Welcome back to Himalayan Orchard!
[Here is an audio version of the occasional Letter from Himalayan Orchard, which is also available via a WhatsApp group. Let me know if you’d like to be added!]
The Summer Solstice has now passed and the south western monsoon has officially reached us from the Bay of Bengal. Following a drought over winter, the spring (April) and summer (May and June) have been remarkably wet and relatively cold, or at least chilly in the evenings, and we were lighting the wood-burner after dinner all the way into early June.
The apple blossom took a battering of heavy rain and hail before the hail nets were put up in early May and so the apple crop is looking minimal, with some trees bearing no fruit at all.
Sitting in the evening on the sky terrace at this time of year under the grapevine canopy with its nascent grapes, the sun sets to the north of the Fuji-shaped hill across the valley in the erstwhile Princely State of Kumarsain. The ducks and chickens, including four recently-hatched chicks, have all gone to bed, and in front of me is the brand-new yet-to-be-inaugurated pizza oven, complete with arty-farty rustic finish. Once the cement has fully cured in a couple of days’ time we’ll try it out and if all is well, we’ll be offering applewood-fired, homemade sourdough pizza on a regular basis.
I made the whole shebang myself, including the mini Eiffel tower it sits on as an extension to the terrace, a process which involved driving back from Chandigarh with a jeep-load of refractory fire-bricks – about a month of fairly constant effort overall. However! I am very grateful for the constant reassuring and constructive input and support (via WhatsApp) from the renowned and distinguished architect, Romi Khosla – whom I am fortunate to call my friend.
Remarkably we have had three architects staying with us recently, on different occasions, all of whom I am very glad to say inspected and said very positive things about the yoga shala, aka HYMAC, which is finally not only finished but has hosted our first Buddhist meditation retreat back in April, led by Lama-ji Yeshe Rabgye from Chandigarh. Lama-ji also was very positive and we are greatly looking forward to seeing him back here for his next retreat next spring. On the last day of the retreat he unfurled and strung up the Buddhist prayer flags that we bought last year in the Spiti valley – an incredible other-worldly valley of ancient Buddhist monasteries relatively close to here, and where we are looking forward to revisiting after the apple harvest.
Read more: Letter from Himalayan OrchardComing up in July we have our first yoga retreat in the new building with Pragati, and Lucinda is coming back from Cornwall for the third time in October.
Romi, by the way, is also an expert on the Buddhist monasteries of the Western Himalayas, having written a book on the subject in the 1970s. He came here not in his capacity as an architect but as a participant on one of our monthly cheese-making courses led by good friend and maître fromager François from Amiksa cheese. François has been running his cheese-making weekend workshops here for the last couple of years, and seeing as we now have a full-size pizza oven, I decided to join the course and learn how to make our own mozzarella. This involved visiting the forest Gujjars early on Saturday morning and being blown away when finally the huge buffalo emerged out of the forest mist, groaning and bellowing like humpbacked whales, to be relieved of their rich creamy milk.
Here’s a poem by William Stafford:
You and Art
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;
and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.
Until the next time, keep well, be happy, namaste
Himalayan Orchard 