FOR MOST OF US who have ever traveled to East Asia, the trip involves a several-hour flight across the Pacific. For Lucy Horne, her first excursion to Japan took her a full two weeks. She traveled by train. “Denmark to Warsaw, Moscow, Vladivostok,” she tells me the afternoon we meet. “And then over to Japan. I don’t like plane travel. You miss what’s in between. I wanted to know what was in between.”
Horne was in her early twenties when she made that trip, many years before she joined Kashi, an interfaith ashram in Sebastian, Florida, and became Swami Dhumavati. But even as a young woman, the “in between” experiences in life—the something that we miss because we are moving too fast—was what she was after.
She tells me the story as we take a tour of the ashram grounds. It’s the middle of January, but the lush greenery of mango trees and bamboo provides relief from the intense sunlight.
“I wanted to feel love and know the expression of love,” Dhumavati says of her younger, secular self. “The experience of oneness is the ultimate experience of love: totally at one outside yourself and inside yourself. The journey to Asia was about finding an experience of that, and the tools to be there—that experience of oneness—as often as possible. Ma gives me the hope that I can.”
Ma is Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, a spiritual teacher, or guru, who was born in Brighton Beach, New York. In 1972, the married woman with three young children had a mystical experience in which Jesus told her to “teach all ways, for all ways are mine.” Dhumavati laughs as she relates the story. “Ma told Him, ‘You got the wrong house. I’m Jewish!’” But soon Ma was seeking spiritual direction, especially in Hindu teachings. Four years later, she founded Kashi Ashram, dedicated to her guru, the Indian saint Neem Karoli Baba.
“The form we embrace is Hinduism,” Dhumavati explains, “but it’s in an interfaith perspective. Nobody has to become anything, or do anything to participate here. Any path, or no path, is welcome.” As we stroll around Ganga Pond, Dhumavati points out the Jewish Shrine, the Christ Garden, the Buddha Garden, and the Shiva Lingham, a phallic representation of the male aspect of the Hindu god.
For several years, Dhumavati was Kashi’s representative at the National Religious Leaders Roundtable, an organization sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which supports the full inclusion of glbt people in the life of the church. It’s hard to imagine this soft-spoken woman with pale gray eyes and wearing a saffron-colored shirt participating in raucous demonstrations and political actions, but that’s exactly what she did during her years with nrlr. When I ask her if she is the only gay person at Kashi Ashram, she laughs. “Absolutely not. All sorts of people come through. The interfaith thing is not just all religions; it’s all people—gay, straight.”
The ashram’s special relationship with glbt people began during the aids epidemic, when Ma would visit county homes where people with aids had been left to die. She used to travel several times a year to Los Angeles to visit the dying. In his book of essays, Last Watch of the Night (1994), Paul Monette describes how Ma would crawl into bed with men covered with KS and kiss their lesions. “She came to them completely unafraid of death,” Monette wrote, “honored in fact to be in its presence, and gave them all a bluesy sort of comfort. Without the God crap.”
Dhumavati points out the wooden dock where the community holds memorial services and scatters the ashes of the dead. “Some time during the 90’s, we heard about a crematorium in Orlando that had the ashes of about forty people who had not been claimed. We knew most of them had died of aids. Ma said, ‘We’ll take care of them.’ We scattered their ashes here, all but one, the ashes in a receptacle marked ‘Baby: aids.’ Ma kept those ashes.”
Dhumavati suggests that we continue our conversation on the banks of the Sebastian River, which forms the western boundary to the ashram’s property. We make our way there via the Memorial Boardwalk, which cuts through a dense mangrove forest. The planks of the boardwalk are inscribed with the names of people with aids whom the ashram has cared for. For about eight years, Dhumavati explains, during the worst ravages of the epidemic, she volunteered at River House, a hospice at Kashi, where those afflicted by the disease would come to live out their final months. “People would come from all over to die. Ma would also go down to the county home in West Palm Beach to visit babies with aids, guys in the aids wing. They were isolated, nobody visited them.”
