It's About The Journey

Metamorphosis

2011-06-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I last wrote, and that feels strange. Its been a long time since I've felt like communicating at all about anything that is remotely touchy feely or emotionally charged. Instead, I've been in action mode. My long-time housemate moved out to shack up with her boyfriend, so I've been re-organizing my home and moving in another housemate which, for a nester like me can be slightly traumatic. I've also been launching some projects that I can't talk about yet, but lets just say that some of your wishes for this blog to morph into something else may be on the brink of happening.

It would be wrong to say, then, that I have felt numb in totality. But, I have felt rather deadened in many of the areas of my life that were so vitally aware and ever changing while I was traveling in India. It's as if my sense of wonder has dissipated, dissolved, and been replaced by eyes that see not in Kodachrome, but black and white and shades of grey. Even the great mysteries that revolve around "why" and "how" and "who" and "when" have lost their pull and I feel anchored by practical conundrums like "oil" versus "gas", "family wedding" versus "bank account", "long hair" versus "short hair." In other words, questions that make for lousy blog copy.

Perhaps I've just been shrouded in the collective shadow that has enveloped the Pacific Northwest this Spring, the same shadow that has sat over the area since last October and which shows no signs of vacating the premises anytime soon. While much of the country bakes in record heat and battles tornadoes and fire and rising tides, we live in a perpetually chilled and gloomy green cocoon. I feel like I am seeing the world through gauze, lying still and quiet, waiting for the next phase of the journey to start...only I suspect, or is it fear, that I'm going in reverse, from colorful butterfly to work-a-day caterpillar.

My first few days in Darjeeling the whole town was overrun by ladybugs. They were everywhere, filling the air, blessing the walls, the trees, the cars, the people with their presence. It was magical. But by the end of my time in the mountains, their bodies covered the paths and made the air feel empty and ordinary once again.

So many parts of my life are dying away, I realize now. When I was in Agra I wrote of feeling like my inner child had grown up. This wasn't a mournful feeling, but a relief and a release. The almost willful determination that I'd had to keep a sense of naivete and childlike delight in the world, was replaced by eyes that found beauty and joy in parts of the world and in even the darkest aspects of our own humanity. I came home with a new strength that allowed me to see what I wanted with the kind of fierceness that I had when dealing with rickshaw drivers or storekeepers in India who tried to sell me something I did not want.

When I first returned I also had this burning sense that I had to leave Seattle, and soon. But then I sank deeper back into this world, realizing that it is not a change of geography that is necessarily beckoning to me, but a change in form, in size and shape and texture.

Having been turned off and shut down and uncommunicative, I find now, now that I need to write once again, that I have been, am in the midst of metamorphosis.

What does the butterfly wrap themselves in when it's time to transform to the next phase? The butterfly, like those Darjeeling ladybugs, dies and litters the ground with tattered wings.

Perhaps we humans get the chance to sprout wings over and over again, to fly and rest and fly again. I hope so. In some deep place inside I might believe it. Though this phase in the transformation seems to require a complete submission to the the death of parts of myself that no longer serve. I've been grounded for several weeks. And only now do I feel that I am aware of a new stirring of life. I've crawled into the cocoon to await the next awakening.

It's curious to me that at this junction my step-mom should be taking me, my step-sisters, and their families to Duck, North Carolina with a stop-over in Norfolk, Virginia...my childhood home.

Doomsday

2011-05-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of press about the end of the world bearing down on us. Whether it comes on the 21st of May or sometime in 2012, it appears that we may be on the cusp of destruction.

I have a friend who channels a Native American wise woman and this wise woman once said, "Yes, the world is headed for a cataclysm, but remember, just because everything as you know it will be destroyed doesn't mean that the outcome will be bad. What springs from the destruction may be more wonderful than anything you can currently imagine."

As I've gone through several personal cataclysms over the last decade, I've tried to embrace this wisdom; I've tried to hold onto this hope in the midst of my dark nights of the soul.

But my dark nights keep getting darker. And that makes it harder to hold onto the hope.

Since I've returned I've been mired in depression. The depression is the flavor of a depression I've been battling on and off for the last several years, but now it seems bigger and more unwieldy. I think it's made me sadder, darker, bleaker, than before because I'd hoped India had vanquished it and it is extra dispiriting to find that it was waiting very patiently for me to return. But that also makes sense because much of my sadness and grief springs from my feelings about Seattle.

I've debated writing too much on this topic because, unlike in India where most of what and who I wrote about would be unknown to my friends reading the blog, writing about Seattle means writing about a place that so many of you know and love, and that makes sharing my feelings about it trickier. I certainly don't want to offend anyone and I certainly don't think anyone else should share my warped feelings.

Here's the thing: I love Seattle and I loathe Seattle. There, I said it. Whew.

Seattle, for me, is like the boyfriend everyone says is perfect for you, but who ultimately makes you feel bored with your life and then makes you feel bad for wanting more from your life. Seattle is like the boy next door who is handsome and strong, but lacks curiosity and passion. Seattle is so temperate that I wonder if it even cares about or wants for anything. And don't get me started on the passive aggression. As I like to say, Seattle is sooooo passive aggressive that the weather follows suit.....it never thunders or lightnings or even really RAINS....it just bathes you in a constant whining drizzle......

So, what keeps me here. Seattle is beautiful. It's outwardly perfect. It's surrounded by snow capped mountains, but nestles itself next to big water. It's green and lush and filled with beauty. I have a gorgeous house to call my very own. I have friends, most of whom came from somewhere else, who are passionate and curious, seekers who were drawn, like me, to the calm beauty of this place. And I'm part of a theater community filled with talented and joyous souls that I adore working with and watching work.

I don't know. I don't know why that isn't enough. Seattle makes me crazy because it is so wonderful and yet it doesn't thrill me. I feel like it should thrill me. It did, once upon a time when I was 25 and needed a place where no one pushed me or expected anything of me or needed me to do anything special. Seattle, which lacks the mania of New York, the ambition of LA, and the aggression of Chicago, gave me all the room in the world to figure out who I am, to explore the dark spaces of myself while basking in the incredible natural scenery of the Pacific Northwest.

Unlike in India where I had to accept that privacy was in short supply, here in Seattle I retreated from much of the world and holed up in my house for the better part of two years and no one really seemed to notice. I've made huge messy public mistakes and had a few small successes which most of my friends never knew about, because of the isolation and the inward focus that Seattle engenders in so many of us. Or maybe Seattle just enables my own innate tendency towards reclusiveness....Or maybe I'm just prone to depression and isolation which engenders further depression.

What does this have to do, you might ask with the impending end of the world? I was reading today a personal manifesto written by a guy I really dig named D.K. Brainard. He's an astrologer and all around advocate for personal and planetary change, he's doing his darndest to inspire people to wake up and take responsibility for not only their own energetic and spiritual health and happiness, but also for the well-being of the planet and all the creatures that call it home. He's trying to rouse us to be conscious participants in the global sea-change which is threatening to destroy much of the old way of doing business and which holds the possibility of bringing in a a new, healthy, vibrant, ethical and empathetic way of co-existence. You can read his manifesto, entitled "Who are you and what do you want?" here.

Like the Native American woman that my friend channels, D.K. and many spiritually inclined folk believe that we are not so much headed for a literal doomsday, but a series of potentially violent and dark events which will threaten the health and well-being of many, if not all, of us who dwell on the Earth. And, judging by oil-spills, tornadoes, rising flood waters, it may well be that the planet itself is gearing up to join the fight.

If you don't want to read all of D.K.'s post, let me tell you this, he writes that because of the escalating darkness, the schisms between countries and factions within borders, not only do the stars say that "We are in the throes of a global identity crisis," but that he can feel it intuitively. He talks about "the inner disconnect between our soul longings, our aspirations and the culturally programmed assumptions of who or how we should be in the world." He says that many healers he knows have noticed that business is dropping off because so many people don't want to wake up, don't want to do the work of asking who they really are. People are frightened of taking steps to break free from a life they don't want because it's such a giant leap of faith to trust that the life they dream of might actually materialize...that last part is my very personal interpretation of what D.K is saying.

Though I haven't been going out and drowning my anxiety in fast food, like D.K. alludes to in his post, I have been trying my best to check out with tv and comfort food. When the sadness became almost unbearable last week I went to the pound and adopted a little dog I've named Maisie. She needed someone to call her own, and I needed something to love, something to wake up to, something to make me care about my day. We are both pretty lucky, I feel.

Though Maisie gives me a reason to get out of bed, if only to let her out to pee, the depression is still sitting comfily in my house and in my soul. It makes me feel heavy, unmotivated, and extremely disconnected. I've become numb.

But reading D.K.'s post has given me a shot of hope. According to him, I'm not a pathetic 41 year old woman shut up in her house with only a little dog to love, but I'm a soul that's clued into a global phenomenon; life is supposed to be throwing this darkness at me so that I can figure out how to choose to fight for my life, to become a warrior in a global revolution....

D.K. writes:

What we’re being asked to do now is find out what we really want. The start of finding out what you want is to stop lying to yourself. If you hate your meaningless job, have the heart to speak that truth. That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to quit it today (maybe you will), but telling yourself the truth does start you on the path towards freedom....it’s time to decide which side you’re on....If you don’t have the balls to fight, then go ahead and eat your McDonald’s and watch your TV and surf your Internet or whatever else you do to shut yourself away from reality and pretend the world isn’t going to hell around you.....If you are on our side, though, it’s time to make your own declaration of independence.....it’s time for us to get to work.

So, what do you want out of your life?

Here's the thing....Seattle is breathtaking. But it may no longer be the right fit for me. That's my truth. Not because my material needs aren't being met, or because I don't have a community that I adore and that I want very much to learn and to grow and to work with, but because something in my soul dreams for more, not because Seattle is "less", but because the kind of work I'm supposed to do can't be found here. I'm talking about Soul Work here....not necessarily actual paying job work. Though, who knows, maybe they are one in the same.

I don't know. And I don't know what the work is. And I don't know where I'd go if I left Seattle. And ultimately I don't really know why I'd leave.....except for thunderstorms.

I've been saying for years to anyone who would listen that I miss thunderstorms. I tell people that I dream of moving away if only to experience thunderstorms on a regular basis. I'm pretty sure most of those people I told thought I was joking, or at least that I wasn't really serious. I mean who leaves such a beautiful, temperate place for a more extreme existence? But I mean it. Thunderstorms make me happy. Blissfully happy. And I think in them lies a clue to my broader happiness.

I'm not interested in being temperate myself anymore, of being only safe, tucked into my cozy, perfectly fine life where I want for very little and where I am not needed very strongly by much of anyone except Maisie. I'm interested in joining the revolution that D.K. speaks of, the revolution where we allow ourselves to feel more, to connect more, to express more of our true, authentic, unique and crazy selves so that when the world as we know it does come to an end, there are enough of us left standing to create a new world built not on fear and exclusion but on love and inclusion, a world where we look out for each other and our planet. And even though that kind of revolution is fought peacefully, it requires thunder and lightening and passion and going out into the world to figure out where I can be of use, to figure out where I'm needed.

In India it was very easy to see where and when I could be and was of use. They are a culture that thrives on interdependence. But America is a culture that applauds autonomy and independence. It's scary to ask for help here, and it's often considered condescending to offer help by those who need it most. Or, maybe I'm just wired to believe those things....But I want to be of use and I think there must be someplace in America that I could thrive and help other people thrive as well.....

As we approach the end of the world as we know it, I want to put my oar in, I want to sign my recruitment papers, I want to enlist in the army of souls who are volunteering to wake up and figure out how we steer this planet towards the light. I guess it means I'm going to have to endure a bit more of the darkness as I wend my way towards my own truth, my soul's truth. And I may just learn that my soul is telling me it's time to start thinking about letting Seattle go. I just pray that I don't have to set off in darkness, that if and when it is time to leave I am drawn to the next place with a clear, resounding, and joyous call.

Padded Cell

2011-05-16T21:12:00.001-07:00

You know those stories about explorers who can't ever settle down and get comfortable in the "real" world? I can relate.

Not that I think I'm Indiana Jones, or anything. But the stillness of the back to normal is very disconcerting. My dis-ease is heightened by the gripping bouts of fatigue that hit me out of nowhere; jet-lag is a monster and this monster owns me even a week after I've landed. I feel, at times, like I've suddenly discovered that I'm strapped to the table in some institution designed to keep me safe and, consequently, as if all that I learned and became available to in my travels were the discoveries of a mad-woman.

I continue to wake up between 4:30 and 5:30 in the morning, just as I did in Darjeeling and Varanasi where the allure of the sunrise gave the early rising an air of mystical import. Here, in Seattle, the early hour feels like a cheat of good sleep. I mentioned that on facebook and my friend, Truman, wrote to suggest that I might try looking at Seattle with the traveler's eye, using the early hour here to explore with my camera. It is a wonderful suggestion, one I've carried with me for the last day as I've struggled to ignite my sense of curiosity about home, a place I think I already know the depth and breadth of.

What I notice most, right now, is the cleanliness, the affluence, the ease, not only of my own life, but of everyone around me. Even when I was hit with a massive car repair bill three days after I returned, I was aware that, although it's a major hit to my bank account, that I have the means to pay it off when I was living, only weeks ago, with families who couldn't afford vital health care treatments that were a fraction of a fraction of the cost of my car bill. I eat single meals in restaurants that cost what families of 5 or 6 in India eat off of for weeks.

Aditya, one of my hosts in Delhi, explained that the reason so many Indians are fastidious about the cleanliness of their homes and yards while piles of trash and filth lay just outside their gates, is that the idea of communal stewardship doesn't exist in India. That's not universal. I met one couple in Santiniketan who personally pay for a group of people to clean up the trash in their neighborhood and to dispose of it properly in a landfill. Aditya works with a group struggling to save several acres of forest on the JNU campus in Delhi. But, there is a long way to go before the general population of India cottons onto the idea of pitching in to keep their country clean.

Something else that I discovered in my last week in India was that there isn't a word in Hindi for privacy. This also explains a lot. I rather wish I'd known that at the top of my visit. It's hard to have expectations of privacy when you know you are living someplace that doesn't know what it is.

But if you think about it, there is an interesting dichotomy there. You have a huge population that has little to no physical space issues, no privacy issues, but they do not work together to care for the space that they all share.

Back home, I'm aware that we are the opposite. Americans tend to hold their personal space and their affairs private, but we take great pride and ownership of keeping our streets and shared spaces clean. Working in my yard yesterday, overgrown as it always is in the spring, I was aware of my duty to clean it up for my neighbors, to make sure the trash that was hiding in the brush was disposed of and the sidewalk clear of branches that might impede the flow of traffic.

And after a few days of relaxing and relishing my private space, I find I miss the intrusion of strangers when I walk down the street. No one comes up and asks where I am from, no one returns a smile; there is a decided lack of curiosity about the things around them, which, as I've been saying, I understand.

Our western world is clean and ordered, the expectations are set-out for us about behavior and social interaction. When we drive down the road we all know what lane we must stay in, for the most part we all put on our signals when we intend to turn left or right, we only honk in an emergency. I would venture to guess that most of us know how our day will go, or at least guess we do and are seldom surprised. We don't travel through our day alert of cows in the path, monkeys descending from the trees, the bag-boy at the grocery store surprising us with a mystical revelation.

We live in a world where front porches are disappearing because everyone wants to stay closed into their private spaces, which is something that had, before India, been a defining part of my character.....I was a person without a front porch who was selective about who I invited into my house, into my personal and tender spaces. In India, I felt like my borders got teased out, softened; I felt like a soul evolving. Existing for so long in a place where doors are always open, where the village comes out to meet you, where babies are thrust continually into stranger's arms for photographing, where you become family in an instant, made me aware of a longing I have to be a part of my world, to be involved, to be connected in a more intimate, less private sort of way.

Yet, here I am in my porchless home, feeling aimless, disconnected from both India and this life that I've known for so long in Seattle. It's no wonder, I suppose, that I imagine myself a mad woman, because I'm caught between lives, between realities, and where I was so sure last week that I could create any reality I want, now that I am back in my so clearly defined life, I have trouble believing that that is true.

Photo Finish

2011-05-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

Jet lag owns me at the moment. It can take me down anytime it pleases and keep me asleep for as little or as long as it likes. My soul and body are finding it hard to be completely in Seattle, though they are no longer in India, as well. I seem to exist in two realms, and if I had to name those realms they would simply be "Awake" and "Asleep."

I've been forced to do stuff today. Responsible stuff like dealing with the bank and getting my car and it's dead engine towed. The last two boxes that I shipped from India arrived and I unpacked them and felt like, "This is it. I'm all here. All arrived. My adventure is over. Tied up. Concluded. The End." I left everything out on tables for the day, though, so that I can process longer, leave the door ajar till I'm ready to close it for good and all.

I've also been uploading all my photos....or at least a grand amount of them. There are still some areas that might be flushed out a little more when I have the energy to sort through the thousands of pictures I took. As it is, I'm afraid, should you choose to peruse, you might also find yourself hunting a bit for the gems. I don't have it in me to go through and label who is who and all, just now. But if you've been following along, I suspect it might be a little like a scavenger hunt and you might just be able to put names to faces and illustrations to events.

So, I'm just gonna make a list of links here to galleries. I hope you enjoy them. I don't know if this is the last chapter, or just the last one for a few days, a week, what have you. But I am giving myself permission to step away and linger in the moments of reconnection here in Seattle.

Once again, your company has been invaluable. Each comment and private message sent has been cherished and made each step of this journey more rich. So, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Now...The pictures:

Mumbai

Fort Cochin

Keralan Hill Stations

Lucky and Lakshmi

The Backwaters

Santiniketan

Hindu Village

Holi

Darjeeling

Varanasi

Jaipur and Agra (The Taj Mahal)

"Aathite Deveo Bhavya."

2011-05-01T19:11:00.000-07:00

Being home is like returning to Oz. I suppose that's fitting since Seattle is known as the Emerald City. But beyond that happy coincidence, lie the magical aspects of living in one of the cleanest cities in the world, in one of the most advanced nations on the planet.

Getting drinking water from the tap, sleeping in a bed with springs, going into a grocery store and not having to wipe dust and dirt off the boxes, fruit, veggies, or swipe flies away from the meat are all rediscovered joys. I knew how much my groceries were going to cost. I didn't have to argue with the sales guy over using a 20 dollar bill. I'm reveling in my home which is filled with color and beauty, not locks and tin trunks filled with God knows what. I'm waiting patiently to go to a restaurant this afternoon to order food which will be served on plates that are unlikely to be suspect, germ-wise.

I can pick up my phone and call friends far and wide. My Internet is lightening fast. Texting is called "texting" and not SMSing, and I can do that too, with pictures attached if the mood strikes me.

It's amazing how giddy all of these things make me. I literally giggled when I bought my groceries. I said, "My BED" out loud 20 times before I could accept my good fortune and fall asleep, sound asleep, blissfully asleep, feeling as if my ordinary pillow-top mattress had been transformed into the most opulent feather bed made for the most glorious queen.

