13. The Beach is a Beautiful Place

Fig 13-1,2,3,4: Sunset on Repeat
(click bottom row to enlarge pictures)

I wish that there was some way to upload the covertly shot video footage that accompanies the above still shots of a woman dancing to the sun setting over the Arabian Sea.

Jecca and I stumbled upon her one night, during the most beautiful sunset that I think either of us has ever seen, and there she was: a normal enough woman, wearing a skirt and a bikini top, listening to some sort of cd or mp3 player, and celebrating the setting sun by doing a confused sort of modern dance consisting of the repeated motion of bringing her hands together near her heart, and then fully extending her arms out to her sides as if she might miraculously rise into the sky, over and over again. This woman seemed determined to dance until the last bit of light had left the sky, and the catch here was that whatever song she was listening to wasn’t long enough, so she would have to halt this celebration every few minutes to stop, rewind the song, and then start flinging herself around again. If your religion is the setting sun, and your hymnal comes in the form of one song, religiously repeated, then don’t you think you would owe it to yourself (and to the sun, for that matter) to figure out how to use the repeat function on your cd player?

There have been fleeting moments when I look around at all of the white kids with dreadlocks, all the OM symbols or pot leafs embroidered onto clothing in all seriousness, or people engaging in these sorts of religious routines, and forget that I don’t fit in. These usually only last a minute, and this particular event certainly wasn’t one of those moments. Lest we forget, if even just momentarily, we have reminders like these all around us: we truly are surrounded by hippies.

Fig 13-5,6,7,8: Sunset at Varkala Beach
(click bottom row to enlarge pictures)