After twenty one years in India, I am only now fully attuning to one of its quiet powers. India has always offered me a life that is crooked, unsterilized, and open to mystery, shaped by faith woven into daily life. Recently, by aligning myself with solar and lunar calendars, I have begun to hear Indian festivals as a living clock. What once felt like background ambience now reveals an ancient, communal way of keeping time.

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After twenty one years of living in India, I am only now opening myself fully to one of its most quietly magical dimensions. For me, India has always been a deeply mystical place. Not in a performative or exotic sense, but in the way it allows a life that is not perfectly straight, not fully legible, and not constantly explained. It is a place where I am largely left alone, where the world is not sterilized, where roads bend strangely or disappear altogether, and where faith and mysticism still live openly in the everyday fabric of life. There are moments here when I am genuinely unsure what is happening beyond the walls of my cottage in the Himalayas, and that uncertainty feeds something fundamental within me.

Like many Westerners who come to India, I arrived in my early twenties drawn as much by escape as by attraction. The West felt, and still feels, relentlessly planned. Every inch is zoned, optimized, curated, and made safe. There are few surprises left, and even fewer spaces where something genuinely untamed can persist. India, especially once you move away from the cities, is not like that. It resists straight lines, tolerates disorder, and allows contradiction. That nourished something deep in me when I first arrived, and despite the very real challenges of living here, I never lost my need for it.

Religion is inseparable from this quality of life in India, particularly Hinduism. I have always admired its vastness, ancient reach, and the way it seems to make room for every conceivable mode of human expression. Hinduism accounts for everything from work, devotion, renunciation, pleasure, suffering, family, and solitude. Indian culture carries this religious backbone so naturally that it becomes almost invisible to those living inside it. I am fully aware that the life I am able to live here would not exist without this deep and persistent relationship with the divine.

At the same time, I have never felt compelled to adopt Hinduism as my own. I do not mean this dismissively, and I do not begrudge those Westerners who come here and feel seized by it. In the hills where I live, you will see many white people who actively take on Hindu identities, mannerisms, and expressions of wisdom. For some it is sincere while for others it feels uncomfortably close to a kind of fetishization, like a trend wrapped in spiritual language. I have never been inclined toward that kind of expression. I am an outsider here, and I accept that fully and while parts of the lifestyle I adopt because they are practical and make sense, there are others that would feel performative to me. Like calling myself a Hindu, or a Buddhist.

My own orientation toward God remains rooted in the somber Christian tradition, supplemented and enriched by naturalistic, animistic, Hindu, and Buddhist ideas. These frameworks help me ask better questions, but Christianity remains the form that resonates most deeply. If there is a strand of Hinduism that has always quietly moved me, it is the life of the sadhu, the holy man who gives everything away in pursuit of God. Simplicity, renunciation, and devotion stripped of ornament. But even there, I have never felt the need to claim the Hindu variation of it as my own, preferring instead the mode of the Christian ascetic.

Because of this, I never spent much time formally studying Hinduism. I learned enough to understand its contours and to respect how thoroughly it permeates Indian life. I was content to observe, to benefit, and to live within a culture whose spiritual depth I did not need to possess in order to be nourished by it.

What has changed recently is my growing attention to time itself. As I have begun aligning my life more deliberately with solar and lunar calendars, I have found myself awakening to a dimension of Indian life that I had previously treated as aesthetic background. The festivals.

In India, sound is rarely just noise. Beyond the rhythms of daily life and the inevitable weddings, the sounds that drift across valleys and through villages usually mean something. They mark a festival that signals a threshold, transition, or important natural event. India has an astonishing number of festivals, and they are not arbitrary. They are tied to the sun, the moon, the seasons, harvests, and mythic time. When I began paying closer attention to the calendar, I realized that these sounds function almost like a communal clock that reminds us that we have arrived somewhere. A full moon. A new moon. A turning point in the solar year.

Where I once experienced these sounds as atmosphere, I now hear them as signals. An ancient, decentralized, and entirely free service provided by the culture itself. A way of keeping people oriented in time without screens, notifications, or advertising. This morning, for example, on the final day before the new moon, distant horns echoed from a hilltop temple somewhere down the mountain. I asked my assistant what it meant. He acted unsure at first because he has spent 15 years trying to explain things to me and has probably given up. But when I mentioned the new moon, his face lit up with recognition and he offered a more detailed explanation because they all know. This knowledge lives in the body of the culture.

Back in the West, nothing like this exists. There is no shared, audible acknowledgment of cosmic milestones. Holidays are announced through marketing campaigns and digital calendars, divorced almost entirely from solar and lunar reality. Time there is abstract, administrative, and transactional. Here, it is embodied, social, and sacred.

I feel now that this attunement will deepen my experience of living in India in a way I had not anticipated, even after two decades. What once felt like background texture has revealed itself as a living temporal framework. India has been quietly keeping time all along. I am only just learning how to listen.

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