One thing has been unsettling and that is the silence. This morning I sat at the kitchen table and felt like I was drowning in silence. All I could hear was the ticking of the clock, and as any bad horror movie will tell you, that's a disturbing sound when left all on it's own.

I left Seattle fearful of the impending lack of silence in India, and I returned unable to comprehend the quiet. Where are the packs of dogs barking, the sacred cows mooing, the sweepers moving dust around, the calls to prayer blaring in loud speakers, the horns announcing, the people talking, the peacocks squawking, the laundry being beaten against a rock?

In the silence of my kitchen, my espresso maker sounded like a jet plane with only the ticking clock to compliment it's song.

I haven't seen too many people yet. The few I have all ask the same question, "How was it?"

I don't have enough perspective yet, I tell them, to deliver the summation they all seem to want...the sound bite....the elevator speech. Going to India for three and half months might be one of those things that can't be explained in any satisfactory way to someone who hasn't been to India themselves. Like childbirth. Unless a miracle happens and I get pregnant sometime sooooon, I won't really ever be able to understand what giving birth feels like, physically or emotionally, or how, given the absolutely intense physical ordeal some women have, why they would do it again.

But there is one nagging loose thread that wants to be pulled. It goes back to something I asked in my first week in India, when I wondered what this Indian idea of "duty" in relation to visitors was all about, and why does it seem so foreign. Over the months as I was repeatedly a guest in other people's homes, I tried to unravel the mystery. I also tried to reconcile the stubborn insistence that many Indian's had to feed me, even when I was sick, and with the absolute inability for many Indians to actually listen to what I, the guest, wanted and needed.

As chance would have it, a young Indian girl who was traveling by herself from Varanasi to Delhi befriended me at the Varanasi airport. She had come to Varanasi to take her university qualifying exams and was on the way home. She was obviously a very independent young person. She is intent on being a doctor, isn't worried about marriage. She told me how her parents were very forward thinking and how they weren't "hung up" on all the more traditional aspects of raising a daughter in India. What they wanted from her amounted to three things: Be Helpful, Be Respectful, and Trust in Your Heart. She said, "I don't worship God very much. But I worship my parents."

She plied me with questions about my trip and somehow the idea of duty to visitors came up. So, I asked her what that was all about. She said, "We explain it as Aathite Deveo Bhavya. It means, Guests are God. No one knows what God looks like, so anyone could be God and should be welcomed into the house, country, our lives, accordingly."

Wow. It's so simple. If each person you meet could be God, then best to pay your respects, bring them sweets and food, just like they would when they go to Puja at the temple. No wonder no one listens to what the guest actually needs. After millennia of worshipping a pantheon of Gods, the Indian folk probably figure they've got the process down. After all, rarely, I'm guessing, does Ganesha say to a devotee who walks up to his shrine with sweets and food, "Hey, listen, I'm really not feeling well today, so I'm afraid what I need instead of candy and biscuits is a little peace and quiet and time to sit and read a book."

The other glitch in this system, this practice of Aathite Deveo Bhavya, is the presumption that neither they themselves or the people that they encounter everyday could be God. I mean, they don't offer the gal who sweeps their floor every morning biscuits and tea, nor do they force their mal-nutritioned cooks to partake of the amazing chicken curry that they've spent all day slaving over. They turn their daughters into burdens, their wives into work-horses, their husbands into good-for-nothings, and their planet into a dumping ground. But, guests are God.

As I re acclimate to the joys of western living, I find myself making sure that I take the time to really say hello to each old friend I greet, to hug them with all I've got. Not only does it feel blissful to be able to hug and touch another human being in public, I am newly aware of how special and beautiful each of them are. Not only have I been a guest in India for three and a half months, but India, in some respects, has been a guest in my life and heart, an entity that I tried to be respectful to, to listen to, to learn from, to be fully present with. I want to make sure that I am engaging with my "same old-same old" life here in America with the fresh eyes and open heart that I gave to India. I want to remember that not only are guests God, but so am I, so are you, so is this planet.

While I settle into backyard bbq's and relish the clean streets and put together quality of life in Seattle, I also want to hold onto what India taught me about our humanity, the complexity of it, the room we all have to be fragile AND strong, smart AND bone-headed, adventurous AND cautious, clean AND dirty, available AND shut away, full of grief AND filled to the brim with joy......

Touching Down

2011-04-29T04:26:00.000-07:00

I am back in the good old USA, in the Newark airport. I'm watching the royal wedding and reveling in the deliciousness that is my vanilla soy latte.

When I bought the drink I didn't have to wonder how much it would cost and when I gave the cashier a large bill for a small purchase, she didn't insist that I magically come up with smaller bills that I don't have, as was the custom in India. When she handed me my change without any hassle, I positively giggled at the ease with which the whole transaction had taken place.

Stay tuned in the next few days for a few more entries and a whole lot of pictures.

Till then: thank you, each of you, all of you. This trip has been so amazing, full, rich, terrifying, wonderful, awful, exceptional, brilliant...... and part of what has made the unpredictability bearable and manageable was your company, your kind words, your travel stories. I feel like I am coming home to more friends than I had when I left, because you have all been such steady companions on this journey.

I look forward to sharing the adventures ahead with all of you...mine and yours!

Exodus

2011-04-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

I can't believe that it is my last day in India. I didn't sleep terribly much because of the excitement of going home and because my nerves for traveling are really ramping up. While I was getting dressed this morning I stopped, suddenly, and stood in the middle of the room saying out loud to no one but myself, "I am in India. I've been in India for three and a half months. My trip is coming to an end. I'll be home tomorrow. I'm in India." It was like I had to fix this reality, solidify it, own it one last time because tomorrow the reality will be totally different.

Last night I stayed in the home of Aditya and Mridula who I'd met back in Santiniketan. They are two of the country's leading historians. They have a great home filled with eclectic furniture and books and wonderful artifacts and mementos of their studies and travels throughout the world. Picture tribal masks from various African countries, Mexico, Korea and Japan mixed with Buddhist and Hindu statues, alongside, plastic thermometers from New York City. If you had asked me what the home of two of the leading historians and academics in the country would look like, this is what I had pictured. Cluttered, warm, full of the joys of finding treasure in odd and exotic places. Aditya showed me his newest find, a piece of gnarled wood discovered in the forest next to his house while he and his daughter were out on a walk. It is something I would have lugged home, had I found it.

Yesterday afternoon we went to a lecture at their university given by the man who had taught Aditya and Mridula history. He's kind of a historian rock star. The house was packed. This historian is close to 90 and almost blind, probably almost deaf, and was completely oblivious to the fact that 99% of the house couldn't hear more than 20% of his words. Nor did he acknowledge the piercing feedback that would terrorize the room whenever the technicians tried to find a way to mic him enough to be heard. People would be fiddling with mics in front of him, piercing noise would threaten to deafen his audience and he just kept reading his notes. It was uncomfortable to watch.

But it was also beautiful. Hundreds of people from the ages of 17 to 80 sat and gave this man their total attention, when someone did need to navigate through the crowd, who were literally sitting in the aisles, to help with the sound issues, they said excuse me and were very polite; you could feel the room oozing with respect for this man, and each other. At the end of the talk everyone applauded and speeches were give about how it was an "exhilarating talk" despite the fact that no one heard it, students took pictures of the little man at his table as if he were Paul Newman.

Can you imagine an historian commanding that much respect and attention and kindness in America? Sadly, I cannot.

I spent my first two nights in Delhi with Chandana and her father, Ajit, and her daughter Nandini. I was, of course, taken such good care of. Chandana was in full mother hen mode, but also allowed me full sway to excuse myself and nap and take it easy. When I finally admitted that I might need another prescription to get this stomach bug under control, Chandana phoned Dr. Ganguly and then ran out at 8:30 in the evening to get the medicine. Ajit, played chauffeur while I just stayed home and played the dutiful patient.

Ajit, it turns out, was once the leading economist for India, "held the top post". He is still, at 86-ish, whip-smart and funny. Nandini has only just graduated from university and is socially and intellectually buzzing with brains and beauty. Yesterday was her 21st birthday and the house was being readied for a large party, friends were calling and there was an air of festivity and the hope that comes from stepping into your adulthood held and cared for so meticulously by her family.

So, Delhi has been, for me, an immersion into the intelligentsia of India. It's a completely different side to the country than any I've seen before. I've seen glimpses of it in Santiniketan, but to be in these two wonderful and warm homes, surrounded by art and humor and conversations that go leagues above my head has been a wonderful way to end my first visit to the country. Not only is it a new and fresh view, it's a place to wonder, one last time, how I got so lucky to be on this adventure in the first place.

Today I had a long visit with Aditya and then went to the tiniest beauty parlor I've ever seen to get my feet scrubbed and my face cleansed so that I can leave just a little of the dirt of India that's been absorbed into my being, behind. I still have plenty of India in my lungs and digestive track and, of course, my heart and mind and spirit.

Just now, I've awoken discombobulated from a nap I've taken in Aditya and Mridula's living room. They are off at a big lecture. I could have joined, but I knew I wasn't up for being social and that eventually I'd have to rest. Summer came early and suddenly to these parts a few days ago and the temperatures linger around 105 degrees outside and the air-conditioning isn't in for the season yet in this part of the house. So when I was waking up, I was aware that I was sweating and achy and slightly nauseous. I worried, for a moment, that I might be sliding backwards, health-wise, but then knew it was just the extremity of the heat.

Back home it seems to be raining and cold. Several facebook status updates from friends in Seattle indicate that there is even snow in some parts. As I look outside at the lush tropical forest which sits on the oldest mountain range in the world, I was told, I feel both here and there, up and down, in and out. A peacock is somewhere, calling, which is both a reminder of the exotic nature of where I'm sitting (there are wild peacocks right outside!), and as familiar and comfortable sound as I know. When I was growing up I could hear the zoo peacock everyday; his voice would float across the river to my house along with the occasional baboon yell. Right now, I am 41 in India and 6 years old in Virginia. Both.

But not really.

"I am in India. I've been in India for three and a half months. My trip is coming to an end. I'll be home tomorrow. I'm in India."

When I was going to sleep last night, I discovered that the house I'm in is in the flight path of the Delhi airport. I started my journey in Mumbai, staying in a home in the flight path of that city's airport. With all the other noise in India, I haven't heard an airplane, outside an airport, between then and now. I could feel the circle closing. In 24 hours I will be in the Newark airport. In 35, I will walking through my front door in Seattle. In 35.1 hours, I will be taking a shower and trying not to go instantly to bed.

While I write, I am aware of a deep well of sadness, grief even, to be leaving this place. I feel frustrated on some primal level that here and there, have to be so far apart, that a choice has to be made. With all that India has taught me about being able to hold multiple realities at once, I cannot really be both in India and in Seattle at the same time. I can love India and hate India, I can wilt in this extreme heat and yearn for it immediately when I arrive in the cold and wet Pacific Northwest, I can want to throttle the shop-keepers here within an inch of their lives and, yet, revel occasionally in the absurd ritual of bargaining for every little thing. But I cannot be on two continents at once.

Not really.

So, I must leave. In order to go home....and I use the word "home" deliberately, specifically, strongly, then I have to peel away the fingers of my heart that are wound so tightly and resolutely around this place. I must drag those angsting parts of myself kicking and screaming into the airport and onto the plane.

I am rather surprised to discover that there are parts of myself yearning to stay. It's been such a tough few weeks. For a while there I wanted to go back to Seattle early and was sure that I'd never look back if I did. But then the gifts from India kept coming, bombarding me till I could open my heart once more to this strange, unfathomable place and now I can feel the bittersweet, tender bits that love this land and it's people with every fiber of their being.

But the leader in this exodus, who is gently prying the other parts away and pointing her finger to the future, is ready to leave and is packing nothing but gratitude for this amazing and dynamic land. I feel like my inner child has grown up, gone on the great adventure she'd always dreamed of and learned, at the end of it, how to love being a grown up in her own right, how to place boundaries that really mean something, how to say "no" without feeling guilty or worrying that people won't like her, how to find peace and to enjoy silence in the midst of chaos instead of trying to insist that the world around her quiet down, and, most importantly, how to let people into her heart even when they scare her, or annoy her, or mystify her. I think I'll always be an observer, but instead of observing from the place of a young and wounded child who is afraid to fully participate in relationships, in career, in life, for fear of getting hurt, I think that child went through a series of intense growth spurts and returns to the United States, on the verge of real womanhood.

But that's tomorrow. Today, for 4 and a half more hours, I am in India. I've been in India for three and a half months. My trip is coming to an end. I'll be home tomorrow. I'm in India.

"Next Time"

2011-04-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

I’m hanging out in my hotel room in Agra, hometown of the Taj Mahal. I arrived yesterday afternoon after a 5-hour drive from Jaipur.

My mood was not good. My body was not much better. I went up to my room, closed the door, turned on the TV and tried to forget that I was still in India. Eventually, the fact that I hadn’t eaten became a mental health issue, so I ventured out into the town. I had to walk about half a mile to get some chips and water, which was about all I thought my system could handle, if that.

Agra is like every medium sized town in India I’ve been in, full of dust, dirt, trash and people trying to get something. Two little begging girls started to follow me, one even turned on the water works, “Meeeessssss (Miss), sob sob sob, Meeeeeessssss, sob sob sob.”

I discovered that I had no feelings whatsoever for those two little urchins. I snapped, “Chelle Jow, Chelle Jow” which is a really rude way of saying, “Get lost.” They hung on. As I kept saying, “Celle Jow,” and the one girl upped the histrionics of her routine, “MMMMMeeeeeeesssssssss, Mmmmmmmeeeeeeeessssss,” the younger quiet girl started laughing.

Eventually, a man on a motorcycle came and put himself between the girls and me and told me to go on ahead. I was grateful for the help. I tried to let his kindness reignite my love for India and the majority of kind, warm, helpful souls that I have met, because they have held the majority. Unfortunately, when a country has billions of people, the minority can take up a lot of space and sap a person’s energy.

Eventually I found a store, bought some supplies and started the walk home. When I was looking for the store, I had told a bicycle rickshaw man that I might get a ride on my way back. By the time I reached him on my return journey, I was being followed by 5 auto-rickshaws that I’d already told to go away, and several bicycle rickshaws. I went up to the guy I thought was my guy and said, “Are you the guy I spoke to?”

“Yes.”

I pulled out the card with the map to the hotel to make sure he understood that I had only a short way to go, and where we were going. Ten other drivers crowded around me and started trying to say they knew better how to get back to the hotel.

I waved my finger at all the interlopers and said, “I’m talking to this man!”

How much has changed since those first days in Mumbai and Fort Cochin, huh? Remember when I let rickshaw drivers boss me around?

I got home and hid in my cave of a room, determined not to go out unless absolutely necessary. I even thought of not going to the Taj Mahal this morning, staying in my cave till I had to get on the train tomorrow to go to Delhi.

By dinner last night, I was in my darkest mood yet since I arrived in India. I sat at the table in the small hotel with the two couples that had freshly arrived in country, all four people full of wonder and awe at the color and spectacle that awaits them. They talked about the difficulty of dealing with drivers and salespeople almost as if it was cute, not nearly as annoying as people say it is.

I am really proud of myself. It took all of my effort not to rain on their parade. I held my tongue and squelched all the bile that has been building up from the dealing with the harassment of never being able to walk down the street without being yelled at to buy something, to look at something, to take a picture with so and so and then being asked to pay for the picture I was asked to take.

That morning I had not been as reticent to speak out. My Jaipur guide, RV, who lived next to the hotel I was staying, had asked me to dinner with his family on my last night in town. I had repeatedly told him that I was sorry, but my stomach was not up for food. I was very nervous about having a 5-hour drive the next day and being caught in the middle of rural India with the desperate need to find a bathroom. After the seventh or eight time I had said I couldn’t come over because I couldn’t eat, RV said, “Just come over and meet my family. No food. I’ll introduce you to my niece.”

Of course, I had to say, “Yes.” Mostly because I didn’t seem to have a way out. When I got there, I met his lovely sisters, his mom and dad and his three year old niece. I aped it up for the little girl who found me, at first, very disconcerting, but who warmed to me eventually. Soon she was dancing and flirting and we were all having a great time.

Then, RV said to me, “Now you eat.”

“No, RV, I’m sorry, but I can’t eat.”

His whole family was staring at me, expectant. I was informed that the desert I would have was made especially for me. It was good for an upset stomach. It was made out of milk and cheese.

I said, “RV. I’m sorry. I’m allergic to milk and cheese.”

He said, “No. Come one just a little it won’t hurt. If you eat this every morning you will never get sick.”

I said, ”RV. Milk and cheese has been known to paralyze me. I can’t eat it.”

He literally rolled his eyes.

Everyone else stared. He told them to get the food. It was brought to me. I had a bite or two, thinking," I will eat this, go home and take an aleve and hopefully not be any worse off".

Then, when I was done with that, they brought out more food, rice and veggies in spicy sauce. I said, once again, twice again, three times again that I couldn’t eat. No one would take no for an answer. I was going to look like the rudest American ever if I didn’t have a few bites. Oddly they didn’t think it was rude to make a sick person eat food while they all sat around not eating and just staring at her.

I went home and was up all night running to the bathroom. So, in the morning I very strongly told RV, “Here’s a piece of advice. If a tourist in your care says that they are sick in their stomach and that they cannot eat food, you must listen to them. I was up all night and now I have 5 hours ahead of me where I may be in distress, all because you made it impossible for me to not eat without being very very rude.”

I was almost enjoying my righteous anger. I was becoming more and more sure that this is what India has been trying to teach me all along: how to have a backbone, how to say “NO”, or something like that. I actually wasn't sure if I was more mad at RV or myself, for caving in and doing something that I knew would be bad for me just to make other people happy.

I carried all this anger and frustration with me to the Taj Mahal this morning. I got there at 6:15, having not eaten or had water for a long time only to discover that the provisions I’d packed were not allowed in. So, low blood sugar and dehydration also accompanied me into one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The Taj Mahal is breathtaking. Even in my state, my breath was taken when I stepped through the arches of the gate that faces that most famous white mausoleum. It is perfect. Because it is a world heritage sight, the grounds it sits on are also very beautiful, green, mostly trash free. Because I was part of the early crowd, there weren’t that many people, only a thousand or so, would be my guess.

Sadly, the splendor couldn’t distract me for long. I obviously had more important brooding to do. I’m sure the cloud around me was as black and ugly as the Taj is white and pure.

I wanted to shake my mood. I wanted to break through the darkness so that I could enjoy the moment of being at the Taj Mahal. I dutifully walked around and took it in, along with all the people looking almost as miserable as I was feeling. All their sour, hot faces would have made me laugh if I wasn't feeling so contrary to even myself.

I kept wondering, "Why can't I let all this anger and animosity go? I know I'm making the choice to be miserable, why can't I shake it off."

