[sixties-l] Faraway Fascination Builds a Foundation for Life

From: radtimes (resist@best.com)
Date: Mon Aug 13 2001 - 17:17:53 EDT

  • Next message: radtimes: "[sixties-l] The Student-Labor Union"

    Faraway Fascination Builds a Foundation for Life

    <http://www.sltrib.com:80/08122001/travel/121005.htm>

    Sunday, August 12, 2001
    BY SUSAN SPANO
    LOS ANGELES TIMES

    India Supera, founder of Feathered Pipe Ranch, a yoga retreat center in
    western Montana, traveled far to find her direction in life. In 1967, when
    she was just 21, she set out on the five-year journey and spiritual quest
    that climaxed at an ashram near Bangalore, India. There she met a woman
    named Jerry Duncan. When Duncan died in 1972, she left the ranch to India.
    India was named by her father, an artist and a student of Indian
    philosophy. She grew up in Downey, Calif., but she was a flower child
    before the ^A'60s ever began. From age 7, she yearned to see the
    subcontinent and rummaged through used bookshops in downtown Los Angeles
    for novels about India and copies of old National Geographic magazines with
    pictures of fabled places such as Rajasthan, Ellora and Dehra Dun.
    For her, the road to India included detours: running away to Mexico when
    she was 17, living in San Francisco at the height of the hippie era,
    traveling to Europe with a dog called Roachie and finally setting off on an
    overland trip to the subcontinent through Europe, the Middle East and
    Central Asia, with little more than $200. She hitchhiked, almost died of
    hepatitis in Pakistan, threw away her passport in northern India (because
    she wanted to be a citizen of the world, she laughingly explains), washed
    her clothes in rivers and slept under trees with beggars and lepers.
    Her adventures in India were dangerous then and seem even more so now. She
    says she wouldn't want her children, Crystal, 24, Josh, 19, and Winter, 17,
    to travel the way she did. Still, she returns to India every other year and
    owns land in the holy city of Varanasi on the Ganges River. She was at home
    in Montana when I recently had a long chat with her.
    Q: I spent a month in India four years ago and came home shaken by the
    poverty. Does it seem a hard place to travel to you?
    A: Part of the hardness of India now is the crowds. It was a gentler
    country when I traveled there. There were 500 million people; now there's a
    billion. I would say that something's wrong if a person goes to India and
    isn't shaken because of the cultural difference. For me there was always a
    level of culture shock, no matter how many layers I peeled away. It is
    beyond anything we've been taught, how little people can have and still be
    happy.
    Q: Didn't you travel with your sister Vijaya part of the time?
    A: We ran into each other in Almora, a beautiful and then remote place
    in northern India where there were tigers and cobras. That was a
    miracle. She'd traveled through Asia to get there, but I didn't know it. I
    went to the river to brush my teeth and saw her.
    Q: At one point during your spiritual searching in India you vowed to give
    away everything you had at the end of each day. How did you travel with no
    money?
    A: I just had faith, and it wasn't always pure. Sometimes friends or my
    sister would pay my way. You will faint, but my sister and I used to sleep
    on the pavement at the old train station in Delhi. We would wander around
    and meet people who'd take us home because we were novelties. They would
    write letters about us to their friends in other places, asking them to
    take us in when we arrived. At that time, people were nice, and the hippie
    movement interested them.
    Q: Weren't you hassled by men?
    A: I was thin and androgynous-looking and wore Indian clothes. I
    learned how to call men who bothered me "sons of dogs." And I always felt
    safe in the crowd in India.
    Q: You lived for 2 years at the ashram of the holy man Sri Sathya Sai
    Baba. What was that like?
    A: I worked in the hospital there and learned natural healing from Sai
    Baba. The ashram has gotten fancy now, but 30 years ago, we slept outside
    or on the roof and cooked our own food. We did yoga and meditated. It was
    like heaven.
    Q: In all that time in India, did you ever do any sightseeing?
    A: I saw the Taj Mahal, the caves at Ellora, the temples at Khajuraho.
    I lived for quite a few months on a houseboat in Varanasi. But I visited
    these places as a religious seeker. At the time, there must have been 30 or
    40 of us who wandered around India like that.
    My daughter Crystal travels by herself a lot, meeting people and staying
    with them. In some small countries where there's no TV, the source of so
    many bad ideas, you can still travel the way I did. But I don't know if I
    could do it again.
    Q: What did you get from your travels?
    A: They taught me not to be afraid and gave me my work here at the
    ranch. I want to live my life in such a way that, when I die, any religion
    would have me. That's my motto in the end.

    The road to India included detours: running away to Mexico when she was 17,
    living in San Francisco at the height of the hippie era, traveling to
    Europe with a dog called Roachie and finally setting off on an overland
    trip to the subcontinent through Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia,
    with little more than $200.



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Aug 14 2001 - 02:25:05 EDT