Death Valley Day 3

Somewhere in the last ten days the daily one hour commit to photo editing before going to bed took a backseat on the priority list. Got a break yesterday evening when it was cold and raining out and the kids and me ended playing "name place animals things" at home.

We also started on a 500 piece puzzle which was messed up by the little one after we had almost assembled 50 plus pieces to connect because she got "fursrated".. she almost says it like "firstrated"! We might start that again as long as no pieces were damaged. 

Managed to edit Day 3 photos. Two more days of photos to edit still left!

For previous photos and trip description go here..

Day 3 saw us going straight to the Kilns through the Wildrose entrance of Death Valley national park. These are some magnificent structures built hundreds of years ago to make charcoal from local wood. They must be easily 25+ feet tall as the entrance is close to 6 feet. You end up driving through a dirt road and it is better if you have a Jeep. We were all praying that no big rocks hit our vehicle as it is pretty desolate out there and there are no cell signals.

After the Kilns we headed straight to see the salt creek. There is a nice wood path (that reminded us of the Petroglyph trail in Hawaii)  and you can walk it in 30 minutes or less and you can see the creek run by, small fish, birds if you are lucky and a lot of butterflies.. not to mention the vast expanse of salts.

We continued in the same direction and went to the Borax works next. Borax was the main thing folks mined from the salts. So they figured out it was easier to refine the borax locally and haul it in mule wagons instead of taking raw material across the desert.

Now of course all this is gone because there are deposits outside death valley that are thriving and have more elaborate mines. At some point there were thousands of tents on the vast expanse in front of this wagon exhibit that sits in the middle of nowhere.. mostly Chinese migrant workers!

After this the plan was to go to Golden Canyon. We saw a coyote that we almost ran over as it crossed the road! There was no one else on that road and why it chose to cross just in front of us is beyond me.

We went for a hike through Golden Canyon as far as we could go which was a mile and a quarter. San and the girls decided to stop halfway and return while the two and a half men went on! The sun was almost directly over us and the previous experiences of walking in a shade within the canyon were not applicable. 

There were no clouds either. So the sky was a nice plain blue but the photos came out with "something missing"!

After this it was a drive back to Furnace creek visitor center for lunch. There is an auditorium there that plays a video of what to see at Death Valley at regular intervals. We caught that video and spent some time looking at the nice displays in the Visitor center. After that it was  a race with the sun to go see Dante's View and Zabriske point right before sunset.

We saw some of the most fantastic views ever at these two places. You can see the highest and lowest point in the continental US from this place on a clear day and we had a clear day! What you see below is an expanse of salt called the Badwater Basin. 

The sun was going down sooo fast! We caught some amazing hues on the rocks..

Unforgettable views!

Wanted to stay there for a long time just to admire what mother nature had created over millions of years, but the 20 odd cars that were there started dispersing fast and it got dark very fast and we started down from Zabriske point..

We had one more day at the park to cover some more must see spots.. It only got better on the last day!

Numbers..

We go to war because of possible WMD's in a country and eventually justify the war by saying 140 people in a village were killed by chemical weapons and the tyrant who killed them must go and the country must be democratized.

All of you know my feelings about how Americans are taught (subconsciously) that their lives are somehow worth more than the lives of people from other countries..  My kids growing up in here somehow get that "holier than thou" attitude inspite of my working constantly to bring them back down to earth.

28 lives is not far off from 140 and if you factor in any mutliplier for the Chuck Norris factor, it is even closer! An automatic weapon that can put out bullets at that rate is a WMD. Cannot understand why we would let these weapons be so easily accessible to anyone be it a sane person or an insane person.. because you never know when it can get in the wrong hands. 

So what are we going to do about automatic and semi-automatic weapons?

On the day of the shooting rampage, will go through the following reactions:

1- I will write a blog post which will practically be a copy of what I wrote after the previous such shooting and will realize it after going through archives and ask myself "when will I get the courage to do something about this other than write a blog post?" and will console myself saying "next election I will vote for guys who say they will bring in gun control" and also get frustrated after realizing "wait a second.. that is what I said last time".

2- Indian friends will say something about "too bad. America still a great country? My heart goes out to an almost great country.. etc. etc." 

3- My  Desi US Citizen friends will write about how their heart bleeds, how we have to take a stand against gun control, forward a few standard facebook articles that somehow articulate an equal percentage of truths and untruths that will actually weaken a stand for gun control, send some chain mails that urge you to share a hallmark card of sorts which say "1 share = 1 tear, 1 like = 1 hug for the victims" or some such thing.

4- A few friends who actually do some fact checking and are the intellectual types will either write articles which put forward "why gun control never happens" and the real facts behind guns in the US, statistical correlation of semi automatic weapons vs. number of mass shootings, etc. etc. and will be critiqued by some other friends who out of fear of losing their rifles and pistols will accuse them of focusing on gun control while we should really be grieving. There will be posts about how not all gun owners are insane killer etc etc.

5- My kids will freak out. Jr. usually throws up when she gets graphic descriptions of violence and the little one will sulk for a day or two and be angry at anyone and no one in particular to a great predictability.

Just yesterday morning there were helicopters above our house because the local high school which is four blocks away had a bomb threat. They closed two of the four schools that are within a 4 block radius of our house.. (no, kid you not.. there are really 4 schools within a four block radius from our house.. two elementary, one middle, one high school) and we had to wait to see if our kids school was going to be open or not. The local roads were blocked by cops and TV crews and we were glad that the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm. The kids were already spooked by this yesterday. 

We had gone through a similar experience recently with someone killing a bunch of co-workers at the Quarry up the mountain and more folks in the parking lot of the same high school and he was eventually shot by cops the next day..