I found a bench to sit on, in the shade, out of view of the monument, but surrounded by some truly great trees. I was watching all the families go by, all the couples, all the friends. Miraculously, no one came and sat next to me or tried to sell me anything. I could just sit and watch.

Maybe it was being in nature, or being left alone in a beautiful spot, or the hunger finally getting so great that I went into another dimension, but something started to release in me. I started to shed all my defensive anger and began to feel open space around my heart. What I discovered past the gates of darkness was that though I am not lonely, I am no longer enjoying my solitary adventure, but not because of India and all the hastle and the stomach bug, etc....but because the Taj Mahal should be shared.

Adventures should be shared.

It was a new feeling, a new sense of understanding. There was no self-pity, no “poor me”, no sadness, grief, regret for my loner life up to now. Just an acute understanding that sometimes an experience really is only half experienced when you can't share it with someone, family, friend, lover. I realized, too, that there were other adventures back in the good old USA that I'm so much more excited about now......I knew that after the exotic wilds of India that the only place I have any desire to see right now is back home.

I got up and walked around a bit and found another bench with a better view of the Taj. I got to thinking about what the place is about. Built by a king for his dead wife, it is about love, of course. But it's also a requiem to death. So, as exquisite as it is, there is something very dead about the Taj Mahal. It is an empty place devoted to what must have been quite a passionate affair.

As I sat there I felt something on my leg. I thought it was a fly, but I discovered, instead, that it was a beautiful green caterpillar. I picked it up and it began crawling on my hand. I watched it crawl up and down my arm for about 20 minutes. I found it infinitely more beautiful than the Taj. It was so small and perfect and alive, so in the present. The eagles flying around the gardens and the perfect white dome of the Taj also enchanted me. The things of the earth, tiny and large were so much more beautiful to me than the absolutely amazing creation of man that is the Taj Mahal.

While I sat there a transformation was taking place. My black cloud was breaking up and floating away. By the time I got up and started ambling again, I felt completely free, free of all the angst, the anger, the frustration. I only felt full of love. I could really see the people around me again. They weren't all sour and miserable. Some of us exchanged smiles, I felt like the darkness that has been around me for the past week was lifting and I was visible again.

Simple things. I'm interested in simple things now. A touch, a look, a nod, a moment, a kiss. Dinner. Holding hands. Laughter. Good conversations. Work. Telling stories. Digging in.

Yesterday, I talked to a Nicole. She was in exactly the same place I was…tired, fed up with India, contrary, angry at this crazy place. But she said that she knows she will be back within 6 months, that this insanity has made her want to travel even more.

She thought it would be different. That after three months in India she would want to settle down for a while before her next travel adventure. I'm the opposite. I thought this would be the whetting of a great appetite to travel as much as possible, as far as possible, as soon as possible. And now, I just want the simple things for a while. A long while. I'm not saying I don't want to travel. I'd love it if somebody wanted to pay me to travel for short periods of time and to write about it. But as for the shape of my life in the near to not so near future, I'd like to settle in, settle down, connect with home.

I'm so tired, but I feel good. I feel broken newly open. I have felt that so often on this trip...broken open, newly. But I keep discovering layer after layer. I keep thinking I've hit the core and that there's no deeper place to find.... and then something like today happens and I feel gutted to a point I'd never known existed.

Yesterday my driver from Jaipur had smashed a bug on the inside of the windshield while he was driving. It left a big splat on the glass. He looked in the rearview mirror and said to me, “This is India.”

I began to laugh quietly, cynically. Then a little more. Then even more. Soon the driver was also laughing.

As we went along the road, whenever something very Indian would happen, a cow would block traffic, a car would be driving the wrong way down the highway, two camels would get loose and bolt in front of the car, one or other of us would say, “This is India,” and laugh. It was slightly comforting that his laugh was as cynical as my laugh, and just as tinged with a deep and bittersweet kind of love.

About 40 miles away from Agra I had to decide if I was going to take a detour to see the abandoned city of Fatehpur Sikri, a gorgeous red complex of buildings high on a plateau. As you can already anticipate, I decided not to. My driver helped me choose.

He said, “It’s hot. You are tired.”

“You’re right. I’ll save it for next time.”

“Next time. With family.”

“With family,” I echoed.

"Next time," he said again.

"Next time," I echoed.

It feels blissful to be free of the anger that has possessed me for the last week, to feel, instead, full of love, excitement for whatever adventure lies ahead closer to home, the adventure hidden in the familiar, in what I had previously known, but which I will now discover anew.

And it was lovely to drive around town this evening, looking at the daily life of India with all it's color, it's squalor, it's friendly faces, it's children waving "hi" to me from the side of the road, and to feel, once again, how lucky I am to be here, to know something of this transformative and transforming place. I was excited to find myself imaging returning, next time.

Carrying a Bottomless Bucket

2011-04-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

They've got camels in Jaipur. Working-stiff camels.

I finally got out to see a little of the city after two days spent trying to get my equilibrium back cooped up in the hotel.

I don't think my balance has been restored. Two hours was all I could handle. Not even. I was in no mood for being hustled, hastled, pointed in a different direction. My stomach hurt, it was too hot and I was generally what you might call miserable.

When the fourth camel passed me on the street and I realized that I could almost care less I thought, "I'm done."

I came back to the hotel and promptly started looking up tickets to get me back to Delhi and then onto the states as soon as possible. Never mind that I am scheduled to leave India in a week. Six and a half short days away. I want to go home now.

It's no secret to anyone who travels to India that it can turn a person bitter. You meet fellow travelers all the time who have come to hate everything about this maddening country. Some of them have been here for 3 day, others for 3 months, some have made it 3 years. It's always been easy to see how the transformation from India-lover to India-hater could happen, but I didn't think it would happen to me.

And, it hasn't. Yet.

I still have a tiny bit of reserve left that allows me to step back and to get perspective. In fact, if I could look at myself the way I sometimes follow my alter ego in a dream, I would be amused by the way my bad mood is affecting my interactions with India and it's people.

This morning, when I went out, I got an auto-rickshaw. The guy wanted to charge me a 100 rupees when I knew the fare should be 50. I under bid the going rate and said I'd pay 30. We settled on the fare it should have been in the first place, 50. Plus, I said very firmly to the driver, "I'm just going to the City Palace. You will not stop anywhere else. Understood?"

We went straight to the pink palace; when I arrived, there were still a few minutes left before the place opened, so I ventured a gander in a shop. The owner started pulling out this, that, and the other thing, "See Miss, look at this, Miss, look here....".

I very clearly and sternly laid down the law, "I can look on my own." No one spoke to me again.

Ever since I left Santiniketan I've had little patience for drivers and salespeople. When I arrived in Siliguri two weeks ago on the night train, I exited the station to people pestering to take me up to Darjeeling. I was tired and I asked the first kid who got close, "How much?"

"100 rupees."

"100 rupees. To Darjeeling?"

"Yes. Yes. 100 rupees."

As we got to the Range Rover, the kid tried to sell me the two seats next to the driver for 300 rupees. I'd have more room with two seats.

I said, "NO, we agreed on 100 rupees."

"Ok. Ok. 100 rupees."

I sat alone in the middle bench of the range rover for half an hour while the kid tried to rustle up more customers. Eventually a family of 8 arrived and a boss type man tried to get me to move to the back of the car, the bad seats, to give the family the good seats. I said, "No, I've been here for quiet a while. I will not move."

Boss man told me that the car had already been booked and I'd have to get out. I said, "No, you had no customers when I arrived and I've been here for half an hour. I will not move."

The family piled in, despite the rude American, which I'm sure they'd all decided I was, and we all sat sweating like sardines in a very hot tin can. Another half hour went by. Yet another customer was found so that every square inch of seat was now filled with sweating, hostile customers less than eager to make the 5 hour journey up to Darjeeling smushed together. Then the little guy who'd hustled me into the car in the first place came around to collect his money. When he got to me he said, "150 rupees," which, to be fair is what he'd asked from everyone else.

But, it was not what we had agreed upon.

"No. You said 100 rupees."

"No ma'am. 150 rupees. Government price."

"We discussed it three times. 100 rupees."

"No ma'am. 150 rupees."

"I'd be happy to pay 150 rupees, if that is what you had said in the beginning, but that is not what we agreed on."

"150 rupees. Pay now."

I didn't care that I had a car full of sweating, equally tired Indian people crammed into the car along with me. I was not letting the kid get away with it.

"Like I said, I'd be happy to pay 150 rupees, but as we talked about three times, you said the fare was 100 rupees."

He opened the door, telling me I had to get out.

"You find me another ride and I'll get out. But it is your job. You pulled me over here."

The kid pointed to another car across the way that was only partially full. The extra room was tempting enough to get me out of the claustrophobic tin can. Though I didn't know if the half empty car would take me.

"Ok. You will have to get my bag down." My suitcase had already been secured on the top of the vehicle.

I got out of the car and a very official looking man came over and asked what the problem was. I explained that I'd been promised a fare of 100 rupees and now was being charged 150. The official looking man glanced over at the kid who'd pulled me in, and then kicked me out of, his car. The kid looked nervous. He started talking in Bengali.

As soon as my bag hit the pavement another driver of a jeep down the queue came over and asked me if I needed a ride to Darjeeling. I said, "How much?"

"150 rupees."

"Great," I said, loud and clear right in front of both the kid and the official looking man. I wanted to make sure that everyone understood, this was not about 50 rupees (1 buck), this was about principles. As I walked away, the official looking man gave me what I can only describe as an extremely admiring look.

It's one of the contradictions of India. Many many people here want to hustle you, but the same people also admire the hell out of you when you don't allow yourself to be hustled.

Like my bicycle rickshaw man who brought me back home today from the City Palace. We'd bargained on a fare before I even got into the rig. He'd said, "100".

I'd said, "50".

He said, "100".

I walked away.

He said, "Ok, 50."

When we arrived at the hotel he tried to make it 100. I said, absolutely no smile or leeway in my voice, "No. 50 rupee." I even made him give me change from a 100 rupee note. As he gave me the change, I could swear he smiled, as if to say, "I gotta admire the tough broad."

India is a shifter, a shaper, a sculptor of souls. It opens hearts, it expands minds, and it toughens skins. The trick is to know when the work is done. Leave too soon and your surface is only scratched. Leave too late and you become hard.

I have one week left. One week. I know that I can stick it out. And, as my dear goddess of a friend, Tina, says, "You just know some magic is going to sneak in at the last minute, no?"

I do know India is capable of delivering magic, even in the darkest of times. I'm not so sure that I have the ability or even the desire anymore to take in the magic.

But perhaps this is the final lesson India has to teach me during this three month crash course in...... what? Metaphysical soul searching? Finding center in a sea of crazy? Focusing on the moment because if you focus on the big picture, you will go insane?

Yes. Maybe this is India's final exam. Instead of fleeing when it feels unbearable, am I supposed to find the stillness once again? The quiet in myself? I've been in a state of discomfort and dis-ease before on this trip. Only I've never ever wanted to give up and go home. This is a new level of disquiet, a much higher peak to climb to find peace.

I think there is strength in going home early, too. There is the self-validation that comes with saying, "I've had enough and I'm a big girl who gets to say it's time to get back to the familiar."

What, pray tell, is India asking me to do?

I'm realizing that for all my talk of eschewing gurus, I've taken one. I have, for the last three months, been India's faithful disciple.

In this book I'm reading of Sufi stories, there's one about a guy who went to a guru. The guy begged the guru to take him as his disciple. The guru said he would on one condition: the guy could not ask a single question. The guy said, "Oh, that's easy. Done. Not a single question."

"Great," said the guru. "Let's go to the well and get some water."

"Great," said the guy.

The guru then proceeded to pick up a pail that had no bottom. All the way down to the well the guy was just itching to ask the guru why he had a pail with no bottom and how in the world they were going to gather water with a pail with no bottom. But he resisted.

When they got to the well the guru attached the well to the rope and lowered the pail into the well and pulled it up. Of course, water went into the pail and then immediately right back out. The guru just kept lowering the bucket, making chit chat with the guy, and raising the bucket which was always empty. Eventually the guru told the guy to take a turn drawing water from the well.

This was the final straw. The guy couldn't take it anymore and said, "What are you saying? There's no bottom to the bucket? How can we gather water with a bucket with no bottom?"

As you might imagine, the deal was off. The guru was no longer interested in taking the guy on as a disciple. The guru told the guy that he had one job and one job only, to never ask a question and he clearly couldn't do his job.

Seems if a guru wants you to do something ridiculous, even seemingly idiotic, that's his prerogative. He's doing it to teach some great life lesson to his disciple and the disciple is meant to humble himself by accepting his tasks and succumbing to the higher wisdom of his master.

So. I've decided to go to the well and draw water with my bottomless bucket. I'm not asking any questions. I will stay the course.

I'll be in Jaipur one more day. I may leave the hotel. I may treat it like a holiday in the tropics and hang out by the pool all day. On Saturday I will go to Agra so that I can wake up Sunday and see the Taj Mahal at sunrise. I'll hire a car. Oh, yes I will. I will hire a car and that car will take me in it's pod of air-conditioned bliss from the door of my homestay to the Taj and back again.

Hey, I said I wouldn't ask questions, I didn't say I'd continuously keep banging my head against the wall, which in this case is fighting for the right taxi fare, letting myself be swamped with relentless requests to look at this and to buy that, and getting dizzy in the sweltering heat. I will allow myself to be what I am, really, a spoiled, by Indian standards~rich, American tourist.

Then I will go to Delhi on Monday to stay with Chandana who is visiting family and I will reconnect with other friends that I've made over the last three months.

Then I will go home.

To Seattle.

Because it will be time.

Smackdown

2011-04-19T22:52:00.000-07:00

The universe has a funny sense of humor. I finally understand, in my bones, that the only way to be happy is to trust in yourself and to make peace with the moment, the place that you are in, your view on the world and then I come down with dysentery.

I challenge the Dalai Lama to make peace with dysentery.

I've heard some gruesome stories from fellow travelers about their bouts with dysentery and, all in all, I'm pretty sure I got off lucky. I think that's also because I gave in quickly to the antibiotics my doctor made me carry JUST IN CASE.

Who knows, maybe I did benefit from my epiphany of last week. I managed not to get submerged in self-pity which, let me tell you, when even the tiny joints in your toes ache and you can't stand fully upright and you are India which is on the other side of the planet from almost every human being you know, self-pity seems, well, justifiable.

But, I like Jaipur. I'm staying in a heritage hotel just outside of the old city which is delineated by a wall made out of pink stone. I could be wrong, but I think much of the old city is built out of pink stone. I shall find out as soon as I feel up to exploring. There are 7 gates into the city, one of them is called chandpole, or moongate. On the way from the airport to my hotel I saw the full moon rising over the chandpole. I wanted to stop and take a photo but we were in the middle of major traffic plus, I realized later, I was pretty sick and totally not up for it. Just after I saw the moon, my guide, RV, pointed out the elephant walking by. Some guy was riding his elephant home from work. They were going along in traffic just like any other vehicle. I was amazed to see how fast an elephant can go and how confidently he maneuvered with all the cars zooming by.

My hotel is a heritage home owned and operated by members of some kind of minor royal family, the Bissaus. The main house where the dinning rooms and such like are is painted on every square inch with gold and pink and red. There are lotus friezes and dancing girl paintings. It's a bit like being on a movie set. I had a choice of rooms the first night and one of them, the one I didn't take for some reason (dysentery brain) was absolutely gorgeous. A maharajah's room. But it is supposed to be hotter and that's an important consideration in these parts. I have a good room. Plain. I am making peace with that.

Today I think I will stay close to home to make sure that my body is really mended enough to be out and about. There is a pool here and my room needs to be cleaned. Whenever I've needed anything I've just thrown anything that was in the way out of the way and therefore my room looks like a cyclone hit it.

I also have some making up to do with the staff here at Bissau. I've been so out of it that I haven't tipped anyone and just now I tried to and realized that one of the things I threw somewhere was my coin purse. This is the kind of place where tips are expected and I am quickly rising on the Rude American Customers list. I can see it in the face of my waiter.

Somewhere, outside the gates of my hotel are elephants and fortresses and tiny streets with treasure shops. For now, they will have to wait and I must get strong, but it's hard. It's hard to make peace with my view when I haven't seen the view outside, when I don't know what adventure I'm missing out on.

Metaphysically Speaking, Part Three ~ Closer I Am To Fine

2011-04-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

Deep, my guide on the first two days in Varanasi, took me to see his Guru. I thought, why not, I'm in Varanasi, I should do something mystical. Deep's Guru, whose name I never caught, is an astrologer. After meeting Deep's Guru, Guru Guy, I decided that I would make an appointment to get an astrological reading, see if he could enlighten me about what might be coming up next in my life, without me having to do the agonizing work of being patient and finding it out for myself.

I'm no stranger to astrological readings. Or tarot readings. Or Skrying. So, it wasn't like it was the first time I'd ever sought answers from the celestial spheres. I actually do a bit of tarot, or intuitive, reading myself. I've always believed that there are people who can clue into the cosmic data-base that all of us human energy balls are constantly downloading information into and from that data base these intuitives can check out different books that can give us some info about ourselves, in particular, and life, in general.

Of course, there are also a lot of people who can read star charts and memorize books on tarot reading or palm reading or what have you, that actually have no intuitive capability at all. They probably don't even really believe in all that "crap" but they know that other people do, people who are willing to spend money so that they don't have to learn how to trust their own intuition. The untalented non-believers, posing as intuitives have no qualms about relieving hopeful suckers like myself of their money.

I had no idea upon meeting Deep's guru whether or not he was an actual intuitive or if he just wanted my money. But I was willing to spend a few dollars for the experience of finding out what going to an astrologer in India was like. It seemed like a "When in Rome" kind of a thing to do.

And, sure, hope springs eternal....maybe Guru Guy would tell me something that would unlock all the doors I've been struggling to unlock over the last three months. Maybe he could tell me what really matters so that I could change my life accordingly and decide what I should do next.

There is a lot of detail I could throw in next about how I got lost trying to get to the appointment and then Guru Guy was late because he was "doing a ceremony for some American man"....

But that part isn't, for the purpose of this post, important.

When Guru Guy finally did start reading my chart and telling me about myself, I could tell he was pretty good. He wasn't really telling me anything I didn't know already, either based on other readings about what my chart says or from my own self-knowledge, but he wasn't throwing out gross generalizations that could apply to anybody and he wasn't saying anything that was wildly off the mark about me in particular.

It started to get interesting when Guru Guy began to zero in on how I am a very spiritually oriented person ("You have an American body and an Indian soul") and how that focus would only get stronger over the next ten years, which backs up what other astrologers have told me. But then he said that that spiritual energy would make me more and more confused and unsettled because I was also very physically oriented, my sexual energy was very strong, so that would be apt to get in the way of my finding peace and cause, instead, a feeling of constant "unsettledness".

