most surrender (for the time being) my dream of having my work visible in a proper, refrigerated cake display does the opportunity turn around on itself and come back chasing after me. After persevering through what feels like a million false starts and disillusioned aspirations, The Universe spoils me. This week my bliss balls are available in the cutest cafe, the most aesthetic storefront, and the hottest clothing store of Dharamshala: Hemp House. I can hardly say it without my heart catching in my throat. Let’s try that again. MY SIMPLE HUMBLE BLISS BALLS ARE OUT FOR SALE! Small-batch. Really raw. Like virgin cold-pressed coconut oil raw. Vegan. Gluten-free. Paleo and Whole 30 friendly. Made with all the tender love in the world. On exhibit. Adjacent to racks of hemp, raw silk, khadi cotton, nettle, and cashmere. The sustainable fabrics that I am so, so into right now. More than I ever dared to hope for. Or is it? My wish is to cater to people who, like myself, value quality over quantity. Health is an investment. Real ingredients and sustainable fabrics are investments in ourselves that can only go in one direction—gain. Most of India’s travel scene will not understand because many bakeries offer dessert balls in large sizes at low prices. The base of these balls is most often commercial biscuits, full of palm oil and packaged in plastic. If the balls are healthy, the base might be oats. I don’t use grains in my recipe in order to preserve the high fat content and to bring out the flavor of walnuts, the most expensive nut on the market. Usually I profit nothing from bliss balls because I gift away so many. I have an extremely hard time taking cash from people who I consider to be my friends. I create for fun, out of pleasure and love. The idea of placing my work with other pastries in a glass display is much more tantalizing than the stack of banknotes after they’ve sold out. Distancing myself from my product by leaving it in a cafe is a step forward. I make the balls the same way and portion each to the same size as I would for myself. I price it at 50-rupees with zero guilt because I ask myself if I would pay this amount for this product and the answer is yes. I’d pay more. I leave a little note of the ingredients for fellow neurotics and for those who might have an allergy. In three hours four are gone. Then for two days nothing. Life works like that. I allow myself no expectations. At the last minute before HH closes for the weekend, my Veronese friend/ Number One Customer takes the last couple. Life will always connect the dots if you choose to draw the lines yourself. I am not so sure that I would have made a strong enough impression without speaking Spanish for months to the HH owner, who is Basque. While the bliss ball trial-and-errors took over a month, and while the marination of the idea to actually sell them and create an Indian-based recipe took over a year, the development of my Spanish language skills has taken half my life. The location of Hemp House is ideal. It is visible and heavy with pedestrian traffic. Incense burns out front and Lili the fluff ball sits on guard. A bliss ball is the perfect punch of fat and carbs to get you through a yoga class or a hemp shopping spree. A bliss ball is the perfect fuel boost to get you up the rest of those mountain village stairs. Or through the rest of your life. current obsessions: fep chocolate listpeanut butter honey bananathis female crimson sunbird taking an inverted bath in a flower petalsin senos si hay paraísohaim brown rice thickshindi duolingostudyspanish.comardha baddha padmottanasanabelieving in myselfwoodys health foods himalaya winter honeyglass cake cabinets with refrigeration settingshemprhododendronmoktukvan morrisoncoffeepoetry Bird of the month: Himalayan black-lored tit Source: eBird A spunky North Indian tit whose existence I had been aware of for a year, but did not see until recently. By chance, my binoculars picked up on its rockstar look casually rockin’ out in my yard. best recent reads: Taline Gabrielian’s Love-Myself Mindset Child Labor and Slavery in the Chocolate Industry Cocoa’s Child Laborers Mighty Earth’s frequently cited chocolate report this middle ages poem Study Spanish lessons on direct and indirect object pronouns anything by Rupi Kaur Current book: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Previous mood: We Are All So Lucky Accessories and photo by ArtAttractive.