At the end of the boardwalk, we come to the river, a placid, slow-moving tributary of the Indian River, the salt-water sound that forms the Intercoastal Waterway. On the opposite bank is the Sebastian River State Buffer Preserve, conservation land that ensures that Florida’s rampant development will not encroach upon the isolation and tranquility of the ashram. Dhumavati points out an osprey. “We’ll probably see a manatee, too,” she predicts. When I nervously ask about alligators, she assures me that the tide is wrong at this time of day, offhandedly adding, “I lost one of my dogs here to an alligator.”
Dhumavati was born in England. Her parents, conservative Christians, sent her to a girls’ boarding school when she was twelve. It was, she recalls, “an old-fashioned school” with old-fashioned ways of addressing girl-on-girl crushes. “They had this interesting practice called ‘cracking.’ There were rules about it. The younger girls could ‘crack,’ or have crushes on, the older girls, but there had to be at least two years between them. There were certain things you did: put sweets on the older girl’s pillow, make her bed for her. That’s as far as it went. It wasn’t supposed to be physical. That’s how they handled crushes. I was very confused, because I would really have crushes on girls and wanted to have a relationship.”
She interrupts her story to point out a manatee placidly swimming by. “You usually hear them—coming up for air—before you see them. He’ll come back.”
By the time she was sixteen, Dhumavati had outgrown the girls’ school. “The last two years, I was really lost. I didn’t want to be there. I felt very isolated, knowing I had these feelings but not having anybody to tell. Typical British culture: you don’t talk about your feelings.” She started drinking, smoking, having sex with guys.
“There’s another manatee. Two! Three!” As she laughs with delight, I try to imagine the repression she must have felt years before as a teenager.
After high school, Dhumavati worked as a secretary in London for two years, casting about for a direction to her life. “Christianity was dead to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t know there was something else, but I didn’t know the form of spiritual practice that would be mine. In school I had discovered the Dao De Jing. Amazing. That really helped me for several years. I taught myself yoga and meditation, the basics. I felt different when I did it. Something would change.”
During the early 1980’s, Dhumavati—still Lucy Horne then—spent some time at New York University, where, despite hating the city, she discovered her love of writing and photography. By now, too, she was acknowledging her lesbian feelings. When an acquaintance took her to her first lesbian bar, Horne “knew that was it.” It was shortly thereafter that she took that two-week train ride to Japan. “I thought I would be interested in the Buddhism there, but it left me cold. I didn’t want cold. I’d already done cold! Being in Japan was really about my coming out: learning about the lesbian community, meeting feminists. A wonderful growth time for me.”
In Japan, Horne met Jenny, an American lesbian, with whom she fell in love. Jenny related stories of her travels through India, of meeting the guru Neem Karoli Baba and of Ma Jaya, the spiritual teacher from Brooklyn. The two decided to make a kind of spiritual pilgrimage through Southeast Asia. “The sight of monks walking around Bangkok with their begging bowls—the humility, the simplicity—it got to me. And when I got to India, it was like boom!” They stayed at Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in the Himalayan foothills, where she experienced an “enlightenment episode thing.”
The two women eventually ended up in Nepal, where they ran a guest house for women and started a pre-school. Jenny kept telling her stories about Ma Jaya, about how gay-friendly she was. In an essay she has written about her spiritual journey, Dhumavati says, “I was surprised and grateful, but still felt guarded and wary—no one of any spiritual authority … had ever said that it was OK to love women the way I did.”
When their visas expired, the two moved to Taos, New Mexico, where they set up an Asian import business. Jenny introduced her girlfriend to Ma Jaya in 1988. “The first thing Ma said to me was, ‘How long have you been searching?’ It wasn’t until later that I realized that all this traveling I’d been doing had been a journey to get here.” In the meantime, Horne’s relationship with Jenny became an increasingly troubled one. “It was a very co-dependent relationship. I didn’t know who I was. I’d completely lost myself. A very dark time. Ma gave me the strength to break up.”
By the early 90’s, Horne was traveling with Ma and some of her other students to Los Angeles, where the guru was doing aids work. “It was absolutely amazing. She would go anywhere, talk to anybody, touch anybody, hug anybody. Horrible, horrible days, such sadness, and yet Ma was right there, the whole nine yards.”