Internally I went, "Whoa." I felt like he was touching a new nerve. Though, "unsettledness" is not the word I would use for what he'd hit on. Confusion, yes. Confusion in the sense that I'm no longer interested in having sex just to scratch an itch, to satisfy a craving. There's got to be a spiritual/energetic connection.

Guru Guy continued to explain that my desire for connection would become more and more problematic as my orientation towards spirituality intensified, because he could see in my chart that my future relationships would continue to be unstable. I would be seeking out deeper meaning, deeper connection, but relationships wouldn't happen, and then I would have these physical urges and not know what to do.

Ok. I could see how that might have been true in the past...I thought to myself. In fact, I could see how that had been painfully evident throughout my life and how I'd gotten involved with the wrong people because of those physical needs.

Hmmm... this guy is really good, I started thinking.

Then, he said, "Your energy is so strong. Like mine. People want some of it. I understand this. People come to me and they want some of my energy. Women come from other countries and I can see they want some of my energy. This one woman came and I could see she wanted a hug. I asked her if she did, and I let her give me a hug. But I told her her hug was not real, not strong enough, if she was going to hug me she should hug me with all her strength because, after that hug, that would be it, nothing more could come from me after."

Hmmm....now this guy was veering a little off course.....

Then Guru Guy shifted in his seat so his mundu (skirt) was split just enough for me to see his package. But not enough for me to know if he knew that I could see is package. And let me solve the age old question right now: Indian men do not wear anything under their mundus.

I just kept looking Guru Guy straight in the eyes, wondering where he was gonna try and go from there.

But Guru Guy did not push his agenda too hard. He never came out and made it plain that he was suggesting anything specific, you know, about his energy and my energy meeting up. Though I became more and more sure that he was trying to say that if I wanted his "energy", all I had to do was ask.

But soon the session was over and it was time to leave though not before he tried to sell me a very expensive talisman, or the even more expensive "Ceremony", to stop the "unsettled" trend in my life.

While we were walking to the door, I reached out to shake Guru Guy's hand, to thank him for the interesting reading. All in all, I'd rather enjoyed myself in a "I'm not sure what just happened here, but this guy is fascinating and I can't wait to tell the story about him" kind of a way. So I reach out and offer my hand and he takes it in his hand and, gosh darn it, if when I took his hand, it wasn't electric. I mean E-LEC-TRIC! It didn't excite me sexually, but it did shock the heck out of me.

Guru Guy saw me register his "energy" and said, "You see, you want some of my energy."

I said, "No. But there is energy."

"I think you do. I think you want some energy."

I laughed and walked out....quickly...sort of waving my hands by my ears in a "Oh, my God this just turned too weird and too funny all at the same time" kind of a way.

Guru Guy followed me to the outer door of his building and called after me down the narrow little alley, "You come back. When you have no hesitation, you come back."

I walked quickly, trying to shake off Guru Guy's "energy". As his electrons fell away, I found myself slowly, but steadily, filling with elation. I was thrilled. I had no idea why. I mean, I should have been pissed. I'd just spent 50 bucks for some guy to stage an elaborate and bizarre seduction.

But as I let it sink in, I realized that I was happy because I was free. Suddenly, everything became so clear....Guru Guy could tell me nothing that mattered about myself. Even if he'd been the most pious and talented mystic ever. The truth is in me. My truth. Just like the truth is in you, each of you, each of us, if we get quiet enough to listen. That communal energetic database that intuitives tap into is a free library, folks, we all got a card when we signed up for this ride. And there are certain volumes that only apply to us and we are the only ones who can read the crazy font they are printed in.

A wealth of psychic weight dropped off of my soul and out of my heart. I realized that I could not only check my own books out of the cosmic library, I could write new ones, I could make my own reality. I could decide what mattered to me and build the rest of my years around that.

Later that night, I took a little evening stroll and met a real mystic, a kid of about 17 years, named Kundar....he doesn't know he's a mystic....but boy did he put me in my place.....I tried to shoo him away and he just persisted and then said, "Oh, you think you know everything, you think of me as a dog...not good enough to talk to..." I tried to interrupt him and to have a rational conversation about how I was just trying to be quiet and that my shooing him away was not personal. But he kept saying, "I'm a dog to you, a lowly dog. You know everything...."

So finally I said, sharply, "Do you want to be quiet long enough to listen?"

He said, "Yes, of course. Where are you from?"

"America."

"How long you in Varanasi?"

"Since Wednesday."

"You like it?"

"Yes."

Kundar sat down beside me, calm, gentle, inquisitive.

We had a great conversation. He taught me how to say "mother fucker" in hindi: mutta chowd, so that the next time I needed to shoo somebody away I could let them know I really meant business.

Out of the blue, Kundar wanted to know if I thought God was inside of each of us. He'd heard that this might be true and he wondered what I thought.

"Funny you should ask," I thought. Hadn't I just had that epiphany this morning. The truth, aka God, is in each of us. Sure, I'd heard that before. But now I knew it, in my bones.

I said, "Yes. Yes. I believe that is true. God is in each of us."

In turn, I asked Kundar, "Why do the Hindus say "God"-singular when they believe there are over a million different gods.

Answer: God has many faces, so many that we don't even know how many faces he has.

I asked, "If the Ganges is so sacred why do the Indian people treat her so poorly?"

Answer: Because the hand has five fingers and each finger doesn't know what the other one is doing.

See, a natural mystic.

Kundar also fessed up and told me that Varanasi "runs on money. Because money never stops, money is always working, always going. Money never takes a break. People get tired. Money never gets tired".

After about half an hour, Kundar said, "Your face looks kind of happy, but I think inside you are a little upset with me, a little angry?"

Kundar was right. I was a little bit upset, but not with him, with myself. I had said "no" to his intrusion; I had tried to shoo him away because I wanted to sit with my new found spiritual freedom, I wanted to bask in the light of my earlier epiphany.

I was also sure he was hustling something which I was not in the mood to buy.

Yes, ultimately he wanted to take me to his shop where he works in hopes that I would stock up on souvenirs. But he didn't push it. When I said no, Kundar accepted it without question. And the conversation we had in the meantime was perfect. A gift.

Kundar was right about another thing. I didn't know everything. I thought I knew something; maybe I even felt, in some small way, that my earlier epiphany had given me special powers to know that Kundar was someone I wouldn't possibly want to talk to. Though I certainly didn't think he was a dog. But I may have initially treated him as one.

The next day, yesterday, I woke up, as is my customary habit in India, to see the sunrise. But instead of going out in a boat, or for a walk on the ghats, I decided to just sit on my own little balcony which sits back from the front edge of the guest house, creating a limited view of life on the waterfront. The sun would be rising to the left of the corner edge of my view, so I wouldn't actually see the sun, itself, rise.

It felt great to just be in my space without yearning for a better vantage point. So easy. So relaxing.

As the sky began to lighten, I caught site of a tourist on a prominatory pillar snapping a photo of something in an easterly direction and knew the sun had just crested the horizon. Soon, I could see rays of sunlight segmenting the sky in perfect pie shapes. It was like the sun was reaching out into the receding darkness with a giant hand and all I could see were the tips of the fingers.

It dawned on me that light spreading in the mind and soul and heart works like those sun rays; tendrils of insight reach out into the darkness of closed minds and hearts and if we are patient and easy with ourselves our inner sky will eventually be swathed in light. We don't even have to move or search for anything, not even a better spot to take in the view, light will make it even to all our little corners of the world, even if we choose not to be out in the middle of everything.

I decided, while the rays slowly spread out and disappeared and daytime came to Varanasi, that I was not going to leave the guesthouse all day. I wasn't going to go to any temple or puja or astrologer; I wasn't going to go to Sarnath, a town nearby where Buddha taught his first lesson. Instead, I was going to practice being happy right where I was, accepting what I might know and what I don't know and making peace with the distinct possibility that there are a million metaphysical conundrums that no one can really solve, certainly not definitively.

The magic of Varanasi, for me anyway, is that here, more than any place I've ever been, the essence of what it means to be human is on display. Does it matter why we are here? Maybe yes, maybe no. But for sure we are here. Varanasi makes it clear as sunshine in a matter of minutes that being on this planet, being human is messy, often disgusting, life is hard, death is inevitable, rebirth is a possibility, and yearning is universal. Everybody is yearning for something: peace, love, money, connection to the divine, to their family, to their friends, a better job, clarity...... the list goes on and on.

As I sat and wrote and chatted with the staff here at Ganpati Guesthouse, I began to sense that in 12 days when I get on the plane to go back to the states it will be time, not just because that's what my ticket says, but because that will be the next step in my journey and no matter where I go, back to Seattle, Santiniketan, Paris, my view will be as expansive as I allow it to be, my reality will be mutable, my choices only limited by my ability, or inability, to trust in my own deepest intuitions, dreams and visions.

Metaphysically Speaking, Part Two ~ I Went Down To The River To Pray

2011-04-16T07:46:00.000-07:00

Varanasi likes to tell a person what matters. It likes to make a lot of things that many would say are unreal, very real. Reincarnation, for instance. It wants to make sure that you understand why we are all here on this planet, why we suffer, and why and how we can be relieved of that suffering, if not in this life, then, surely the next one....or maybe the one after that.

I'm actually a believer in reincarnation. There, I said it. Have been for a while.

But like I began to say in that last post, before Varanasi jumped in with all that metaphysical marketing who-ha, I have been batting around the question of what matters and why we are all here and what is real, because you know I might be wrong....maybe we only get one shot at this living thing. I've also been wondering why we all can't agree on the answers to those questions, even though so many people think they know THE answer. I've been wracking my brain and querying my heart trying to figure out if all the metaphysical disharmony on this planet rules out the possibility that there is actually one reason, singular, that we are all here, that there is only one, or maybe two, things that really matter (if anything matters at all).

On my first morning in Varanasi I got up at 5:30 a.m. and went to watch the bathers and the mourners and the workers and the pilgrims from the safety of a little boat. I told you about that. Watching the young widower lighting the funeral pyre for his dead wife. I sat in my little boat watching from the outside and beyond the incredible intensity of what was happening onstage.

On the second morning, I decided to go out again at 5:30, but this time I walked along the banks, mingling and taking pictures, almost from the inside of things. Or at least from a more intimate and involved vantage point, sort of from the wings, if you will. I even found a place to sit and to just be for a little while, without being hustled by boatmen wanting to take me out on the water.

I watched the sunrise, which I'd missed the day before because I was looking at the shore while the sun made it's entrance behind me. I watched the sun rise over the Ganges and marvelled that only a week ago I watched that same sun rise over the Himalayas. I tried not to make too much out of that.

When it started to get too hot, I decided to wander back to my guest house. Holy men looking like Asian gnomes sitting under their little mushroom umbrellas called to me, "Namaste, Namaste. Come. Come." But I walked on, sometimes saying what I would say to any boatman, or souvenir hawker, "Nigh-che eh" or "I don't want any."

And, I didn't. I didn't want any of what those holy men were selling.

Speaking of holy men. I've been reading this book by a Sufi named Osho. Who knows, this guy might be famous. I might write "Osho" and half of you out there go, "Oh, yeah, of course, Osho." But I didn't know Osho from anybody, but I bought this book on a whim about a month ago and started reading it on the plane rides to Varanasi. Ok. It wasn't a complete whim. Ever since I read Ellen Burstyn's autobiography where she talks about being a Sufi and why she's a Sufi, I've kind of wondered if, maybe, I'm actually a Sufi, too.

Anywhoo. This Sufi master, Osho, talks really eloquently about why it's bad form to pray just to pray. That a soul should only pray when it is moved to pray. And wherever that prayer happens is ok. Any place where someone prays sincerely becomes, instantly, a sacred and holy spot, a temple, a shrine. Osho also talks about how trying to be like the Buddha or Jesus or Mohammad or any Guru you could name out there, is also very bad form. Because to be truly divine, we must all be wholly and completely ourselves. If we just try to copy Buddha or Jesus we only succeed in becoming, at best, a good imitation of somebody or something we are not. There was only one Jesus and only one Buddha.

So, as these Varanasi holy men tried to sell me a moment of serious devotional prayer, I told them I wasn't buying. I had neither the inclination to pray or the the desire to be them.

This resolve wavered a bit as I approached what I call the Big Circus Ghat, where every night they do an extremely elaborate Puja, or prayer service that strikes me as a bit of a cheat put on for the tourists, as well as, the grief stricken Indians who will pay anything to find peace. The Ghat is wide and deep and can hold a lot of holy men, each on their individual little platforms, under their individual large mushroom shaped umbrellas. Pretty soon I had said, Nigh-che eh so many times that I was sick of hearing myself say no and when a certain priest called out, something in me was drawn in.

I went over and, in the blink of an eye, found myself sitting barefoot, in the criss-cross apple sauce pose, a red dot on my forehead, flowers sprinkled with holy Ganges water and a coconut wrapped in flowered cloth all sitting in my cupped hands. And, I was chanting. In Sanskrit. The priest would chant, I would copy. Sometimes I'd squinch up my face to indicate I hadn't caught what he'd said, and he would repeat. Sometimes I would simply butcher the Sanskrit sounds that I was trying to parrot and then silently wonder to what strange deformed deity I might have just promised my first born.

When Sanskrit Priest was done with me, another guy suddenly appeared beside me. The English Speaking Guy. He explained that he would say a prayer for all of my family each and every day for the next month to rid my family of bad karma forever. Then I had to chant some more. But this time in English. Cuz English Speaking Guy was leading me. Then English Speaking Guy made me bend forward and he put his hand on the top of my head and he chanted some stuff I wasn't supposed to copy, having to do with peace and happiness for my family and a good marriage for me. That good marriage part was his idea, but, hey, who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Then I had to get up and walk down to the water with yet another guy, Water Blessing Guy. Suddenly I found myself weaving towards the Ganges through a bevy of devout Pilgrims. Suddenly I was no longer backstage, but on stage. I was a real Pilgrim.

I stepped on the first step into the river. There was only enough water on this level to feel like I was dipping the souls of my feet in a shallow puddle left after Shiva finished mopping the floor; I wasn't taking the plunge any further. Water Blessing Guy leaned over and took a handful of the sacred liquid and sprinkled it on my head, saying something benifacting.

Everything was happening so quickly. I didn't know what to make of it. I remember climbing down to the edge of the river and thinking, "How did I get here?" I also had a very clear moment when I was stepping in the water where I thought, "This water feels great. Special. Blessed." I was glad that I was there, getting sprinkled, relieved, even, that I hadn't missed my chance; all the filth and the potential disease that I had previously imagined might muddy the experience of the divine Ganges, disappeared and all I could sense was joy. I was filled with the awareness of millions of drops of faith that infused the water with some kind of special power to filter out all the gross particles and to leave only the blessings.

Then Water Blessing Guy walked me back up to the platform and English Speaking Guy did some kind of final little magic. Then, I had to write down my address in a book along with all the names of my immediate family members.

Then I had to write down how much my donation was going to be to the Temple where generations of bad Rowe/MacCracken karma was going to be wiped clean. I wrote down 100 rupees and then was told that that was too little. To prove his point, English Speaking Guy showed me in the book where Indian's, who we all know have no money, had given 2000, 3000 rupees for the spiritual safeguarding of their entire ancestral line.

I added another zero and called it a day. Not because I don't think my ancestral line is worth the cash, but I'm also thinking my ancestral lines only go back a fraction of the way that most Indian family lines go back, and my people only made a handful of souls compared to all those generations of Indians, so my donation seemed to be appropriate to the task at hand.

I wasn't surprised that the blessing came with a price. Nor was I particularly disillusioned by the hard sell after a slightly transcendental experience. I was rather shocked, however, that I'd just been suckered out of my whole day's budget. But I got over that in a few minutes.

Can you really put a price on the spiritual salvation of your entire ancestral line? Probably not.

The night before I had been to a puja down at a small Ghat close to my hotel. I'd noticed the small puja while I was watching this Puja, The Big Circus Puja, on my first night in Varanasi:

This daily ritual is very elaborate. Using several different holy implements, conch shell, bells, incense, fire, more fire, then a little more fire, sandalwood oil, fire, feathers, fire, water, fire, the priests do a series of synchronized rituals honoring all of the elements, but mostly fire, addressing the six directional points (North, South, East, West, the Heavens, and the Earth).

Here, maybe this might help you get a better picture:

But at the little puja, instead of 9 priests lined up on 9 individual rose petal covered stages, there were only 5 priests, situated on one platform, arranged like dots on dice. I was one of about 20 people watching this intimate affair, because the other two thousand pilgrims were all at the puja big top.

The guy who keeps the show running at this little puja, Munnar, invited me to sit close, presumably because I was the only white person who bothered to stop and because I was alone.

I almost said no to that invitation, too. I'd been sitting far up on the steps where I felt I could have some space to really connect with the ritual, to feel it, to take it into my being, to invite in my own prayer, if the occasion warranted. But Munnar came up and told me to sit down next to him and his family near the little machine that clangs the drums that keeps the priests in step with each other...the drum metronome. Because it was so loud, and there were so few people, and because Munnar and his niece had to jump up frequently to light the next line of candles or to place incense, I had quite a lot of time to sit by myself, with the drums resonating in my chest and the bells and smoke of the ritual surrounding every nook and cranny of my being.

"This is the real thing," I thought to myself. "Visceral. Palpable."

At some point a small boy of 4-ish or 5-ish, appeared at my side. He was talking to me, but I couldn't hear him over the drums and the bells. So, we adapted and started talking to each other in head bobs and blinks and with points to the moon. If he pointed to the moon, I pointed to the moon. If he put his hand out in a sort of high five gesture, I put my hand out in a high five gesture. If I winked, he smiled, then cocked his head to one side and gave me a lopsided look that showed off his missing front teeth and then I would laugh out loud, joyfully. I thought the kid was angling for a little hand out. I wasn't going there. But he never asked for anything. And just as suddenly as he'd appeared, he looked at me, got up, said, "bye bye," and left.

As the Puja went on for quite some time and eventually Munnar and Punam ran out of tasks, I let Punam distract me from my intention of calling in a moment of personal prayer by letting her decorate my hand with henna. This is not something Punam does to make money. She is not skilled. I will be walking around for the next month with a strange heart with an arrow through it, glaring from the palm of my right hand. But I like my tattoo so much more than those professional jobs that so many tourists get that cover their calves and arms and feet and hands.

Munnar and Punam didn't want money for either their hospitality or the unique, one of a kind, tattoo. I tried to give them something, but they refused. Though they did extract a promise that I would return the next night, and I knew, eventually, that I would be asked to go to some store to look at something....and indeed I was asked just that, when I went back.

I started to have a feeling that first night, though, which I think was still in effect the next morning when I got suckered into paying the 1000 rupees to the priest at the fancy pants ghat. A feeling born of finding myself at the river Ganges among so many people who yearn for purification and blessing from the river, and others who just want to make a buck, and then, others who just want to reach out and connect with something or someone in the course of their simple, ordinary lives. It was a feeling born of discovering that sometimes a person could want or need all three at once. I mean, just because someone wants to make a buck, doesn't mean they don't also want to genuinely connect.

