Gracias a las Himalayas que me han dado tanto.

Written in early July, website remodeling and a heavy meditation retreat have delayed publication of this post by two months. Thanks for your patience Jo.

Monthly Mood: When I Close My Eyes I See Bliss Balls

I thought I would have been in Parvati Valley for weeks by now, but I am nearing the end of my third month in my wee room where the sunlight filters in from 7:45-10:00 and where I am wheezing and breaking out in hives on half the nights from dust allergies.

I love my room.

Every week I step onto unknown dirt paths and into new restaurant establishments. The views are always changing. When I sit by myself on the green benches with my aloo parantha and look out to the left, the peaks have shed their snow. It’s easy to understand how some foreigners have settled here in Dharamshala for years on end.

This place treats me well.

 

These days I have been cherishing Lhamo’s Croissant, a cafe run by a pleasant Tibetan mother with the help of her two children. The cozy spaces assist me in drafting poems and learning Hindi.

Lhamo bakes with whole wheat and gluten-free flours. Her lemon tart is the best I’ve had. I always pair it with an Americano.

Lhamo met her husband while escaping from Tibet to India . They found Dharamshala’s climate at 1,800 meters above sea level to be far too warm for their liking. A couple decades after joining the local community in exile, her son will soon start school at Colorado State University.

Next door is RK Fashion. Beyond the narrow entrance is where I spend hours trying on cotton clothing. I sip chai with the owner Manish in order to savor life—and put off the future—a little longer.

We joke about his cow until his Taiwanese friend enters to pick up her daily share of fresh milk. She and Manish bicker at each other with great zeal. When the rains starts and the temperature plummets, I help myself to all the samples in the shop and layer up, cocooning myself in hemp ponchos and vibrant shawls. More chai is ordered.

Over at Hemp House, I continue to place treats into my allocated space of the cake display. The creations never repeat themselves.

I have suffered many a restless night, tossing and burning with urges to concoct novelties using my yoga teacher’s food processor. The apocryphal appliance is fond of quitting after a few seconds, forcing me to repeatedly jam the reset button until the motor whirs back to life.

The perpetual threat of a village-wide power cut patiently hovers over my head.

Sometimes I lug a few kilos of glass jars and ingredients over to my creation cave, just to trek back uphill to my room to retrieve the sieve that I forgot.

Other times my body quivers from exposure to cold tap water and punishing winds as a thunderstorm sets in.

After my original bald bliss balls, I used the limited ingredients I had to make coconut bliss balls and threw matcha powder in half of them.

The plate emptied in 15 minutes.

The HH owner had nothing to say except that I could make whatever I want.

I did that.

Masala chai and hot chocolate bliss balls, cinnamon raisin peanut butter bliss balls, chia puddings colored with beets and matcha and mango and layered and swirled, mostly-raw vegan beauty bars and tiramisu…

 

Using raw vegan “cheesecake” principles, I enlisted cashew and coconut cream to make normal and matcha tiramisu. The “cookie” base is essentially a caffeinated bliss ball, smashed flat.

I miraculously found little glass bowls for this new project. They were stowed in a dusty box at the bottom of a pile of stuff in an unlikely shop of electrical miscellany. The guy was so eager to rid himself of the bowls that he sold me the charming set of six at a hefty loss to himself.

In the last days people have been stopping me on the streets about tiramisu. Correction—people have been stopping me on the streets whining about tiramisu. I get heartbroken messages from Iyengar yoga students who hiked over to HH just for tiramisu, only to find none.

HH tells me new faces come by asking for tiramisu. How these strangers knew about the tiramisu remains a mystery.

 

This morning when Jo and I go to say buenos dias to HH. At this moment I am introduced to one of my loyal fans.¹ He tells me I should make a group chat for my goods.

Jo. Jo is one of my best friends. Jo is the strongest and most liberated woman to grace this planet. Jo is genuine. Jo is committed to her best effort at living mindfully even if it means renouncing the avocados from her sourdough toast.

My beautiful friend happened to book a trip up here when I happened to still be here.

Her presence has given the last two weeks a much-needed shift in energy. I have benefitted endlessly from having a close female friend who I can be myself with. To Jo, I pour out my deepest thoughts. Prior to her arrival my Dharamshala life had been lacking someone who made me feel understood.

Many friends are a call away, but physical presence is all difference. I am convinced that my new friends from the last three months are relieved to see me have a companion.

I look around our large community of Indian and non-Indian travelers. There are hundreds of us. Who else gets to walk around with a friend of four years by their side?

I know I am especially lucky.

When asked how we met each other, Jo and I get to say,

“Mexico.”

Day 1247

7 July 2021

“Pure food brings a pure mind, and in a pure mind is a constant memory of God.”
—Swami Vivekenanda

It’s world chocolate day but we all forget because we are setting up our stalls. Some of us have nothing but a stack of self-published quote collections. Others have dried blooms and crystals and printed signs and upright boards.

In Dharamshala, India, the hippy aesthetic is immaculate.

The first Wednesday Market of the season bustles in full force. Energy healing station. Veg momos. Kombucha. Chickpea omelettes. Yoni eggs and braided bread. Homemade shampoo bars and pussy potion. Half a dozen macrame stalls.

The stall I share with my Italian friend has zero gemstones. No flowering plants. Our signs are handwritten, some with a shaky Parkinson’s font. At the front is a row of wrinkled bras and cover-ups for thrifting from his Nepali girlfriend. The provided tablecloth is tacky and distracting. The one candid shot of our stall shows a stray dog passed out in front of our table. Atop the table is a clutter of empty coffee cups and half-eaten lunch.

I call us The Garage Sale table.

I sell slowly. My friend makes deals in rapid-fire.

