Books: What We're Reading While Abroad

Often, what would be a simple task at home is a big, time-intensive process while traveling, and this leaves LOTS of time for reading. (The photo above is a sleeper train from Goa to Kerala). This enables us to read about one book per week on average. We usually just trade for new books with other travelers, but we still have quite a few, very heavy books that we lug around with us. Here is a rundown on what we've been reading while abroad. You may notice Rusty's list is a little longer than Kelsi's, but remember that he went to Law School and had to get through masses of pages, so he reads 2-3 books for every one Kelsi reads.

Novels:

1. A Girl Named Zippy (Both)
2. Twilight (Both)
3. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (Rusty)
4. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand (Rusty)
5. On Chesil Beach (Both)
6. The Awakening (Rusty)
7. The Secret Life of Bees (Both)
8. Nepal Folk Stories (Kelsi)
9. The Kite Runner (Both)

Historical:

1. Devil in a White City (Both)
2. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Both)
3. Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer (Both - For some reason, Kelsi read twice)
4. Seven Years in Tibet (Both)
5. Life in the Far West (Rusty)

Science/Social Science:

1. The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs (Rusty)
2. The Making of Modern Economics - Skousen (Rusty)
3. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson (Both)
4. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins (Rusty)
5. When Elephants Weep (Both)

Spiritual/Philosophical:

1. A New Earth - Eckhart Tolle (Both - Rusty twice)
2. The Art of Living - William Hart (Both)
3. A Theory of Everything - Ken Wilbur (Both)
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig (Both)
5. The Art of Happiness - Dalai Lahmma (Rusty, Kelsi currently reading)
6. Nausea - Jean Paul Sartre (Rusty)
7. Life Ahead - J. Krishnamurti (Both)
8. Tao Teh Ching - Lao Tzu (Both)
9. Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert (Both - 2nd time for both of us)
10. Textbook of Ayurveda - Vasant Lad (Kelsi)

Wedding Pics

We've had many requests to see wedding pics, so here's a few highlights (if you're not on Facebook). Finally 9 months later - can you believe that?! Now we've been married 9 months.

Starting with some adorable kids . . .

And an adorable photographer!
Kissy Kissy!

Our niece Ashley helping out without being asked to! What a wonderful flower girl!
KISSY! KISSY! Again . . .

A Sneak Preview caught Rusty off-guard!

Rusty's sister, Briana, died her hair in our wedding colors special for this day!

Man Love

India has some social codes prohibiting hand-holding and touching in public. Fortunately, for those who enjoy a good cuddle, this applies only to contact between opposite sexes. You will almost never see a husband and wife holding hands or touching when they are out and about. In fact, if two couples go out together, the husbands will stroll along holding hands with each other, typically with their wives following along behind.


We have been travelling in India and Nepal for almost five months now, and had become quite accustomed to same-sex interdigitation and cuddling as a normal, everyday, occurrence. Then, one evening as we were enjoying a walk along the Arabian Sea, we realized that everywhere we looked, men were holding hands and cuddling each other. We had our camera with us, and here are a few pictures we shot:

We have noticed that same-sex affection, or "man love," as we have dubbed it, is actually a non-homosexual, worldwide phenomenom. Maybe it is Westerner men who are missing out...  or maybe not...

Finishing the Guitar

We finally finished our guitar yesterday, and thought we'd post a few more pictures of the final product as well as a few more showing the 16 day process.

Holding our new guitar with Chris, our master luthier teacher.

It sounds amazing... perfect intonation and accoustics!

Our first piece of wood.

Amazingly the stack of wood clamped together below turned into the guitar neck.

The finished guitar neck.

Rusty working on the headstock.

Kelsi making the rosetta.

Rusty bending the sides and trying not to burn himself over a torch-heated pipe.

Kelsi preparing to inlay the rosetta with the router.

Unfortunately, this is the only group picture we have with the other couple (Malachy and Stephanie from Ireland) that was 2 weeks ahead of us on their guitar. We became quite good friends and hope that our travels will cross paths again.

Rusty laquering.

Our Decision to Become Luthiers

We seriously can't get away from India! There are so many things to do here, and we love all of it. This country has devoted much of its existence to exploring the nature of reality and spiritual practices, so we have spent a lot of time looking around at what all of these practices can offer (you can read more about that in our previous blogging.) After all of our spiritual exploration, though, by some cosmic chance, we became neighbors with Jim, a physically huge, but big-hearted Utahn, former Weber State footballer. As we got to know him, he introduced us to a luthier teacher in the area, and we are now totally hooked!

Although our decision to become luthiers might seem strange to many of you who are acquainted with our backgrounds, education, etc., it really is a perfect fit for us. The results and progress we see each day thrill us, and and we just love the calm and meditative state that we experience in this cingular-focused work. While being a luthier isn't necessarily easy, it is uncluttered by rigidity and is surprisingly flexible. Aside from this, if one is diligent and becomes a master luthier, it can even provide a living. Chris, our England-born luthier teacher, moved to India to open a center, which now provides a comfortable income for his family. However, we aren't necessarily set on taking the same course in life as Chris, as becoming a master luthier really requires a lot of dedication and time. However we develop as luthiers, we are really pleased to have stumbled into this, and definitely intend to continue enjoying the fruits of this work for our entire lives. We'll just let these pictures explain an experience which can't really be put into words.

By the way, a "luthier" is a guitar-maker just in case anyone is wondering exactly what that word means, and we are hand-crafting a guitar of our own. We certainly didn't intend for our ambiguous description of "luthier" and the above worshipful looking images to cause anyone to even momentarily worry that we joined a new religion, which are exceedingly abundant in India.

Below is a picture of the progress we have made so far during our guitar-making course, and a picture of Chris, the master luthier (check out http://www.jungleguitars.com/). Like we mentioned, we get to keep the fruits of our labors as luthiers, although it's a bit difficult to haul around a guitar in addition to all our other stuff. We'll look forward to strumming out a sweet tune for anyone who requests when we return home!

Spiritual Seeking

We originally came to Goa, India for three reasons. First, Goa has paradisaical beaches. Second, Goa is Christian and we wanted to attend a Christmas Mass in one of the famous white-washed cathedrals. Lastly, we wanting to take paragliding lessons. The beaches were beautiful but sunscreen is expensive, Christmas Mass was nice but only one night, and paragliding didn't work out too well on the sandy beaches of the Arabian Sea; the sand kept getting in our noses, eyes, mouths, and filling up the paraglider each time the wing went down, and after Kelsi got dragged across the beach one too many times, we flunked ourselves out of the course.

After all this, we purchased a train ticket out of Goa, but as it happened, we stumbled into so many interesting distractions that we cancelled the ticket and are still here. Mostly we have been taking interesting courses, and since India has more courses than any other place we have ever been, and we could just stay here learning forever...

The first course we took was an introductory course in Iyengar Hatha Yoga. The basic idea of Iyengar Hatha Yoga is to initiate awareness and wisdom through bodily movement. Iyengar Hatha Yoga is a famous school of Hatha Yoga that teaches a very structured and safe way of making the Yoga movements which appealed to us and (apparently) to the loads of Germans in our Yoga class who seemed to really like the precise instructions and structure of the Iyengar Hatha Yoga school. The picture above might give you a better idea of what a Hatha Yoga move looks like when performed by two beginning Yogi's.

In the US, what people think of when they hear the word "Yoga" is usually the bodily movements of Hatha Yoga, which many Americans use for exerice. In addition to the bodily movements of Hatha Yoga (also called "Asan Yoga", there are also various Yogic schools and philosophies which are also under the broad umbrella of "Yoga," which means "to join" body and mind/soul. The Yogic practices that might help an individual to initiate awareness, such as: breathing Yoga, acro Yoga, partners Yoga, laughing Yoga, dancing Yoga, sitting meditation Yoga, chanting Yoga, mantra Yoga, humanitarian service Yoga, scholastic Yoga, and many others.

Although some Yoga practitioners diminish Yoga's connection to the Hindu religion, the Yogic practices were developed by monks to assist with meditation, and many of these practices were recorded in Hindu religious texts called the "Vedas." In truth, though, many of the Yoga practices are non-religious and don't have many attendant religious accoutrements from their Hindu origins. Such is the case with Hatha Yoga. After our first week of Iyengar Hatha Yoga, we liked it so much that we moved into a bamboo hut inside the Yoga center and continued to take yoga lessons for a total of three weeks. As you can see from the following picture, our modest jungle hut even included a few choice pets! (We found this one in the corner by Rusty's toiletries bag.)

As we advanced along in our Hatha Yoga courses, we were moved from the beginner afternoon class to a morning class from 6:30 to 10:30 AM. With the entire day open, we decided to see what other courses we could find. A friend recommended that we take a look at a 13 day program called "The Twelve Inquiries," which is taught by a group called Great Freedom (later changed to "Balanced View." After attending several morning introduction classes, we decided to jump into the course. We won't say too much about it, although it was really interesting, and we recommend that you check it out at http://www.balancedview.org/.

We finished up our Great Freedom (Balanced View) course and our intensive Iyengar Hatha Yoga courses almost two weeks ago, and decided to move to a different town just down the beach so that we could study Ayurvedic Medicine. Ayurveda is basically traditional Indian medical science, and it is considered a sister study to Yoga. Below is a picture of the facility where we are studying Ayurveda. As usual, Kelsi is vying to be the top student in our class of two.