At one point, in the dark night, mesmerized by the candles flying in the priests' hands, the river black and bottomless and vast behind them, I caught sight of a strand of cobweb floating on an air current. It danced silently by me, past Munnar and his niece, and hung in the air for a few minutes at the knees of two holy men who were chatting on a step nearby.

Trying to figure out what matters, what to pray for, who to pray to, even trying to ascertain what is real, is like trying to catch that little cobweb floating on an air current in the dark. Sitting there I knew I didn't even want to try to catch the cobweb, it was magic enough to notice it. I just took a deep breath, and followed the wispy thread till it settled down on the ground between the two holy men. Even though I was sitting only a few feet away. I have no ideas if those guys saw the web, maybe yes, maybe no.

But I did, and maybe that's all that matters.

Metaphysically Speaking, Part One~The Varanasi Family Photo Album

2011-04-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

I'm having a long distance conversation with a friend back in the states about what matters. Does anything really matter? Does everything matter? Are there only a few essential things that matter, and everything else is inconsequential? Sometimes we branch out into, What is Reality? Do we make our own Reality? Is anything, essentially, solidly, Real? You know, small questions like that.

Being in Varanasi, even more than being anywhere else in India, makes a soul wonder. Varanasi brings the metaphysical out of the closet and puts it right in your lap and says, "You want to find out what really matters? What's real? Let's look at some family pictures."

"First of all. You are not alone. You are part of a large tribe. The Varanasi Tribe. Look at all the seekers, your brothers and sisters. They come in droves.

"Do you like that new airport? We just had it built, to make all the Westerners feel at home, and to make the Indians feel like wealth is here for the taking if you are willing to make the pilgrimage to Varanasi....

"Because, let's face it. Money matters. Indians have finally embraced this idea. Isn't that funny. Westerners come to India to find out what matters after money, behind money, other than money. They dress like Indians. Indians who've been able to see for millenium what was more important than money have finally decided Westerners are right. Now the Indians want the money. Now they are starting to dress like Westerners.

"Oh, we park the planes at the old airport and make everyone walk in the sweltering heat to the new air conditioned airport. It's a little joke we like to play. Getting the seekers to question the Journey itself. Some of them say...'Ah, I see what this is all about....it's about leaving the old behind and getting to the new all on your own steam....right...I get it'.

"Silly humans."

"Prayer. A lot of people think prayer is what matters. And God, of course. Any God. In Varanasi we like choice. It's like an American supermarket, only we are selling a million different kinds of God instead of a 100 different kinds of laundry detergent."

"Ooooh. And Devotion. Devotion matters. Reaching for the divine. If God(s) is so important then it's best to prove it with devotion."

"Giving thanks. Gratitude. Puja. Celebrating life. That's what this one's all about. Gratitude. Of course, ask each priest and spectator what they are thankful for, and you open a can of worms....big can of worms. There are as many different answers to that one as there are dead bodies in the Ganges.

"Ok. Wait. I tried to pull one over on you there. Sorry for that. I said this one was all about Gratitude. Celebrating Life. That's kind of not true. There's a puja down the river a bit that is about all those things. But this one. Well, this one just might be a little more about money. Making money. It's really more like a Puja Circus.

"But you didn't hear that from me."

"Oh, look. We are back to God. Prayer. Though that chick in back seems to have something else on her mind. She looks pretty happy. She might even be having fun..... I wonder what matters to her."

"Caste. Social Status. That matters. At least to these young Brahmins. Every morning they come down to the water to learn how to pray, cuz they are special, only they can pray the Brahmin way."

"Death. Really, when you think about it.....all that matters in life is that someday we are all gonna die. Right? Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

"Of course, I don't like to brag, but it is most honorable to die here, with me, Varanasi. Everybody in India says so. So, I guess, really, I matter."

"Family? Well, ok. It could be family that matters. And sons. Having a son. That matters too."

"Food. Tea. Coffee. Don't worry, be happy. Hmmm. Maybe nothing really matters."

"Cows. This is one of my personal favorites. Those humans let the cows shit everywhere. Then they walk in it. Seriously. But that brings us back, of course, to God. Shiva. The sacred divine.

"Boy, willing to walk in shit for God. God must really matter."

"Told you."

"Of course, to the monkeys, what matters is food. Come to think of it, there are lots of humans who think that the world begins and ends with a good meal...."

"Good personal hygiene. Clean clothes. Very important. But would it be getting too metaphysical on you to posit the question, How clean can those clothes be if they are washed in fetid water?

You are absolutely right...it wouldn't be too metaphysical...it would be, rather, deeply existential...if you think about it. But no need to bring you down. Existential pondering can lead to despair, grieving....no need to go there. Grief only matters a little."

"You know, a lot of people think a roof over your head is what matters."

"Looking Good. Could be that is what matters. Again, where did that man bathe? In the river. Best not to think about that."

"Then there is nature, the beauty of the moment. Soak it in sister. Lean back. Look at the sunrise over the Ganges. Could be that's what matters. Especially if you don't think about how disgusting everything is around you. And if you can forget about that little kid you just saw taking a dump on the sidewalk several feet to your left. Focus on the BEAUTY OF THE SUNRISE!"

"Peace of mind, OF COURSE. That's what matters. Emptying your mind of all the worries, the dirt, the death, the "all" of this crazy planet and it's absurd humanity. Empty your mind...."

"Ooohh we have a metaphysical hodgepodge here. We got your boatmen sleeping on the ghats. We got your yogi down there in the lower left. We've got a good Indian family selling tea for all the tourists and pilgrims, doing their service...that's surely what matters.

"Oh, oh, or it could be, once again, God. See all those wise men sitting up there looking out at the Ganges. Surely the wise men know what matters most."

"This poor guy just wants to make a buck. No clients. He over slept and now everyone who wants to go out on the water has left him to sit all by himself next to the warf. Him and the stray dog. If only he were a better worker and he'd woken up an hour earlier....He obviously doesn't know what matters. He doesn't know that money doesn't sleep. He hasn't met Kundar, Kundar knows that Varanasi runs on money. That's why Kundar isn't in this photo."

"Now this guy knows from work. This guy got up on time. He is hard at it. Work. Work is what matters. Right? He is washing those pillow cases. Next he will wash the sheets. Then those pillow cases, and the sheets you can't see, will be returned to the hotel where they came from. Then these pillow cases and sheets will be put on the beds of travelers who won't touch the Ganges because it is frighteningly dirty, but, and here's the funny part, they are all sleeping on sheets and pillow cases that were washed in that sacred, germ laden water."

"Of course. It could be peace that matters. Real peace. Peace for all of humanity. That's what this guy thought."

"Now it might just be that what matters is the very same thing that brings all the pilgrims to Varanasi.

"The source.

"Isn't that a great word: SOURCE. Especially when you are talking about The Ganges. About the mother of life.

"Life giving Ganges, who also holds death. Death and Life and Life and Death.

"It all comes back to the Source. Now we are talking metaphysically, about the beginning of it ALL. It's right here, folks...right here...Mother Ganges. Mother Earth. Life giving and Death receiving.

"It all comes back to the Source."

"It all comes back to the Source."

"This is Reality."

2011-04-14T05:42:00.000-07:00

Varanasi is disgusting. The Ganges is equally repulsive. If you are even slightly germ-phobic, do not, I repeat, do not come to Varanasi.

I've seen a lot of cows in India. I think there may be as many cows in Varanasi as I have seen spread out over all of Kerala and West Bengal. And, they can go wherever they like.

They can also "go" wherever they like. Shit is everywhere. You know it's not like me to use the vulgar if I can find something else that is nicer, but equally effective. But in Varanasi, it can only and should only be called Shit, with a capital "S". Piles of it, gobs of it, settlements of dung, coat the streets which are narrow, too narrow for cars, and dangerously narrow for pedestrians trying to avoid stepping in shit, especially when motorbikes careen at their own speed (too fast) through the alleys.

Shit foot-print

Mother Ganga, the holiest of rivers, is, presumably, also filled with Shit. But that is the least of what it is filled with. There's your pedestrian trash and non-biodegradables, there's the snakes, there's the slimy film which might be soap or scum from all the bathers, or the laundry, or God knows what. There are also the bodies. Some you can see. There are the live ones, pilgrims doing puja or bringing their dead relatives, people taking their daily bath, Laundry-wallas doing the wash.

Bathers

Laundry Wallas

You can also catch a glimpse of several dead cows, huge and bloated, sailing slowly down river.

But there are also the bodies you can't see, the ashes of millions that have been left here for safe keeping over the centuries. And, I was told today, sunk in the bottom of the river are the bodies of those who cannot be burned: Particular Brahmins, lepers, small pox victims, and children under the age of ten.

Just as you shouldn't come to Varanasi if you are germ-phobic, you should not come to Varanasi if you are uneasy with death, with grieving, with in your face, no holds barred, "Life comes to an end and then something must happen to the empty body and the people left behind will be the ones to do it."

In Varanasi, bodies are brought to the river's edge night and day. These bodies have been washed by river water, blessed, wrapped, if they are men in white, if they are women in colors, maybe their wedding sari, and adorned with gifts left by grieving friends and family. The bodies are sandwiched between two bamboo stretchers, which are more like ladders, in that the bodies are by no means concealed. It is on these stretchers that the bodies are brought to small pyres. Wood is purchased, weighed in some proportion to the weight of the corpse. The heaviest lot of wood is stacked near the shoulders, if the deceased is a man, and under the hips, if it is a woman.

Only men may light the fire, a wife's husband, a mother's son, a husband's brother.....Women are considered apt to throw themselves on the fire out of despair if they are allowed too near. I was told once that some grown children whose deceased father married a much younger second wife might let the healthy young widow come near, in hopes that she will decide to do the honorable thing and relieve her step-children of the burden of keeping her in dal and rice for the next 50 years.

After the body is burned, the ashes are kept for a certain period with the family and then they are returned to the Ganges by the whole family who have each shaved their heads and or facial hair, depending on their faith.

These pilgrims mix with other Hindus and Muslims who have made a sacred journey, as well as, the thousands upon thousands of religious and cultural foreigners who flock here, well, for a myriad of different reasons.

My guide to Varanasi for the last two days was bequeathed to me by my hotel, Ganapati Guesthouse. I chose this place because Nicole called me up and said I would like it, plus, Ganapati is another name for Ganesha, so I thought it would be the perfect place to brave the high-octane energy of Varanasi.

Deep showed up with the driver at the airport. He shook my hand and said with a full heart of sincerity, "Welcome to Varanasi." Right off the bat, I knew Deep was, well, deep. Before we reached the car Deep had already noticed my rings and informed me that I was wearing my butter amber ring on the wrong hand and finger and that for full ayurvedic effect I should switch it immediately.

Deep's insights into my life and his homeland came so quick and steady that I couldn't and can't remember them all, even a fraction of them. A guy of about 30 who can neither read nor write, who is single, the caretaker to his recently deceased older brother's kids, Deep spent the hour in the car from the airport trying to make me laugh ("Your face looks so happy, but your heart is not".) When I did finally laugh at his proclamation that "mobile phones are for the lies," he looked at me, his heart full of sincerity and said, "Thank you for that."

Deep thinks that mobile phones are so popular in India because it allows everyone to lie from a safe distance, "Oh, yes I am just around the corner, I will be there in 5 minutes....They will not be there in five minutes. It will take an hour. You see, lies!"

I hired Deep to be my guide to the "old town" this morning after a two hour boat ride on the Ganges at dawn. I put "old town" in quotes because the city is over 2,000 years old, so when did they decide to draw the line between "Old" and "New", I wonder. Deep was patient with my incessant stopping to take photos, and he was able to ride the fine line between telling me interesting info about the city and being quiet so that I could absorb the energy all on my own without too much extra babble.

Deep is a devout Hindu. He comes from a family of believers. They do nothing without consulting their guru, who is the son of their old guru. If they buy a lamp, they must call the guru to find out where the lamp should be placed for best benefit for personal and economic health. According to Deep, in his religion his Guru is greater than his Mother and Father because the Guru teaches Deep how to release his negative traits, how to open his heart and to live in Peace. Deep's Mother and Father are greater than any God because they gave him life and make sure he is provided for on the planet. So, by my reckoning, the Gods comes pretty low on the totem pole in Deep's interpretation of Hindu doctrine.

You wouldn't know it here in Varanasi. There are, again according to Deep, 56 BILLION temples in this small city by the Ganges. Yes. Billions.

He tried to explain to me exactly how that could be, but I couldn't quite grasp it in a logical sense. However, walking around the one square mile of "Old Town" this morning, I was, admittedly, taken aback by the astounding number of temples. So many belong to Shiva, the patron God of Varanasi. But you also have your Hanuman temples, Durga, Krishna, and, my dear friend, Ganesha who besides getting some good playtime in various temples, also gets a shout out above almost every single door in town. Well, at least in "Old Town". Who knows what they do in the more modern hoods.

Besides the temples, there are priests EVERYWHERE. What's that saying about throwing stones...??? All along the water they sit under large umbrellas waiting to dole out blessings.

They'll also gladly exchange a photo of themselves for a few rupees. I've been tempted to ask for both a blessing and a photo because they do have some of the greatest faces I've ever seen. It's like their faces are painted with wisdom. In some, the eyes are what give them power and prestige. The eyes fairly dare a person to look back....they say, "Can you handle the truth? I've got the truth. Can you handle it?"

So far, the only truth I've sought, well not sought, but welcomed when it arrived, was Deep's. In the car ride into to town, before I'd seen anything of the Ganges, Deep said, "To you all (meaning us tourists) this place is magic. To us, it is just reality."

When I got here and Deep had gone, I walked out onto the balcony of Ganpati Guest House and got my first look at the Ganges and the life that swarms along her shore. I believe my exact thought bubble was, "HOLY FUCK". Again, sorry about the crassness.

But Varanasi is crass. It is rude. It is brutal. It is in your face. It is "reality." It is life and death and Shit with a capital "S". It is hiding nothing. If you look into it's eyes it is prepared to tell you the truth.

Out on the water this morning, I watched as a young widower laid his wife's body down on a funeral pyre. Her body was wrapped in the bright red sari she was wed in. He walked around her five times, then a priest brought some straw lit from the eternal fire which has been going, by Deep's account, over 3,000 years. He walked around her again, went to his wife's feet and lit the pyre. All around him, the city hummed with the visceral energy of the living. As the fire struggled to take hold, the husband stepped aside, sometimes he watched, but mostly he looked away. I saw him wipe a tear away. One moment of introspective, silent, grief in a very public ritual of death and letting go.

"We burn to learn," said Deep from his side of the boat. "This is reality."

But Varanasi is not just crass. "We are not monkeys," Deep would say. "We are not animals. We are the humans, we must make not just our bodies happy like the monkey, we must make our hearts and our spirits happy. We must make for the good Karma. We must do all this that we do when our family member dies so that they will be respected and so that their ghost will be free and not stay here to make our soul unhappy. We are not monkeys, we are humans. We must nurture the soul."

Here's where the magic comes in. What we westerners might, according to Deep, call magic, anyway, is the ever-present thrum of spirit and faith that feeds off of and refuels the mystery of the Ganges. There is no doubt here that life goes on after death, that the whole of this existence is just a chain in the events of countless existences. Everything about this place runs on that same fuel, that supposition, that fact, that Reality.

Joy Squared

2011-04-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in an almost dingy hotel room in Siliguri, West Bengal. I awoke in time for the sunrise I might see if I were still in Darjeeling. The view from my room here is of an abandoned, trash saturated lot and a highway. I have no idea where the sun would be if I could see it. The rain that started in Darjeeling two days ago, lingers here. It is dreary. When I arrived last night I checked in, went to my room, ordered room service and watched Richie Rich on HBO. Sometimes you just have to check in and check out.

I'm hoping for good wifi in Varanasi. Ha. That's a funny thing to say. I'm going to one of the spiritual epi-centers of the world and I'm hoping for good wi-fi. That's funny because I've been noticing how my defense mechanisms are already kicking in even before I get to Varanasi. It's a place that makes non-woo-woo folks stand up and take notice of the aggressively energetic vibe. I bought a string of beads yesterday and stood for 15 minutes deciding which one held the best ju-ju. So, the woo-woo in me is more than a little nervous about encountering the ju-ju of Varanasi.

If I was a good spiritual pilgrim I might tell myself, "NO INTERNET IN VARANASI!" Force myself to just be with the experience, process it internally, let it rummage through my psyche without any back up. But, as I discussed in the last post, I am a sloppy spiritual pilgrim.

No. That's not true. Well, maybe it's true. But it's not entirely true. There's another reason I want good wi-fi, besides the ability it gives me to check out of intense experiences when they become overwhelming, and that relates to why I started to say, "I'm hoping for good wifi in Varanasi," in the first place.

This reason is summed up perfectly by this picture:

That's the quote that greeted me on the balcony of The Classic Guest House in Darjeeling. It made me laugh when I arrived there alone. But the main reason I laughed when I saw the quote and didn't get a little bummed out in a "oh, right, thanks for reminding me that I'm ALONE and that I have NO ONE to share this trip with," kind of way was because I have so many of you to share this trip with via the internet. And, it does, indeed, increase my joy.

Plus, I figure if all the monks I saw in Darjeeling can walk around with cell phones glued to their ears, I can have my electronic outlet and still be a spiritual pilgrim.

I started to write a very short post in which I was going to share with you these few pictures of young monks playing cricket in Darjeeling. You see, I don't have good enough internet to just upload ALL my pictures (maybe in Varanasi! See where I'm going with this?). But these few pictures bring me particularly great joy. And I wanted to share them, the pictures, and it, the joy.

Officially Worthwhile

2011-04-11T19:52:00.000-07:00

I've been tip-toeing through the last few days. No confident Katherine Hepburn strides whisking me up and down the mountains like the first few days of my Darjeeling sojourn. Instead, I feel like I'm in a constant state of walking meditation, with little breaks to eat, or sleep (in that case, long breaks), or to read.

There is something about this place that feels instructive, like it's rearranging things deep down, scratching an itch that I can't even feel. In that way, Darjeeling puts me in mind of Sedona, Arizona. When I stopped there on a drive across country several years ago, I remember a tour guide saying that something about the energetic make up of the place often caused people to up and completely change their lives, though while you are there it just feels like a good place to visit, comfortable, beautiful, peaceful. I think Darjeeling has that same power...to erode unnecessary dams lurking in the subconscious.

This morning I woke up at about 4:50 in the morning and sat watching the sunrise over the mountains. There were a few more layers of ridges visible than I'd previously been able to see and as I sat there the horizon began to stretch even farther and farther back while more mountain tops started to emerge from the steel gray light of early morning. It was like watching a very large Polaroid photo develop over the span of a couple of hours.

I had no idea if the new ridges were the famous Kanchenjunga....the third highest mountain in the world..which lives just up, or is it down, the road from Darjeeling. Later I took a walk and found an official Kanchenjunga "view point" with an official and actual view of the mountain and realized I'd only been seeing it's foothills from my balcony.