No matter how shiny and fine-tuned and expensive one invests in his/her product, a market operates as a market. It’s about the interest of the people and what they are willing to pay for that interest.

As it turns out, India’s hippiest community suffers from a crippling case of nicotine addiction. For those paying attention, herbal replacements are the latest trend.

Pietro paid attention.

A while back I was gifting him and his girlfriend some mini bliss balls garnished with dried rhododendron and mint flakes. This topping was simply a pretty pinch of herbal tea. I had the package with me. Before any bliss ball was touched, we were already smoking my tea.

Three weeks later we’ve got PHD. Pietro’s Herbal Dream.

“Round flavor! Smooth hits! No nicotine!”

I watched as P arrives late and sells out a bucket in one hour, at $3 (200 rupees) for 15 grams.

Across from us a woman from the village is selling dumplings for 70 cents (50 rupees) a plate.

As the market draws to a close, an occurrence unfolds that truly warms my insides. I was serving three types of bliss balls: chocolate chip cookie dough (the shop had no almond butter and the peanut butter was overpowering imho), salted fudge brownie (for the first time I had ground a date pit into the bliss batter but people were delighted anyway), and half-baked (a blend of the two—think those soft serve ice cream machines where the middle lever is a swirl of the two main flavors—110% inspired by the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor).

When I estimate the cost of producing a bliss ball, it normally comes to 20 or 30 rupees. Today’s cost 50 me a pop. As an uncompromising consumer of only Indian chocolate, my cacao supplier was fleecing me at 140r for 100 grams.

It is now late afternoon and two nonprofit bliss balls remain. The young daughter of the momo dumplings lady comes over and requests both. I smile and she runs back to her mother and points and pulls fussy faces as she drags both ends of her mother’s scarf in a desperate plea. She and a couple siblings/friends and her mother were the only locals in the market.

The child’s dramatization produces results. Mom comes over. Mom gawks at my 60r price tag.

Despite my Nepali friend explaining in Hindi that the balls contain no sugar and are full of walnuts and almonds, the mother reprimands her daughter and the show ends with a firm no. They leave.

When taking into account the bliss balls I’d already eaten and given away for free, I just about broke even today.

I also knew that to have a child be drawn to my sweets, among of all the trays of munchies being sold around me, was the highest honor I could receive.

I certainly did not want her family to go home and her mom to buy a packet of palm oil-based cookies for 10r and give it to the kids to obliterate before they tossed the shiny plastic wrapper into the woods.

From my own upbringing and studies in human nutrition, I knew these children were in a crucial age for forming a lifelong habit of appreciating wholesome foods. This girl could not be more than nine years old. I am not capable of denying a child her bliss ball.

I approach them and gift the girl one.

Shortly thereafter her mom returns to my stall and buys the last one.

 

Day 1250

10 July 2021

“Thoughts arise from wants.”
—UG Krishnamurti

I sit across from a best friend. The flat white in front of me tastes like frothed milk with a drop of coffee. That is to say, I feel like I’m drinking a hot mug of ice cream.

The gravel road running next to us has been gutted out and shoddily filled in again by Jio, one of India’s largest cellular networks.

I use Jio. The signal is still shit.

My ears are overwhelmed by British accents. These days, my brain considers anything non-Hindi to be a mild disturbance.

Across the eviscerated road a lit up sign reads “Hotel Shivaay Marriott.”

I take a look at yesterday’s photos. We had snapped the facade of our go-to cafe.

I hand my favorite shot to Jo and ask,

“What’s the one thing that doesn’t belong?”

“The BJP flag.”

Her reply fires back across the wooden table without missing a beat.

There are so many innuendos and habits that I have picked up in the last year and a half. The tacky political flags, the cellphone company ironies, the name choices of hotels and restaurants.

What happens next is also full of IYKYK, and is a typical series of Indian events:

Jo, my aforementioned companion, orders pumpkin chickpea curry. She enquires about the gravies and is told all curries get the same sauce and there is no palak, or spinach gravy. Soon the server returns and announces that the pumpkin she ordered will take time. My famished friend says she’ll accept tofu chickpea curry.

Her food arrives and soon she is wondering where the chickpeas are. She spoons through the tofu bathed in a delectable tomato-based gravy. Not a single chickpea is to be found.

She gets up to ask them. They take the plate back. The wait is longer than expected. Much longer. When her order returns to our table, the curry is popping with tofu and chickpeas, but not only. The gravy has been mysteriously transformed into a suspicious shade of spinach, and its kadai vessel has sprouted a handle.

Her half eaten cucumber slice was left undisturbed, though.

obsessions:
ceremonial-grade cacao
rosemary
wine wednesday
friendship
americanos
cold-pressed virgin coconut oil
homemade coconut cream
basil
cashews
lemon tart
hemp

Bird of the month: Black-headed jay

A common appearance often confused with the even more common blue magpie, this species flaunts a porcupine-esque beard and yells at everyone in particularly unpleasant, crass tone.

The black-headed jay is owner of the tail feather shown in the second photo from the top of this post. Black stripes appear delicately painted by hand across iridescent blue.

A baby gallery of June-July bliss balling and calorie chasing <3

Self-explanatory clicks but the last three from left to right—Kangri dham, a traditional Himachali wedding feast; guesthouse shopping for Jo; and a mirror moment in 2005.

1- This particular customer took two bliss balls packed in a jar at the following Wednesday market. He later admitted that in the middle of the night he heard a noise coming from this jar.

The lid had not been closed tight and a mouse had joined the bliss balls, finishing one-third of a ball before getting caught. After shooing off the rodent my customer sealed the jar, woke up, rinsed off the bliss balls, ate them for breakfast, and was sorry he didn’t take more.

Explore my full archive of India and Monthly Moods.

Learn more about this round-the-world trip.