So it was difficult for them to hear that school kids got killed by some insane gunman. 

Yes, we have it easy compared to the parents who have lost their kids today or have injured kids today or have to explain to their kids why their friends are not going to be back in their class when the school eventually opens.

Yes, our hearts go out to those folks. 

Yes, I cried after hearing this news and came home and hugged my kids a little tighter. 

But NO. There is no reason to stop voicing our opinions on gun control policy out of respect for the victims. That is non-sense and it is not trying to sway opinions on gun control by "exploiting" this event.

While driving home NPR was interviewing three people who were experts on "such matters" and one of them said "schools in the US are extremely safe and what happened today while horrid is a rare event!"

Seriously?! It is rare compared to what? There are more mass shootings in the US than any other country in the world unless you normalize it with the number of automatic weapons sold and even that statistic might be beat by some other country for all I know. 

Every week some bozo goes on a rampage and while controling said bozos is not practical, the damage will definitely be limited if he had to shoot one bullet at a time or use a knife. 

If we cannot stop these rampages, the least we should do is make killing less easier.

To all those folks who tell me to hold off on voicing opinions on gun control out of respect for the victims.. 

go shoot yourself!

We all react to events and things like this that get no real action towards a solution, will get a voice only for a short time after the event till Paris Hilton poses naked outside the Louvre or Justin Bieber gets his next girlfriend. Things like this trend on twitter and facebook for much shorter times than trivial matters. 

The human brain is amazing in the way it selectively forgets bad things and moves on. We all die peacefully or tragically and our brain figures out how to move on amidst facing death. This too will be forgotten by the public except for the folks who are impacted and next year the media will dig that up to do an anniversary of the event and things will fade away.  

Nothing wrong in talking gun control NOW while there are still a lot of folks who want to stand up for it.

ps. I am planning to recycle this post after the next mass shooting rampage in the very near future, as my heart is filled with so much optimism that we the people will do something about it now all of a sudden, given the age of the victims. 

Guru

The word Guru means "remover of darkness", someone who lights you up with knowledge. The darkness in this case does not mean literal darkness but the lack of knowledge!

If you go to Wiki, you see that Westerners manage to take a very important word and associate a negative connotation to it. That is really sad!

In days when word of mouth was the only way knowledge was transmitted from teacher to student for generations, a guru was everything to a student. We are taught at an early age in India "Maata, Pitha, Guru, Deivam" or  "Mother, Father, Guru, God" to put things in perspective for kids. We are also taught

Guru Brahma, Gurur Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheshwaraha

Guru Shakshat para Bramha Thasmaye Shri Gurave Namaha

which means "I salute my guru who is the embodiment of the Trinity of Creater, preserver and destroyer (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva)"

Most kids in India that I grew up with would treat our teachers with deference. Teachers word was gods word. That helped a lot till the Ph.D started, at which point my thesis advisor promptly said "I am not always right. You seem to agree with everything I say. Your job is to question me and come up with answers on your own!" 

That was enlightening in its own way. Be your own guru?! Was that the message?

Once that phase was over and a new balance was achieved in taking your teachers word as gods word with an amendment  that said "the guru is always right except when the guru says otherwise"!

My teachers appreciate me obeying them implicitly when they give instructions that are to be followed as part of the learning process. Be it my Guitar teacher or a teacher in any training class or Yoga class!

Bikram yoga works using a dialogue. It is called a dialogue because the teacher talks and your body does what the teacher asks you to do with your body. It is a dialogue between the teachers voice and your body. So if there is one thing that is still pretty much following an oral tradition of teaching, it is Yoga. 

This weekend some of us got an amazing treat. A chance to spend the entire day with Jim Kallett, a senior Bikram Yoga practitioner and teacher who actually does the Teacher training. 

This is like meeting your thesis advisors advisors advisor! It was an amazing experience as he shared his experiences of learning Yoga from Bikram, his wisdom and "trusting the process". 

He took apart every posture in the series with clinical precision and helped those in the room  one by one! After doing Yoga for almost two years, I finally learned what the dialogue "relax your shoulders" meant. 

One thing with the oral tradition is that the teacher says something, your ear hears it, your brain processes it based on the sum total of its vocabulary and experience and different people will still "interpret" the dialog. 

Jim pushed, pulled and stood on people (yes, at one point he stood on my back to prove that my body could do a pose with external help and it was up to my mind to get there on my own.. wish I had a picture of that) to make folks realize one very important thing..

Your body is capable of doing things that you cannot realize are possible. Everything is in your mind!

Now there are pages of notes from the all day yoga session, little reminders that go a long way in improving the practice. Based on what Jim said, in another 4-5 years, things should be a lot better! 

The whole day was truly enlightening, a series of light bulb moments. For many of the questions his answer was " I am not here to give you permission to take the easy way out. If that is why you are asking the question, do not even bother! You do what it says in the dialogue, no more, no less and that is the only way!"

At the end of the day, after talking and demonstrating non stop, he got up and taught a class! Do not know how he has that kind of energy. He said after a few years of practice I will also have that energy and that is good to know.

Jim Kallett is a Guru in the true sense of the word. 

He did an awkward pose where he stood on the tips of his toes. I can stand on my toe and was proud of the accomplishment till I saw him stand on the tips of his toes.

Apparently that is what the dialogue says! Nothing more, nothing less.. 

When we were done for the day, I instinctively touched his feet to take his blessing. He smiled and said "Good luck to you and your family!". That made my day!

Now Jim has piqued my interest in meeting his thesis advisor, Bikram Choudhury! Who knows, that also happen one day..