Three of Kanchenjunga's 5 sacred peaks

I descend this much smaller mountain tomorrow, down to Siliguri where I will sleep for one night and then I will get up early on Wednesday and take two planes, the first to Delhi, the second to Varanasi, the famed city by the Ganges where pilgrims go to bury their dead and to pray for their ancestors. It is, by almost all accounts, one of the most energetically powerful places on the planet. I just found out this morning that I will be there on the full moon, which makes me both more excited and more apprehensive.

Normally, the cycles of the moon are very important to me. But here in India, I have rarely been able to see the moon and have felt a bit distanced from it's magic. It is either some deep instinct at work, or pure luck, that I will end up in that holy city, in the final days of my trip to India, on the full moon. Just as it was pure luck almost three years ago when I finished up my trip to Europe with two full moon days on Iona, another of the planet's most potent sacred sites.

Just like the last trip at about this juncture of things, two plus weeks from my return date, I am beginning to feel out of sorts with my journey, the fact of it, the "why" of it, the "what has it all been for" of it. There is something in the gearing up to go home that makes me both want to crawl deeper into myself, into my quiet, unsociable places, and also makes me feel itchy in my skin, agitated, like a bottle of fizzy water that has been shaken up and is a little nervous about what will happen when the top is taken off.

I have started to wonder if I've done/am doing all that I can to wring what it is I was supposed to get out of this trip. Is it enough to be here in Darjeeling, soaking in the place, the quiet, the mountains? I have seen a few monasteries, lit incense, spun prayer wheels. Even today, I went to the Hindu temple on the hill to ask Ganesha for safe travels in the coming week and to thank him for the safe travels I've already had.

Though I believe enough in the Ganesha energy that has permeated this journey, I know I am a sloppy devotee. Not like the serious folks, who pause whenever they walk by a shrine to say a little prayer. They are never unaware of where images their god or goddesses live on their daily routes and they pause at every single one, bend their head, fold their hands, say a prayer, then touch their fingers to their third eye and heart and walk on. Then there are the Buddhist holy men dressed in red and gold, the mysterious flagellates wearing dreadlocks and beating drums when they aren't beating themselves, and the Muslim men walking backward down the mountain in a slow steady gait holding a flag to be filled with alms. None of these people are sloppy devotees.

I've also seen lepers and cheerful men with only half a body who greet me everyday with a smile and a hand over their heart, who strike me as being equally, if somehow not more, wise than others who flaunt their devotion to a God, or gods, or prayer. These half formed and wasting men must always bear their crosses, carry their burdens, their days are filled with endless supplication.

But my personal pilgrimage, my supplication has mostly been only to the place, India and the smaller places in it, to the journey, to the getting here. If I have prayed at all, besides the small trips to someone else's shrines, it is at the sunrise, at the first fresh rays of the day, and then my prayer was one of witnessing and not of supplication, not a trial of hardship, only of awareness: Look the sun is rising, there is a beautiful fog settled in the valley, I haven't seen that ridge before.....

I've begun to yearn for some kind of epiphany, some cosmic light bulb that will tell me what this trip has been "about". I know that might seem ridiculous. Like you, I can look back and see so much that has happened that will change and shift my life, so much light that has already been shed.

I think it is the impending return to the life I had before India that makes the need for some kind of grand "A-Ha" moment more urgent. I want something solid to hold onto, something I can take back to America other than photos and souvenirs that will make it all more Officially Worthwhile.

But time is slipping away. Mumbai and Kerala seem like places I visited in a dream. Even Santiniketan, which I left a week ago, is fading quickly into the mist of maya and illusion. I can't say Seattle feels that much more real. But it's where I will go and settle into again, where I will gather about me the familiar, the long-standing, the well-loved.

I don't just want to step back into my old life, to let the way things were become the way things are, again. So, my steps here have become more tentative, slow, even.

****************

There is something in this post, a thread that I cannot quite grasp. As of this sentence, it is a new morning, the sun has just come up again, though it is still hiding behind the dense cloud cover that has shrouded the mountains in their heaviest get up I've seen.

I went to sleep hoping that the thread that I cannot grasp would make itself available in my dreams. I know it has to do with the mountains coming and going, like clarity, like vision, like epiphanies that lie somewhere just on the other side of the cloud cover.

My dreams were no help. I dreamt of an ex who often pops into my night journeys. I must miss him and love him more than I admit in my waking life. I also watched some bit of Indian English detente happen concerning the impending Royal Wedding. And, perhaps most interestingly, there was a lad who had a giant prayer wheel and a woman had stuck a sign on the wheel that said, "Rage -> Morgan." It was, in dream logic, a rather beautiful way for the lad to release his rage at me, though I don't know why he was so angry, by releasing prayers into the universe instead. He had a long baton that he was to reach out and pull the handle on the prayer wheel whenever he was feeling inwardly provoked. The wheel would spin and his rage would be translated into prayer.

While I am writing of dreams, outside up on the Hill above me a scene from my pre-India dream has suddenly materialized. A woman with a deepish, throatiesh voice is leading a call and response song. Unlike my dream of so many weeks ago, there are cymbals and drums accompanying the roving band of devotional singers. Now that I listen more closely, I believe they might be Hari Krishna's, or at least "Hari" is being invoked regularly. At the Temple on the hill where I went yesterday to ask Ganesha for safe travels, the bells are being rung by devotees doing their early morning puja. Joggers are jogging away their stresses and fears. The custodian at the church school below me is opening the doors and readying the sanctuary.

I search for meaning with my finger tips on the keyboard, while catching moments to look up at the clouds, angel clouds, lined with white and holding thunder and rain to be released at a later time (will my prayers also be released?). The sun has almost broken through the dense haze to make itself a clear, round presence in the sky. It's rays, distant only minutes ago, now warm my cheeks and arms. That's all. That's hopefully enough.

Pulled Into Wakefulness

2011-04-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

April 9th sits in me like a time-bomb of fatigue and cloudiness. Eight years ago today my dad died, and even though the anniversary always delivers an explosion of sense-memory muscle sadness, I somehow manage to forget about it in the days leading up. Of course, my soul can play tricks and sometimes sends it's annual gift on the 8th, just to mess around with me, so that I wake up on the 9th feeling almost giddy with relief. This year, I'm in a totally different time zone, so I think my psyche decided to play it safe and spread the heavy feeling out over the 8th and 9th.

I thought it was just all the exercise I'm getting and the elevation, but after I had almost 12 hours of sleep last night and was still unable to stand for fear of falling over, I took a look around in my heart and mind and suddenly realized that it was April 9th and probably nothing in the world was going to make me feel like getting out of bed today, not even the Himalayan mountains.

I did, though, get out of bed. I hemmed and hawed most of the morning away. Crawled back into bed and tried my darndest to let my body sleep if that's what it really wanted. But then the hotel decided that today was the day it was going to clean and paint the tin roof right over my head, so I took that as a sign, made myself get dressed and vacated the room.

Once outside I couldn't decide where to go and eventually took the path of least resistance and went off in the direction of the Tibetan Refuge Center which was supposed to be near the zoo where I had gone yesterday and therefore should be fairly easy to find. After walking downhill for an hour, which meant I was looking at walking up hill for two, I found the center and had a good look around. It is a working and living refugee center, not a tourist place. Theres not a lot of showmanship involved.

But there were craftspeople of all kinds hard at work. I found the weaving especially fascinating. I also found the photos of the first refugees and the picture of the woman who founded the Center moving, to say the least. It was the second day in a row that I'd stood in a museum looking at people I hadn't heard of before, crying for their bravery and chutzpah. Yesterday, I'd been to the Everest Museum and wept for all the souls who'd clawed their way to the top. So much daring and living really gets my juices going these days.

Maybe it's the specter of death that looms for me at this time of the year that makes me cherish the bold way that some souls spend their lives. That April 9th 2003 is etched in my mind. I remember the early hours of the morning sitting on the floor with my dad cradled in my arms. He'd fallen out of bed for the second time and Kit, my step-mom, and I couldn't lift him back on our own. So, while we waited for the fire-truck to arrive, my naked father, covered with a blanket, his body swollen with cancer, laid against my chest and I tried to soothe him as best I could. When the firemen showed up, I remember the absurdity of the situation and especially the inanity of my thoughts which went something like, "Wow, firemen really are handsome."

About 12 hours later, I sat on my dad's bed, holding his hand, unaware that he had so little time left. He was lying awkwardly on his stomach. We were alone in the house. He'd been vomiting dried blood which had put me in a panic. I had called the hospice nurse earlier, cleaned him up as best I could and now waited for her to arrive. My dad was foggy and as far I knew he hadn't said anything coherent since the evening before when he quite clearly told me he wasn't going to eat dinner because he didn't "want to be part of this fiasco anymore."

But something suddenly got my dad's attention and his eyes focused and he appeared to be listening to someone I couldn't see.

I said, "Who do you see, dad?"

He didn't say anything.

Holding his hand, I thought, "I bet your dad is here. I bet that's who is talking to you." And with that came the sudden realization that my dad and I were far from being alone in the house, the bed was surrounded by people who'd gathered in the mist between life and death to give my dad a helping hand.

I thought to my dad, but I did not speak, "It's ok Dad, we are all here."

And my dad smiled, as if he'd clearly heard.

You would think that with spirits around the bed and dried blood, I'd know the end was near. But it just didn't occur to me, nor to Kit. It wasn't until around seven in the evening when the second hospice nurse of the day came to bring dad a hospital bed and to catheterize him to make him comfortable that we found out. The hospice nurse told us as gently as possible that what we'd been witnessing over the last 24 hours were the last stages of living, or is it dying? She told us gently, but she still couldn't completely hide her astonishment that we'd been unaware. She was sure it was a matter of hours, 7 or 8 at the most.

Once he'd been made comfortable, my dad relaxed and set about calling the ferry man. Kit went to change so that she, too, could be comfortable and curl up next to my Dad. We thought we were in for a long night keeping vigil. I sat next to him holding one hand and keeping my other hand, inadvertently over his heart. While I had him to myself, I sang Dites-Moi because the song had always reminded me of him. He'd taught it to me in the third grade and I'd taught it to my french class at school, with his help. I also took the moment to tell him that it was ok for him to leave and that I would be ok. Kit came in and held him almost in a spooning position and he must have felt safe and ready because he took the plunge within an hour and stepped over to the other side. I was rather amazed at the speed with which he left; I’d imagined it would be harder.

My dad had found little to make his last months worthwhile. Some people accept the end is near and try to wring what joy they can out of the time they have left. Not my dad. He tried to take cancer as a sign that living was and always had been a cruel joke and only suckers pretended that their heart had been in it all along. Of course, my dad was just scared and angry like any human being would be.

But those of us who tried to comfort him and to care for him found it exhausting and somewhat devastating that he so stubbornly refused to find anything joyful in the time that he had left. Just about the only time he would perk up was when he'd convinced himself that the cancer was fightable or that the palliative chemotherapy he was getting was really curative, which was equally devastating to those of us who recognized the truth. My dad mostly faced his death sentence as, well, a death sentence and pretty much stopped living the October they'd opened him up to cut the cancer out of his liver only to close him up when they realized that there wouldn't be any liver left if they took out the cancerous parts.

There was a spring storm shaking the trees outside, the night he completely closed up shop. Just like there is today in Darjeeling. Here there is thunder and lightening and the tumultuous sound of heavy drops hitting the clean tin roof over my head. On that April 9^th, in Norfolk, the storm had come and gone, but the wind that had ushered it in still swept through the trees while I sat on the curb waiting for Mutt and Jeff, the two guys out of central casting, one tall and thin, the other short and fat, both dressed in black leather coats and wearing deeply sympathetic expressions, to take my dad away to the funeral home. I sat that night and wept into the wind, letting nature rage for me, while I began the long process of letting go.

During the six months that my dad was knowingly sick with cancer, he repeated the desire several times that I should go to China before he died. He'd recently been with Kit and it had knocked his socks off. He wanted to be able to talk about it with me before he moved on. I knew it wasn't going to happen in his lifetime, but it was unbelievably sweet that he felt so strongly, and naively, about the trip. It was the one sign of life he really clung to.

I don't know how my dad felt about India. We never talked about it. He never came here. But I think he would have liked it.

After I walked down the mountain today to the Tibetan Refuge Center, I was not looking forward to finding my way up. As I started to leave the compound a white pick up truck was going out. I don't know why, but I looked up just in time to see an old Tibetan woman madly waving down at me from the third level of the compound; when I made eye contact she made a motion as if she was driving a car and pointed frantically to the white pick up and back to me. I, in turn, waved madly at the pick up which was almost out of the gate; it stopped. I looked up at the lady and she motioned for me to get in. I asked a kid who was standing in the bed of the truck if they were going to Darjeeling and if I could get a ride. They were and I could, so I hopped in the back.

The white pick up was the communal truck for the people who lived on site at the refugee center to get up to Darjeeling, which I would soon realize I'd actually walked out of on my descent down the mountain. The young man in the pick up bed stood next to me chatting, while we held on for dear life as the truck careened up mountain roads, twisting and turning and taking us on a wild, but free, ride. We stopped to pick up some Tibetan girls who were headed in our direction to play basketball, so for a while there were several of us standing behind the cab, holding on and talking while small town, Himalayan, India whizzed by.

As we sped along, my fatigue fell out of me onto the side of the road and I was filled instead with ecstasy, clear-headed joy and vitality, not to mention gratitude for that woman who made sure I didn't try to walk all the way back to Darjeeling on my own. It was a very long ride.

It was one of those travelling mercies that mean more than the simple facts. A stranger, a refugee from her own land, had noticed me, noticed my need, my weariness and made sure I was given swift and safe passage back to my temporary home. I was not just standing in a pick-up going up a mountain road to Darjeeling, which, of course, is spectacular enough. I was being pulled back into wakefulness.

Now the storm here in Darjeeling has passed, the clouds linger, but the birds are singing again, the motorbikes have taken to the newly washed roads, life goes on. Tomorrow I suspect I will wake up refreshed and energized, ready, once again, to put my heart back into the living.

My Dad and I in London or Paris.

Who do I have to speak to around here?

2011-04-08T14:04:00.000-07:00

I find everything about my bed here at the Classic Guest House in Darjeeling delicious. It is soft. It has two lovely down pillows, to go with it's heavy down comforter. I even find it's companionless emptiness perfect. It's just me and the pillows and the comforter and whichever book I'm struggling to stay awake to read. Part of what makes the bed so sinkable into is the crisp air of the mountains which remains constantly, despite it's minor daily fluctuations, at the perfect temperature for sleeping, or napping, or for having a lie down.

Right now it is one seventeen in the early morning. I woke up about forty minutes ago, I'd guess, after falling fast asleep, without my supper even, at about eight. I laid in bed, clinging to a dream that was very similar to dreams I've been having every night for the last week or so. I don't really remember what goes on in this recurring scenario, but I can recall enough of the essence of feeling to know it is the same.

Some part of my sleeping mind is searching for a way to thank the gods, the universe, I don't know, maybe India itself, for this journey I've been on, for that's what I seem to be trying to do every night. But the rules of this place I go to in my dream world are both specific (I cannot go to or thank anyone directly) and vague (I cannot go to or thank anyone directly).

When I wake up I have the sense that I've had to seek out or been sought out by an ancient Buddhist woman who speaks Hindi, or is it practices Hinduism, who will find the Indian equivalent of a Pagan who will tell me what shrine/mountain/deity/person to speak to/ have supper with/ study under/ genuflect before.

Some nights I am walking in circles where everyone is living in dire poverty, while other nights we all might as well be rajahs. The last image that I recall from tonight's pilgrimage was of a door, set in a mountain wall, the door was painted with chipped blue paint, the surrounding earth was covered in a deep green lichen or moss. In this world, money was irrelevant, what mattered was the Earth. No one spoke English, but some other mother tongue that I've long forgotten in my waking brain.

Outside, while I type, the chorus of wild dogs is hard at work keeping the silence of the mountains at bay. I am struck, not for the first time, by the lack of airplane noise which, after my first week in Asia spent sleeping under the flight path of the Mumbai airport, has been the one major man made noise pollutant that I've not encountered much of here in India. Cars and motorbikes rule the motorized, mechanized sound waves of daily life in this part of the world. But, at night, the dogs, who sleep so much of the day, reign supreme.

A cloud has buried the valley below me, while the stars above are shining brightly. There may be mountains standing at attention tomorrow after all, despite the previously scheduled rain front which has been moving in ever so slowly since I arrived on Tuesday afternoon.

I was rather hoping for a day of rain, an excuse to sit in my delicious bed and read without feeling guilty.

If the sun does shine, I shall have to gather up the strength to put on my shoes and to go out wandering again, searching much like I do in my sleep these nights, for some hidden place within myself, and without, where I can hold the abundance of beauty that India keeps throwing in the path like constant bundles of fireworks. I may find myself at a Buddhist monastery or a Hindu shrine offering up my thanks to someone elses deities or Bodhisattva, hoping that my message will reach the right office, get to the person or people in charge.

Or, maybe, I'll just sit on my balcony looking out at the mountains, and talk to God directly.

Oceanically Soothing

2011-04-07T20:16:00.000-07:00

The mountains of India, at least this one, are incredibly peaceful.

This isn't entirely true. Darjeeling province has been locked in a battle of wills with the government of West Bengal for 100 years. Darjeeling wants to be its own land, Gorkhaland, and they have been protesting and getting killed on and off for decades in order to make their point.

With elections coming up in a few weeks, the protests have been both increasing and becoming more peaceful. Apparently, in mass non-violent resistance, the whole province has refused to pay its electricity bill for the last two months, so, not surprisingly, West Bengal turns the power on and off at will. On the way up the mountain, our jeep had to stop, along with dozens of other jeeps carrying tourists up the road, for a large group of students who were blocking the pass in a bid for an independent Gorkhaland. Only a few weeks ago, this agitation would have become so serious that we would have been forced to turn around and to go somewhere else for the night, or a few days. But with the election coming up, no one dares to take things that far.

But, as I started to say at the top there, other than that rather major divisive movement, Darjeeling is the essence of peace. I have been wandering up and down the mountain, investigating temples of different faiths. My legs are sore from all the climbing hither, thither and yon. But my spirit is getting a lot of well deserved rest. I'm not fighting off advances from men. The gents here are so much more respectful. Not even the hawkers act like stawkers. I can roam with a free and easy feeling.

Where the people in the plains have a lean and hungry look, a weariness that comes from sweating all day to make mere rupees, the people of Darjeeling have a vigor, a round heartiness that springs from the temperate climate and the heaps of exercise that comes with living on one step of the mountain, working on another, and praying on yet a third. Even the wild dogs are fluffier, fatter, and, well, cuter.

Of course, so many of the folks here are refugees from Nepal and Tibet, or their forefathers were. So genetically, the stock is different.