In 1992, Horne moved to Kashi Ashram fulltime. In addition to volunteering at River House hospice, she also worked for the River Fund, Kashi’s nonprofit organization dedicated to working with people affected by hiv/aids both in this country and in Uganda, where the Fund helps support children orphaned by aids and war. “When I moved here, I had the audacity and stupidity to say, ‘Ma, I don’t want to be bored.’ The truth is that Ma is such an in-the-moment person that you are never bored!” I ask Dhumavati if she ever wonders if she has fallen into a new kind of co-dependent relationship, this time with her guru. “The relationship with Ma, with Kashi, is of the heart. When you trust your heart, you don’t often go wrong.”
Thirteen years after she arrived at Kashi, Horne, now Dhumavati, became a sannyasin, the Hindu equivalent of a priest or monk. Traditionally, each sannyasin, or swami, takes vows of renunciation. “In our case,” she explains, “there is only one vow: that we will take care of others.” But she also has taken on the practice of celibacy. “Celibacy is a subject that people get very twitchy around.” She explains the choice as one of “that” instead of “this.” “I don’t want this anymore, not because it’s bad, or taboo, not because I didn’t get tremendous joy and happiness. But because I want that more. To get there—to get to God—this is a distraction. This isn’t the goal. That’s the goal. Unfortunately, so often people think the physical part of life is the most you can experience. It’s not. It’s so not! Is it necessary to be celibate to get to God? No. But can you go fast to God by being celibate? Well, it’s one piece of baggage along the way that you don’t have to carry. It falls away.”
Dhumavati has been with her current partner, Sati, for over twelve years. When I ask whether she and her partner have sex, Dhumavati will say only that they have lived together and have a full and rich relationship while still being celibate. “People expect a swami not to be in a relationship. But some people—those who find themselves with a partner, with a family—it’s possible to do that and be totally in their spiritual practice, every moment of every day. It can be helpful for two people to be on that spiritual path together. But Kashi isn’t a dating service. We’re not a ‘dating community.’ We don’t do the dating thing. I have the blessing of being with someone who I totally love, who loves me, and we are being led by the same teacher.”
Dhumavati’s daily life begins with her spiritual practice—meditation and yoga.
From nine to five, she works in the ashram’s office, where her job focuses on marketing and sales. Later in the day, there is communal chanting and darshan, a kind of audience with the guru, in which Ma will speak and teach. Dhumavati also teaches yoga classes. “In our tradition of yoga, Kali Natha Yoga, there is a flow. You don’t hold a pose, you move. By opening your body, you open your mind. Your mind is overtaken by the flow. You’re in it. Every part of your body is sacred and has sacredness in it and needs to be open and has a reason to be open.”
Several years ago the ashram created Kashi Rainbow, its glbt group. “Ma’s desire is to have everybody feel safe and welcome at Kashi. Ma accepts us, not only accepts but embraces and enjoys the gays. Her banter with the gay guys is hysterical, just wonderful.” As a lesbian, what particular gifts or insights does Dhumavati bring to the ashram and the outside world? “An understanding of suffering. The potential for the role of anybody who is different is helping people to understand that we are not all the same and to be open to that. We are the opportunity or catalyst for people to accept more than just the norm.”
At the same time, Dhumavati stresses that she is sometimes “disappointed in how caught up in the worldly and secular gay people are. As gay people, we often grab love wherever we can. Sometimes we figure it out really well; sometimes we don’t. We get damaged, and find it harder to go beyond the secular, let alone go beyond the damage from religions and religious crap.”
From time to time, allegations have surfaced that Kashi is a cult. What’s her response to that? “When I’m free to come and go as I please, when I have control over my life, and what I spend and what I do, I do not think I am in a cult. There is an undercurrent of fear around spiritual groups, and rightfully so, but the fear gets ridiculously out of proportion. The whole thing about gurus: it’s so easily misconstrued in the West. The relationship with a guru is a blessing, someone who has been on the path already, who is showing you where to go. How much better could it be?
“What speaks to me in Hinduism is the idea of a multiplicity of the deities. From my years in Asia, I learned the perspective of seeing God in every part of every day. Every component of life is sacred; every aspect of humanity is sacred. Even destructive elements can be sacred. Awareness is the root of it—awareness of anything and everything.”
Philip Gambone’s latest book is Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans
