Mount Madonna, California

I drove from the casinos and saloons of Winnemucca to an ashram at the top of Mount Madonna on the coast of California. I'd heard there was a Hanuman temple there. I first discovered Hanuman after the fire. I needed to get away from the blackened disaster and went for a weekend to Taos. I found myself at a pizza place with crayons and paper place mats and I wrote and drew feverishly about the fire. My waiter was stunned by the story and told me to go to the nearby Hanuman temple where there was a ceremony that very night in honor of Lord Shiva. I didn't know who Hanuman was, or Lord Shiva, but I could feel that I needed to go. Years later I learned that Shiva is the God of Transformation, destroying all that that is not Divine, and Hanuman is the Son of the Wind, the breath. It was a few key breaths that kept me alive during the fire.

Mount Madonna was founded by Baba Hari Dass, a yogi who took a vow of silence in 1952 and communicates by writing on a small chalkboard. Over time I'd noticed that many of the teachers whose teachings I loved had Baba Hari Dass at the source. On the mountaintop deer wandered peacefully around the temple and I rose my cup of chai high in a toast to the Pacific out in the distance.

A question from a student in "The Yellow Book, the Sayings of Baba Hari Dass."


Q. Did you start your life like us with lots of demands, and what spurred you to give it up?


A. When I was six or seven, I would feel I was inside a box of earth and sky, and I would weep.


Once I asked my mother: "Take me out of this box of earth and sky."

She said, "I can't."

Then I said, "I'm going."