The faces are wider, the hips bigger, the average height a little taller. I must admit, truth be told, the men are a great deal more to my liking in these parts. For one thing, I don't tower over most of them. Plus, they remind me, many of them, of Chow Yun Fat, and that can only be a good thing. How nice that I can look at them here without fear of being hastled. It's a little more like Europe that way; there are, upon occasion, mutual looks, moments of appreciation, but never a feeling that a line will be crossed.

Though the locals in Darjeeling must deal with poverty like their brothers and didi's down the mountain, they carry themselves with a more affluent, well tended air. Even their houses, which are as small and ramshackle if one looks closely, have a more smartly aesthetic look, or at least one that I gel with more naturally. Here the locals paint their homes in bright colors and surround them with flowers of even more color, taking the time, energy, and money to even build risers so that the potted plants can produce and multiply. Instead of exuding an air just this side of desperation, the Gorkha people take what they have and work to make it beautiful.

In some ways, Darjeeling reminds me of Seattle. Both are surrounded by mountains which come and go depending on the weather. I've made peace with the fact that I might spend a week here and never clearly see the famous peaks that live shrouded in fog and which will be further obscured in the next few days by the impending storm front.

Both towns are also very lush and green, home to evergreen and deciduous trees that keep the land feeling alive and vibrant even in the harshest winters and the hottest summers. Last night I discovered that there is a fountain at the head of the town square which I live next to. The fountain is only turned on for a few minutes every night for water conservation purposes. But this fountain jumps and plays the way ours does back at Seattle Center and, but for the cool temperatures, people would, I have no doubt, be playing in them the same way.

I haven't spent much time in a mountain town. For, though Seattle is surrounded by two mountain ranges, I think of it as being closer to the water, and so a sound-to-ocean town. I've always considered water important to my living arrangements. India is challenging that assumption in all sorts of ways.

Something I've noticed about this mountain town is that at night it is a lot like an ocean town, well, an ocean town on the side of a mountain. You see, the lights come on after dark (if West Bengal is feeling beneficent) and then there is created this divide between town and the great vast swath of darkness that is the uninhabitable Himalayas. Just like at night on the edge of the ocean, there is light were there are people and then there is the darkness which speaks of nature and the unknown and the places where one might get swallowed up if they didn't stay safely in the warm glow of civilization.

I find that even in the daytime, I am staying close to home more than I'd expected to. I go out walking in the early afternoon for a few hours, then again at night, but my body is loving this restful vibe, this cool clean air and it begs to sit and to just be. Often, it demands to sleep. Last night I went to bed at 9. This morning I missed the sunrise by a few seconds and awoke at 5:40 to see it fully floating above the dim and hazy mountain peak that lies just across the valley from my little hotel.

I had hoped to see all the sunrises here, but I trust that my dreaming mind and soul and my weary limbs have smarter, better plans and are using the rest to gather steam for the days ahead.

"This is my story, this is my song".

2011-04-05T22:02:00.000-07:00

The road to Darjeeling is not fun. A narrow, winding affair with long, steep drops on one side or the other, and potholes bigger than bathrooms, the route is barely wide enough for two cars, and often isn't wide enough for the caravan of jeeps going up the mountain to pass the caravan of "Goods Carriers" coming down the mountain. The journey reminded me of being in a bumper car that could suddenly turn into an old wooden roller coaster, I was alternately being slammed against the side of the car only to recover and discover a drop outside my window that induced instant and terrifying moments of vertigo.

Happily, besides the bruise on my upper right shoulder from constantly being thrown against the side of the jeep, all my distress disappeared the minute I walked into my cozy hotel room and saw the view outside my balcony door. Though shrouded in haze, the Himalayan mountains lurk just across the valley from the Himalayan mountain I am actually standing on. I can't say that word enough: Himalayan, Himalayan, Himalayan.

This is the view from the other side of the hill I am on.

When I was traveling a few years ago in the British Isles, I took a detour briefly to Paris and Italy with my Mom and Sister. We spent a week in the Cinque Terra, falling in love with the small seaside towns that hug the lingurian coast. After my mom and sister left, I decide that I would go to Rome for a few days on my own. It was a whimsical and spontaneous decision. I got on a train, stopped in Florence on my way, then landed in the ancient city of Nero and the Pope and Michelangelo.

After dropping my bags off at the hotel, I grabbed a map and rushed off to see the Colosseum before it closed for the night. When I was safely ensconced inside the gate, I took my first deep breath, Whew, I'd made it! Then I looked around and realized, "Holy Hell, I'm in the COLOSSEUM. IN ROME."

I think I went into shock, then I started crying, joyful, marvelling tears. I didn't know it consciously, but I guess some part of me never expected that I would see such a thing, such an ancient, fabled place. Yet, there I was, touching stones that held gladiators and Ceasers and centuries of history.

I feel that way here. Unglued by the enormity of the moments that I am living. Me. Little me is sitting in a chair looking out at the fabled Himalayan mountains. I am practically spitting distance from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. If it clears up enough, I might get to see Everest. No matter if it does, I know it's there. I could beat ground with my fist and imagine the reverberations reaching that famous summit.

I've been waiting for these feelings, this moment, these moments of awe since I arrived in India. But so far, the country has felt so comfortable (culture shock elements aside), that I haven't really been awestruck. It made sense to be in Kerala, in Santiniketan, even in crazy, nerve-addling Mumbai. But the grandeur of these ancient mountains have struck me to the core, like my head was in a bell and the heavens came along and finally rang it....GONNNNNGGGGGGG....WAKE UP.....YOU ARE IN INDIA!!!!!!!!!

After sitting for a few minutes soaking in the reality of where I was yesterday, I decided to go for a walk to get a lay of the land. I found myself at the base of a hill with several roads to choose from. I asked a policeman for help in deciding. He pointed out a Buddhist monastery at the top of the hill, which I could now see with his help. Thousands of prayer flags were coloring the grove of trees that hugged the peak. That seemed like an auspicious place to start my Himalayan pilgrimage.

Climbing up into the woods, I was utterly enchanted by the bright colors sailing on the wind, hanging from branch to branch to branch. A calmness descended the further I ascended. Bells clanged in various spots hidden in the maze of flag and forest. Eventually I reached a shrine and was startled to discover not Buddha, but Kali. Another held Ganesha, then Shiva, then Krishna, then Hanuman. "This is the strangest Buddhist monastery I've ever seen," I said to myself.

Many people were praying at the temple of their choice, or making the rounds of each, ringing the bell before and after to send their wishes and thanks up to the Gods. I made an offering to Santoshi, a face of Durga, for my friend Finn who loves Durga. I also gave my thanks to my friend and benefactor along this journey, Ganesha, especially for the safe travels up to Darjeeling. I said hello to Hanuman for an old High School friend who is partial to the monkey God.

Just outside the gate there was a man who was mute. He could only groan to get my attention. I had passed him a couple of times in my attempts to procure incense to offer up to the gods, and each time he had made quite a racket in my direction. At first I thought he was telling me that I needed to remove my shoes. Then, he lifted his various jackets and pointed to his privates, not in a lewd way, but in an obvious, and increasingly frantic, attempt to communicate something. I decided that he was telling me that a woman was not allowed in the area I was headed. I turned around. On my way back down to my hotel, he started up again and a sweeper woman explained that he was mute and he was asking for money. I asked her if it was good to give him some and she said, "Yes." I walked back up to the man and gave him 10 rupees. I thought this would quiet him, but he started up again with his vigorous yelps and yawps and pointed once again to his privates then up to the enclave of temples, then down again at himself.

I walked away and asked the sweeping woman what he might be saying. She said, "He is telling you that he will send a prayer for you up to God." I didn't ask her about the obvious reference to male and female private parts, but decided to trust that whatever this mute man needed to say to me and then to God was for the most benevolent purposes; I started home and left my faith in his prayer. Turns out that there used to be a Buddhist monastery on this hill, eons ago. Now it is a place of worship for all religions. Anyone is welcome. All prayers are heard, mine, the mute man's, anyone's.

After a long day of travel, preceeded by a not-so satisfying sleep on the over-night train, I was dead asleep by 9 o'clock. I closed all my curtains so that the morning light wouldn't rouse me, put in my ear plugs and set off for a restorative visit to dreamland. Once there, I dreamt that I was back home for a visit. My mom was there. I discovered that I'd left a pile of clothes out and wanted to put them away before I came back to India. But I grabbed a few pairs of undies because the five pair I brought with me on this real life trip are close to retirement.

I woke up to the gentle sound of drumming and chanting. I had no idea what time it was. With the curtains drawn I didn't know if it was late morning or early. I listened to the drums. Then a message came into my brain, loud and clear: They are drumming the sunrise.

I got up and wrapped myself in a blanket and opened the door to my balcony. The mountains were shrouded in a pink and purple haze. I actually couldn't tell if the sun was up somewhere behind me or what time it was. I hadn't arrived till late last afternoon, so I wasn't sure yet where east and west were from my little view. I sat in a chair and looked around to see if I could see the monks (it must be monks, right?) who were drumming. When I turned back to look at the horizon, I sliver of sun had arrived over one painterly peak. The hidden monks WERE drumming in the arrival of the sun. I turned my chair to face the sun directly, to welcome it with my open heart and my full focus. The drumming and chanting remained steady and was such that I was certain the sun and the drum were in perfect sync, moving at the same pace. I'm not sure, but it could be that those monks were pulling the daylight out of the pocket of night.

The last few hours I've been sitting on my balcony, eating breakfast, sipping coffee and watching Darjeeling wake up. I called my mom on skype and checked in with the western world. Turns out my mom had a dream about me last night and in it, clothes had also been a factor. I think we met each other in dreamland. It wouldn't surprise me. I am in the Himalayas, therefore anything can happen.

Below me is The Assembly of God Church School and starting about an hour ago, boys and girls of all ages have been streaming down the winding mountain road under my perch to congregate for a day of learning. After everyone arrived, they all lined up in rows, single file and began to sing. I couldn't make out all the words, but I did make out the refrain, "This is my story, this is my song."

I suppose I have to face up to the fact that I am in Darjeeling. I am in the Himalayas. These things are part of my story, this is, indeed, my song.

"Aschi" or "I'll Come Again!" ~ It's So Much Easier Than Saying Goodbye.

2011-04-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

The last few days have held one goodbye after another. First Chompa and her family came to tea, then the gender group ladies, then the evening school kids at Anturanga, and then, this morning, Dr. Ganguly, then the younger Anturanga kids. Even the house dog here at Akanda, my Santiniketan home, followed me around all morning demanding farewell stomach rubs.

With each ending, a little piece of my heart has been torn off and left behind with each beautiful soul. Chompa and Bishar, her son, and Gopal, her husband whose name I finally learned, got all dressed up and came for cake and tea. While Chompa and I sat holding hands, she suddenly, took a beautiful necklace she was wearing off and put it over my head. It was explained to me, through Chandana, that Chompa's brother had brought the string of glass and silver beads from Goya Gali, another holy city on the Ganges near to Varansi. On the necklace was something called a narisha, or a stamp of the Goddess. Which Goddess, I could never get. Chompa was transferring the stamp to me, and with it, she said, her blessings for safe travels. As if that wasn't enough, the necklace was bought near the site where Krishna fell in love with the married Radha. So Chompa's blessing also carries with it, I was told, a purity of love, the wishes for a perfect love, unspoilt, heaven sent.

When the phone rang and it was abruptly time for Chompa to go, I hugged her close, as she has held me on our first goodbye a month ago. This woman who had been so intrusive and jarring to my senses when we shared the same space six weeks ago, now feels like a guardian angel of some kind, sent to shield me and protect. I was unprepared for the transformation. Just as I was unprepared for Bishar to hug me. As they walked away, it was as if the rug was being pulled too fast from under my feet.

Not that time makes saying goodbye any easier. I had four hours to spend with my Chitra girls, the women of the gender group. We worked hard, weaving the scenes they'd created of Chitra together with the stories from their own lives, stories that would soften the hardest hearts, true life tales of abandonment, abuse, strength, shame, and transformation. For the last two weeks, I've been getting them to practice saying beautiful things about themselves, asking them to own their own strengths and uniqueness. The first time they had to say something kind about themselves out loud they each giggled and covered their mouth or mumbled it so lowly that I could barely hear them over the constant whir of the ceiling fan. But yesterday, after telling the story of Chitra and their own harrowing stories, they finished the piece we've been creating by looking out at the audience (which was me and Chandana) and going one by one around the circle saying their name and what they feel is beautiful about themselves.

You must remember they speak in Bengali. So even though, at some point, these strengths had been translated for me, in this first and maybe final rehearsal of the entire piece, I couldn't remember the exact translations. What I could understand was that each woman spoke clearly and loudly and proudly. They each looked me in the eye. They each owned their own beauty. I could not have been more proud of them, or felt more blessed to witness their transformation.

Afterwards, I gave them each a little picture that I'd drawn with the phrase, in Bengali, "To me you are beautiful." They gave me a scarf that I'd admired in their craft bin. We all sat in a circle, quiet and teary. Rupa, one of the women who had taken to the acting work particularly well, said, "We have had good teachers before and learned a lot from many people, but we've never had someone here like you who was really ours, who we knew loved us so much."

Darn it. Now I can't type. Hold on.....

Ok. I can stop crying now.....

I told Rupa, and the rest, that she'd articulated exactly what I was feeling about all of them.

At the Antaranga evening school, where we had written poetry together, I showed them two youtube videos as a little going away gift. The first was of elephants painting. This blew their minds. The second is one of my favorite viral videos of all time: Where the Hell is Matt? In it this guy named Matt is filmed in various places around the world dancing a silly little dance, first by himself, then with people from the local areas. I just thought since the kids and I had had such a great cultural exchange, it would be a lighthearted way of celebrating, plus I knew they'd like the geography lesson. When the video started up I remembered that the first place Matt is found is in Mumbai, my first stop in India. Half way through the video I remembered that the last place Matt dances is in Seattle. So, as the kids watched, spell-bound, I started to sob quietly, overcome with the beauty of sharing the world with them, and the simple beautiful circle of starting in their world and ending in mine.

This morning I was dreading going saying goodbye to the little kids at Antaranga. We'd worked the most together. One child, in particular, I was very worried about. Tulsi is a little girl who when I first showed up had an almost ugly, certainly angry looking expression glued on her face. But after a few days of working with me she started to brighten up, after a week or so she was actually smiling. Eventually, I noticed that she would be at the gate every day when I arrived. She'd take my bag and carry it upstairs for me and put it next to, or under, her own book bag. When we would circle up, she would take my hand and squeeze it. I would squeeze her's back. I knew it was going to be hard for her to have me go.

I arrived later than usual today because of some errands I had to finish before the afternoon siesta closed the shops. Tulsi was looking grim again. She perked up a little when we played our favorite games. When it was time to start saying goodbye, I passed out little drawings of hands with hearts in the palm, since it has become tradition for me to give all the kids high-fives at the end of class, or they shake my hand. I told them that I wanted them all to remember that in each handshake had been my love and when they needed more they could just give the picture a little tap. What I didn't say to the room, was that I'd come up with the idea for Tulsi, she was the one I knew would need to remember it the most. She was the one I needed to leave my love with the most.

I sat with the kids, Tulsi on my right, for a class photo and I could feel that Tulsi was on the edge. She was using all her strength not to collapse or dissolve. I put my hand on her back in reassurance. The picture was snapped and I looked at Tulsi and she was quietly crying. The other kids noticed. Nanda, the principal, noticed. He very kindly told the kids that Tulsi was really going to miss me. He told me that she had gone down to check the gate every few minutes this morning to see where I was. I put my arm around Tulsi and she put her head in my lap and cried. I cried, but only a little. I was surrounded by little hearts and we all decided to be gently stoic for Tulsi. But we all let our sadness be ok, too.

Later, after I'd said my final good-byes to Tulsi and her class, I walked by the classroom and discovered Tulsi outside, watching me say good-bye to some teachers. I went over and hugged her and whispered, "Kup Shundor. Kup Shundor." ("Very Beautiful. Very Beautiful") in Tulsi's ear. Tulsi, I know, was a soul on the verge of disintigration. Her heart was breaking. It was my job to hold her and to be compassionate and I was thankful that she had given me someone to hold, so that I, too, wouldn't disintegrate as my heart broke.

Today, in Seattle, there is a memorial for Mark Chamberlin, an actor that I worked with on three occasions. He died, suddenly, a week ago. As far as I know, it is still unclear why he passed away.

I had promised Mark that I would write a blog entry from India just for him. He wanted to know what the food was like here. I'd tried to write that entry many times over the last few months, but I kept rediscovering that although I love the food here, I don't know enough about it to feel like I can write anything intelligent, other than to say some food is spicier than other food. Or, its fun to always get to eat with my hands. Or, who knew vegetarian food could be so insanely delicious?

But now, I suppose I don't need to try. I did. For him. Last week, when I heard the news. I sat down and pushed myself to articulate the differences I'd noticed between food in the south and the food here in West Bengal. But it was a driveling little article. What I wanted to write about, for Mark, had nothing to do with food. It had everything to do with how this country is a lot like Mark. Both are, were, maddening at times. They are, were, even more quixotically warm and generous. When Mark chose to smile at something that I said, it tickled me much the way it does when a particularly hard to impress Indian person suddenly lights up with a smile.

I know that back home today so many people will be struggling with how to say goodbye to a very good man and, for many, an incredibly good friend. I wish that I could be there to add my own message of love and gratitude, especially for our last show together, A Christmas Carol, where he played Scrooge.

He was in such a joyful place, on stage and off. He was playful and kind and brought books in to read that he knew I would like. He hung out in the green room and brought beer for after the show. He'd also been excited for my trip. I will never forget the kind of far off look he got thinking about my impending journey, and the sideways smile that spread over his whole being, starting with his lips then going up to his eyes, then just energizing his entire handsome self.

I'd actually, I realize now, been excited to go home and to share stories with him during our next show together while we hung out in the green room. In fact, I'd decided a few days before he died, that I wouldn't write a blog about the food in India, but I'd tell him all about it when I saw him next. I thought it would be easier to convey the nuances of the various cuisines if I could add a little, "Well, the prawn curry in Kerala was, well, so MMMMMMMM." It had been a casual, fleeting thought, one I held lightly because I could never have imagined that I'd not be seeing him again.

There is still one more major good-bye left here in Santiniketan: Chandana. Last night we ate dinner and had a glass of wine while a storm front moved in shifting the air from hot, humid and still to very windy, cool and, eventually, torrentially rainy. Thunder and Lightening wracked the skies and knocked the fear of God into the electrical company who summarily turned off the juice, just as a precaution to avoid falling live wires and destructive power surges.

So, Chandana and I sat in the low light of a generator powered bulb and watched the drama of the heavens unfold till she suggested that if we really wanted to celebrate the coming storm season we'd go out and let the rain soak us to the bones. I put my hands out into the cold water and asked if that was enough to do the job, after all, a couple had been killed by a single bolt of lightening last week during an electrical storm in Santiniketan. She said, "Not at all. We have to look like heroines in some Bollywood movie if we want to do it right!"

