Christmas Holiday arrives at long last

A long semester, with discussions about the school’s official search for a new principal, Jeff’s election to a special Core strategy committee, and Barb’s service leading the elementary school, wound to an especially tight and busy close, with late-night grading and report-card-comment sessions. Happily, both Chris and Cole seem to have managed honor roll grades as well as good health.

We look forward to 3 weeks in the far south where it is always warm. First to Kanniyakumari, Cape Comorin, the southernmost point of India. Chris and Jeff can now claim to have traveled the north-south extent in six months, after their July visit to Panamik in the far northwest – that area is isolated six months of the year by snow-covered passes.

Kanniyakumari (formerly known as Cape Comorin) is a notable Hindu pilgrimage site; its two tiny offshore islands recently gained more prominence with the addition of a temple to Swami Vivekananda on one, and to Tamil poet ThiruValluvar on the other island, and a small overloaded ferry to both. Swami Vivekananda was mentioned in the book Encountering God, from Bozeman to Benares, as the sole Hindu representativa to the World Congress of Religions in 1893, in Chicago.
Now, the guides at the tenple tell us that the Swami was uncertain whether to make the effort to take his message of enlightenment to the Americas. He swam to the island in December 1892 and meditated there without food or water for three days. Then he returned to the mainland and proceeded to Chicago

Soon after the Vivekananda Temple was built on the one island, the state government decided that the other island needed a bigger monument to a regional hero – the poet Thiruvallur whose great epic poem had 133 stanzas deserved a statue exactly 133 feet high. Strangely out of place and defiantly local (the Tamil separatist movement is a touchy subject in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, and New Delhi), this monstrous statue to a literary hero is still quite impressive to visit.

The Cape is the official meeting place of three great bodies of water, as several guides reminded us: the Bay of Bengal on the east; the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Indian Ocean that starts here to the south. As such, it is a place of religious pilgrimage for certain devout Hindus, who visit the (rather ugly) temple there, and bathe in the waves.
Just before the end of the semester, Coleman was researching a report about Martin Luther King. He found in MLK’s autobiography a fascinating connection – King visited Cape Comorin in the spring of 1961 to observe the marvelous annual simultaneous sunset-and-moonrise over the oceans. We stayed for the sunset, though the moon’s cycle was not so aptly timed in December.