Osho and love

I woke up to Nika's spastic laughter at ten in the morning. Not an ungodly hour by any means but after a night of debauchery ending at 4:30 in the morning I was hoping for a few extra hours. The one thing I want to do today is to see Lavra I thought as I was pulling on some clothes. I asked the staff for the private room that night as I was hoping for some good sleep asides from the privacy the room is named for.

After getting directions to Lavra monastery from the staff I left Dream Hostel for some breakfast at Puzata Khata with David, a Canadian from the Yukon who was just starting to travel. He may have been the quietest traveller I've ever met but he somehow made you feel comfortable in the silence he created. We ate potato-stuffed dumplings, chicken sausages, and dessert dumplings. I had a sweet dessert simply called cherry, which was made from almond-paste and dark chocolate made to look like big cherry, with my tea. David left to check out some guitars at a local music store while I jumped down 100 meters of escalator to hit the nearest metro station and ended up at Lavra within the hour.

Crossing behind Lavra from the park I came to the monastery complex where I came upon a no smoking sign with arrows pointing 5 km each way. No worries, I am quitting anyway. Smoking tobacco has always ben a chore for me, only occasionally taking pleasure in it. But nowadays I feel like I am only doing it to relieve social tension, which I like anyway, so it never really made sense for me to smoke. I headed towards the general direction of pedestrian traffic which eventually led me to a small chapel. I decided to enter to light candles and pray.

When I got in, there was a simple candle stall with the typically old Ukrainian woman selling her candles and icons to the left and a small entrance with the sign “for prayers --->” pointing to a small archway on the right. I bought three candles and went down the stairs which were steep and winding, lit by small recessed archways.

At the bottom of the stairs a monk was deep in prayer on the left side of the entrance. Straight ahead of him and to the right of the main floor, sarcophagi lined the narrow whitewashed hallway in recessed nooks. The faithful would walk the hallways, stopping to kiss each glass-paned coffin, say a prayer for a moment and continue to the next in a procession of preserved monks. Some had grey-brown wrinkled hands or feet protruding from their gold-woven robes.

Before the last winding hallway I came across a coffin that was half the size of the rest of them with the icon of a small boy at the head of the casket. The occupant was obviously taken at a young age or was an uncommonly handsome halfling. I stopped at another church on the way off the premises to listen to some Ukrainian language vespers, the choir of men chanting in a much more Benedictian flavoured manner vis-a-vis the Byzantine sound of Greek Orthodox vespers.

I was passing an empty expanse of garden with three rows of vines on either side of the promenade. I knew I was going the wrong way to get out even though it was towards the road leading off the premises due to the complete lack of people nearby. At the gate my fears were confirmed. Both gates, the larger one for the cars and the smaller one for the pedestrians, were locked. I decided that the risk of a torn crotch in my jeans from the spearheaded apexes of the horizontal bars of the gates were outweighed by the reward of saving a bunch of time walking back through the yard. I hopped the gate by climbing onto the inside ledge of the wall adjoining it and headed back through the grounds towards the metro station. I chose to walk on the front side of the monastery this time stopping occasionally to snap some shots on my way to the metro.

I met Lera over some sushi before going back to my hostel for a quiet night in. We said goodbye in front of Khreshchatyk metro station early in the evening so that I could prepare my bag for the plane-ride to London the next day. The plane was taking off at seven in the evening but with the length of time it takes to get to the airport I was planning on leaving at three. When I got into the main room in the hostel though Nika and two other hostelers were drinking beer and watching movies in the common room. The other two were a local multi-pierced-faced doll of a girl with studs through parts of her face that didn't make sense; but looked great on her somehow.

We started talking and trading travel stories, theirs mostly involving Russians as the butt of their jokes. The older guy was a Latvian who despised them due to the many years Latvian language and culture were repressed during soviet rule. Latvians get pissed when Russian-speaking people assume that they know Russian simply because they were ruled by Russian-speaking communists for so long- then proceed to switch to speaking Russian with them. Yeah, I would feel a sting there too if I were Latvian.

The pierced girl invited me to come with her and the Latvian for a long cab-ride to the suburbs to smoke some dutch skunk. “He is my driver” the Latvian was saying as we rode for almost half an hour to the end of a street facing in a more desolate suburb facing train-tracks. We got out and smoked. I was soon immersed in deep conversation about love and the teachings of Osho. “Do you know Osho?” she asked me. “Yes, of course, he was almost lynched when he was on my island” I replied, referring to the violent opposition that he received in Crete (see here: http://clubs.pathfinder.gr/osho_friends/458159). “No, he was never in Greece” they both concurred. Sometimes it's better to fold.

“Anyway, he wrote a book,” said the local girl, “in which they say you will find the answer if you just closed your eyes, focused on your question and opened the book to a random page. I did it and you know what happened?” The wait was almost unbearable. “What?” I asked. “The page I opened had one single word written on it: Love. The only page I saw in the whole book with a single word printed on it and it was exactly what I'm about. Love. Unconditional and trusting.” We went on to talk a bit about anarchism and the solution to the world's problems before dropping her off and getting back to Dream Hostel. I asked the Latvian what I owed for the cab ride and he asked his “driver” in Russian the same question. The driver replied that he didn't know and that he would have to call someone to find out. Wow, I thought, are these guys for real? “What do you mean he has to call? Isn't he a cabbie? Shouldn't he know?” I asked the Latvian. He said something to the driver and then told me the total was 160 gryvnia, a little steep for having your own driver. I gave him half that amount and went back to my room at the hostel for a nice long sleep.