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.

Bollywood Movie Stars

Like many people, we (mostly rusty) have always considered ourselves movie star material, but could never break into the industry. Some of you may know about Rusty's failed attempt in the Philadelphia American Idol tryouts in Sept. 2007, where, as Kelsi put it "he froze up like a scared little bunny rabbit." (Rusty disagrees and claims he was trying to show his "strong, quiet side").

In any case, we were walking down the street and minding our own business in Bombay when a man approached us with a business card from a modeling agency and offered to pay us each 500 Rupees to be in a Bollywood movie the next day. Although we were initially skeptical and thought it may be a scam, as you can see from these pictures, he wasn't joking (or was he?). We are now Bollywood stars!

Bollywood is India's primary movie industry and the second largest movie producing group in the world, next to our own Hollywood. Like Hollywood, the films aren't always timeless classics, but we have learned to appreciate them for what they are. One universal rule in Bollywood movies is that ALL movies MUST have several musical numbers, whether the movie is comedy, action, or drama. To convey what this means, imagine Bruce Willis in the movie "Die Hard." Got it in mind? Okay, now imagine the exact same movie with all the action, but titled "Die Hard the Musical" with Bruce Willis performing in multiple dancing and singing musical numbers. That is the essence of Bollywood.

Needless to say, the movie that we played in was a musical. It had the tried and true plot where the ballet dancer falls in love with the bad boy dancer, played by India's six-fingered wonder dancer, Hrithik Roshan. Hrithik can get away with saying "I'm all thumbs" in the literal sense, as he has two thumbs on his right hand. The nice thing is that this quirk is supposed to be very good luck in Indian culture, and the guy is quite a pretty boy and decent dancer to boot... a genuine triple threat... or is that quadruple threat if you count his extra thumb?

After costuming and make-up, we were ushered into a studio set up to look like a dance club. We had the modest hopes of getting a little screen time for our Bollywood resumes, but were completely overwhelmed when Kelsi was chosen as the first lead extra. In this role, she was assigned to be the main person in the background behind the dancers. Rusty was asked to sit on the floor at Kelsi's feet, and claims that this position should be titled "Assistant lead extra," although Kelsi isn't sure if he'll make it into some of the shots. She thinks it might be more appropriate to call him "assistant to the lead extra." You can see his picture up top and make the call as to whether you would want to see much of him if it was your movie.
In the end, we spent all day as extras in a super cool club scene, cheering for the dancers and doing something which the directors termed "dissing," "talking trash," and "being haters." We did our best, although Rusty kept trying to stand up (he felt it was a much deserved promotion). We also had a hard time knowing what trash to talk, so we just stood there saying "hub, hub, hub" with really animated expressions. Definitely Oscar material!

Taj Mahal

We LOVED the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. What's not to love since this wonder of the world was built as a love monument by the king for his wife who died while birthing their 14th child. In the picture above Rusty is trying to gently explain to Kelsi that he probably won't be able to afford building a similar monument for her (even though he still expects 14 children).