So, I took the plunge and ran out into the pouring rain. Chandana followed and we danced around for a minute until we were drenched. Just as we made it back into the safety of her house, lightening flashed and thunder cracked right above where we'd been dancing.

At the end of the day, that's all we can really do, isn't it? Celebrate the storm with a good drenching dance. Take the lightening bolts of connection that light up our lives and the ensuing rattling thunder that rattles us out of our sometimes stupor and let it move us and shake us.

So many good-byes mean that there have been, and will be, so many good hello's, so much wakefulness, so much electricity, so much thunder, so many tear drops falling like so much rain.

Dr. Ganguly didn't really say good-bye, he said, "You will be back, you belong here. I don't think you can find peace where you are from. You are not like that. Only here you can find peace, I think." He might be right. Here I have been able to find peace within the crackling of my breaking-into-opening heart.

Tonight, I say good bye to Santiniketan and go to Darjeeling on the night train. Chandana will drop me off and make sure I am safely ensconced in the right berth. Tomorrow I will say hello to the Himalayas.

For now, I will leave you with a dance.

Family Beds

2011-04-02T20:06:00.000-07:00

If you've ever read a guide book before traveling to a foreign country, and I've only ever read a little of one, you will probably have at least skimmed the section on etiquette and what cultural differences to watch out for so that you can know what to be sensitive to while guesting in a strange land. You know, those social dos and don'ts which might differ from your culture of origin.

For instance, all the books on India mention that it is more than customary to eat only with the right hand because the left hand is traditionally left for unhygienic duties like cleaning up after a trip to the toilet. You are also not supposed to point the bottoms of your feet at anyone for fear of insulting them.

But in a country like India where there are such major religious players, like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, the webs of religious and social practices are woven with layer upon layer of ritual and even superstition and trying to catalogue all the do's an don'ts for the intrepid traveler would require a multi-volume library and months of study on the part of the traveler to even comprehend a little bit of the diverse interplay.

So, after watching Indians masterfully drink water from water bottles without ever letting the plastic touch their lips, I only just found out that it is actually not hygiene that keeps people from touching their lips to the bottle, but some Hindu practice which forbids one person's lips from touching food or drink that touched another person's lips. Therefore, beggars on the street who have nothing will not take food scraps if someone else took a bite out of the food.

Some people won't even use a ceramic or china cup that has been washed with hot soap and water if someone else ever drank out of it. It would be like spiritually defiling yourself to risk contamination of someone else's juju.

Many of these cultural traditions have to do with separating yourself from or alienating someone else from or pointing out that you are different from a person from another caste or religion. One of my favorite people here in Santiniketan is a Santal woman, Munglie, who cooks for Chandana. Munglie married a man who was from a town and therefore is part of one of the 4 official castes. Munglie, a village girl, is an "outcast". When she goes to her in-law's house where they are much more conservative than her husband, she has to be careful that no part of her whatsoever touches anyone living in the house. If so much as her sari brushes up against her mother-in-law, the mother-in-law runs to the bathroom to clean herself.

These things are strange to me and even appalling, but I've grown used to stories like these. Caste and religion are elements of this society that aren't shy, they parade themselves around, flaunting their respective lifestyles.

But I recently learned of some parts of Indian culture that seriously took me aback and after I thought about it for a while, I realized that this practice also explains a WHOLE lot about why this country feels so very different from my own.

I knew that in villages, or in slums where people are so desperately poor, that whole extended families often sleep in a single room. What I now know is that even in middle to upper class house-holds, parents and children, GROWN children, often all sleep in the same bed. I was told of one man who is in his fifties. He never married. He has slept every night of his life in the same bed with his mother.

In India it is the norm for children to stay with their parents until they are married, for men it is normal to stay with their parents even after they are married, though, presumably, if the house is big enough, the married man would move into a new bed with his new wife. Though not always. Someone told me of a couple who was having trouble getting pregnant. No one could understand it. Then, it came out that the husband's mother had not only been sleeping with the newlyweds, she'd been sleeping between the young husband and wife.

If a young person decides to be independent and asks for their own room or their own (gasp) apartment, like Rei Ganguly did, it is seen as an oddity, a personality quirk. But, should funds permit and the daughter does move out, it is likely the parents will still fully support the child for as long as it takes for a marriage to happen, at which point, I guess, financial responsibility for a girl child shifts to the husband.

In the case of a boy-child, he might not choose to get married and certainly won't leave home until he has worked enough and earned a sufficient amount to have a wife. That's why there are so many older men in their 30s and 40s married to barely legal aged girls: boys live comfortably snuggled into house and bed with their parents until they feel ready to get married and to be more grown up, while girl's, who are considered financial burdens to their parents from the minute they are born, are tossed out at the earliest chance.

Once I learned all this, I realized that I might have hit on the source of what I might call a naivete amongst certain groups of Indians of the middle to upper classes. I've had the sense that many of these Indians are living in a state of permanent adolescence where someone else, either mom or dad or one of the servants, does the laundry and the dishes and makes the meals and pays the rent. Because this means, too, that the child is unmarried, even into their middle-ages, there is a curiosity and yearning for sexual contact, but it may just be that they are, in fact, virgins. Think about it, there are 40 year old male virgins marrying, sometimes, 16 year old female virgins. The emotional and interpersonal learning curve is going to be pretty steep.

In America, of course, living at home with your parents into your 30s and 40s would be severely looked down upon. Until the economic downturn, I think it is fair to say, we westerners saw it as our duty to be out of the house we grew up in as soon as possible. 18 is commonly when we go off to college, so maybe we come home for vacations, but then we certainly hope to be living independently by 24 or 25 at the latest.

I've had friends who get grief if they let their kids sleep with them past the age of 3 or 4. We are told to put the child in their crib in their room and let them cry themselves to sleep....it's good for them...builds that independent spirit we Americans regard so highly.

And virginity past the age of 21 for much of our population is, quite frankly, unheard of.

I hope that this comparison that I am making doesn't sound judgemental. I make it not to make anyone feel foolish. I simply point the differences out in order to try and understand a certain chasm in understanding that I haven't been able to cross.

In my world back home, I am surrounded by the spirit of independence, of sexual and interpersonal experimentation. I, like many, have an easier life because of my parents and the money that they made, but the idea was always instilled in me, and everyone I knew, that I was responsible for myself and my livelihood and my dishes. Though I would have liked to have found a partner that stuck before now, I live in a culture where serial monogamy is becoming the norm. Even people who get married often get unmarried and move onto someone new.

I don't actually know which methodology is better. I told someone here in Santiniketan the other day that one of the reasons my mom loves facebook is because she can keep tabs on my life without being intrusive. This Indian woman, who isn't on facebook, replied, "Morgan, I'm sorry, but there isn't anything my mother doesn't know about my life and nothing I wouldn't tell her apart from, maybe, what happens in my bedroom."

Of this class that I've been talking about, this woman is one of the most independent women I've met . She left her first husband to live with the man who has been her unmarried partner for years. She runs her own business with a gentle iron-fist. But at the root of it all, she still comes from the single-family-bed mentality, the family is all in this living thing together. Who's to say that doesn't beat the heck out of the American family system?

The Day India Stood Still

2011-03-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the Cricket World Cup Semi-Finals. India and Pakistan were up against each other. This made it practically a public holiday in India.

I was in Kolkata for a third and final attempt (this trip, anyway) to see a bit of the sights in the big City of Joy. Chandana had some business that took her in, so she dragged me along, quite willingly, on the Tuesday afternoon train, so that I could get to know the city she loves. She'd hired a car and made arrangements for us to stay at Dr. Ganguly's daughter's flat in South Kolkata. Rai Ganguly hosted us with all the charm of her 25 years and chatted eagerly with the most perfectly beautiful Indian-English accent, which is rather like a constant enchanting song.

Due to a staggering variety of obstacles, however, I saw, once again, relatively little of Kolkata. It started off rather successfully as soon as we disembarked from the train, with a trip to Kolkata's first mall, New Market, which was built sometime around 1856 and which is still a wonderfully labyrinthine hive of small stalls that sell everything and anything a person could want. There's even livestock, or should I say, soon-to-be-dead stock of various kinds. We only managed a few minutes in this part as the smell of blood and guts was absolutely nauseating.

After New Market, Chandana and I went straight to a modern mecca of Kolkattan Commerce: fabIndia, a clothing emporium that specializes in organic cotton Indian style shirts and pants built for everyone, including foreigners with broad shoulders and big hips. I updated my wardrobe so that I could retire the three outfits I've been wearing in constant rotation for three months.

By the time we got to Rai's my Shantiniketan hostess and I were exhausted, so our Kolkata hostess went in search of food to bring in and we sat on the floor and played scrabble and ate kabob and chocolate fudge, feeling ever so slightly guilty not to be going to the rehearsal for a play that we'd been invited to sit in on. Sometimes I am the most ambivalent theater person I know.

Yesterday morning started out fresh and vibrant. Rai insisted on making us breakfast, though she didn't really know how to make the eggs she wanted to offer us, so I gave her a little tutorial and then she, a very quick learner, made the rest to perfection. It was a morning preceded by an evening that felt like family all hanging out on a really good vacation. Chandana was the smart and able big sister, Rai was the funny and beautiful little sister, brilliant in living, with small, quirky holes in her knowledge base that just make her that much more lovable. I said to Chandana as we waited for our "little sister" to cook breakfast, "This might go down as one of my favorite times in India!"

By 8:30 Chandana and Rai were out the door to go off and do their respective business and I got ready to see Victoria Memorial, a huge Raj era monument built in the the early 1900's which houses a museum and which is surrounded by lush, well-kept, clean gardens. Set to meet up with the other gals by 12:30 or One, I figured it was the perfectly sized tourist trap to get caught in for a few hours.

Here's where things started to go pear shaped. At first the auto-rickshaws wouldn't take me to Victoria Memorial. One guy even started to take me, then stopped and basically kicked me out to get a fare he liked the look of better. Or so it felt. Later I realized that auto-rickshaws were nowhere to be seen around Victoria Memorial, so he simply couldn't take me and it had been a few moments into the ride before he'd processed fully my request. He didn't have any English to speak of, so he simply chucked me out. So, I went to a taxi driver who just refused my fare, then, after calling Chandana and bugging her in her meeting to see if Victoria Memorial could possibly go by some other name that I needed to tell the taxi drivers which, of course, it doesn't, I got a cab to take me for double of what it probably should have cost.

After listening to the driver clear his throat then spit repeatedly and watching him pick his nose for the 20 minute ride, it was fun to get out of the cab at the end of the large elegant walk and stroll up to the huge edifice that fronts the Victoria Memorial.

I imagined for a few minutes what it might have been like when it was first built. All the English Officers in uniform and the wives all dressed in white linen. Everything and everyone oozing sophistication and cleanliness and decorum. Maybe elephants decked out in colored blankets with large feathered head dress decorating the walks.....

The front doors shattered any illusions of being transported to a bygone era. Armed guards with very large and imposing rifles manned security desks and metal detectors, though I must have looked harmless because I was ushered inside without so much as a sideways glance.

Inside, there was a peculiar exhibit in a very large rotunda of photographs depicting Sister Theresa's life. They are very strict in the museum about which way you walk and so you follow arrows even though you are in a large open room, so as I went in the proper clock-wise direction I saw photo's of Mother Theresa which were nice enough, though mounted on poster board with little typed signs that reminded me a bit of some strange science art project that a kid might put together for the middle school science/history fair.

What made it really odd, was that every 10 feet or so, there was a break in the temporary Mother Theresa exhibit and then the regular exhibit would be on display for several feet. This older collection was encased in glass and looked much more like it belonged in a proper museum. It was an assortment of bayonets and other deadly weapons of war and mass destruction. So, as I circumnavigated the Victoria Memorial rotunda I was inundated for 10 feet by PEACE and LOVE, then bombarded with HATE and FEAR, PEACE and LOVE, HATE and FEAR, and so on. It was actually a very typical Indian experience in that it contained so strongly the one thing, PEACE AND LOVE, and equally held it's opposite, HATE AND FEAR, with no sense of contradiction whatsoever.

After an hour of looking at the Calcutta Gallery which told the history of the city from the time the first English trader staked his claim on the area through to partition, I was completely embarrassed that I'd ever daydreamed about the elegant and grand days of English rule in India. How completely disgusting it all was. Though not without some benefit to a handful of native inhabitants, which is why I imagine the British influence is still palpable and strangely well-respected even to this day.

With an hour or so to wait for Chandana and Rai, I decided to find a cool and comfy spot under a tree to sit and write in my journal. After a few minutes of lovely solitude, a young man plopped himself down next to me and started asking me who I was and why I was in India. He told me that due to the big cricket match that was happening in the afternoon, no one had showed up at his office so he was having a leisurely stroll before heading home to watch the game. He seemed nice enough, so I chatted for a few minutes, keeping an open mind that he was not going to be a jerk. I am, it turns out, perpetually naive.

Soon he started trying to touch me, first catching a big ant that was on my shoulder...fair enough...but then he just reached out and touched my arm for no reason, while saying he was going to the planetarium and did I want to join. Hmmmm....go somewhere dark with this guy.....no. I got up and explained that I had to meet my friends and walked away. He followed. It was a very open space with lots of people around, so I knew I was in no danger as long as I stayed there, but I'd "gone to meet friends" who wouldn't actually be there yet. So I pulled out my phone and pretended to call Chandana. Eventually the guy took the hint and went on to the planetarium without me.

I sat on a bench and breathed a sigh of relief. Chandana would be calling for real any minute and the car would whisk me away to adventure in a short while. But the phone was not ringing. Another man sat on the bench next to me, so I got up and moved along. I'd seen a big imposing church across the grounds and thought about checking it out while I waited for my phone to ring.

When I got to the intersection that I needed to cross to get to the church it happened to be where the planetarium was....shoot, what if the creep was there and what if he saw me.....after hemming and hawing I decided I had to cross in front of the Planetarium and take my chances. I did. I was safe. But the Church was closed. So was the museum next door. So was the film complex down the road.

I asked for directions to Park Street, the place I'd hung out the last two trips to Kolkata and therefore know and feel safe in, from a guy who spoke good English. Turns out, I found out later, that he gave me directions for the cab route and I thought it was the walking route and I got utterly lost trying to get there on my own steam. I should have known. He told me to go straight, then take a left, then take another left.

So I asked him, "If I take a left and then another left, couldn't I just turn around right here and walk in the opposite direction of where you are telling me to go without turning at all?"

He said no.

Sometimes a common language is not enough for mutual understanding.

I was in seedy streets and tired of cabs refusing my fare and wary of stopping to try and sit for fear of being hit on and now it was well past the time I thought Chandana would be picking me up. So I walked and walked and walked without finding anywhere stoppable. I saw a posh looking mall, but it was across a street that was impossible to cross, which was for the best as I really didn't want to go to a mall that could be just like any mall anywhere in the world.

Eventually, I would walk to the nearest intersection and cross the street and make a u-turn to get to that mall just to try and go into an air-conditioned haven. But, Ganesha was clearly off removing obstacles for some other more deserving soul because just as I was about to step inside the mall, my phone finally rang and Chandana and I proceeded to attempt to connect about where she was and where I was and how we could make ourselves be in the same place.

However, once again, a common language was not enough. What I heard, instead of intelligible words and thoughts, sounded like Charlie Brown's mother was calling and yelling at me very loudly on the phone: WAHHHH WAH WAH WAH WAHN, with an understandable word thrown in every once in a while, CAR, WAHH, WHAN WAH, WHA, GET YOU, WHAN WAH WAH WHAH, NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHERE YOU ARE WHAN WHA WAH WAHN WAH GO TO WHA WHN WAH PARK STREET WHAH WA WHAN WAH WA......

Between my feet hurting, feeling like I was a strange refuge roaming the streets of Calcutta who had no control over whether I would be displaced or find a safe haven, and the intense need to pee, I was not in a good space to be talking to anyone on the phone, especially someone who seemed to be yelling at me (she wasn't, of course, it was the phone acting up) and who wanted me to try and walk to Park Street which was effectively dead to me ever since I had tried to find it an hour earlier.

Finally I told Chandana that I wasn't going anywhere. I was going into the mall to get a pedicure and I would have the salesgirl call Chandana and tell her where I was and the car could come there.

I was shown into the spa by the doorman (you rarely get to open a door in any establishment in India, either because there are no doors to open or close, or because a doorman is in charge of your door for you). I approached the pretty lady behind the counter and looked at the two young men idly waiting for customers sitting next to her. I asked if I could get a pedicure.

The girl said, "Oh, no m'am, I am so sorry. But he has gone home. Something wrong." Here she patted her stomach and squinched up her face and tilted her head just so, all to indicate that the poor pedicurist had taken tragically ill quite suddenly with a stomach ailment.

I was in no mood. I looked right at her and said, "Don't fib to me. He's gone to watch cricket."

The two boys laughed. The salesgirl looked stunned to be called out on her lie. And I walked out.

A block away I found a cafe and realized that I'd heard the name of the cafe in some abstract form in Chandana's phone call," WAH WAHHHN WAH WHAN HENDUMANS CAFE WAH WAHN FOOD WAH WHAN WEHN RELAX." I texted Chandana to tell her exactly where I was.

I went in. It was packed. The Cricket match was about to start and tv's were on. I managed to get some food and a table. I ate. Thinking Chandana's arrival was imminent I opened a text to find out that she was making another stop and would be another half hour.

I had to give up my table. I found another table in the sweet shop next door and ate a piece of cake. Then I got kicked out of there. I asked for more directions from a gal with impeccable English and headed, once more, intrepidly and fortified with sugar, in what I hoped was truly the direction of Park Street and the Oxford Bookshop.

On Camac street, another big shopping and tourist area that would lead me, I was told, to Park, a large group of men had gathered outside an electronics shop and was watching the beginning of the India-Pakistan match on tv's on display inside of the front window. I'd never seen anything like it except in movies about when Kennedy was shot; of course, in the movies everyone stood in silence weeping, here everyone was full of electric anticipation and hope.

Shortly after stopping to take pictures of the crowd, I found another spa and took a chance that someone might actually be working. They where. All the hair stations were fitted up with their own individual tv's and the game was playing in 10 tiny boxes in a row down the length of the salon. So I could be pampered while Rajesh and Naim, who made my hands and feet look pretty, got to listen to the game along with the rest of their countrymen. Walking in sandals for 2 months is brutal on a persons feet so I did not envy my pedicurist his task. Rajesh even asked me if this was my first pedicure. I couldn't blame him. My feet didn't look like they'd ever been pretty in their life. I was glad the game was on. No one should have to scrap my feet clean AND miss the cricket game of the century.

Almost three hours after I thought Chandana and I would be starting our tour of Calcutta, she had arrived and we were leaving to do something. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. This is, I'm afraid, a rather typical Indian kind of a day, so I wasn't really that surprised and the pedicure, and the added manicure that I'd decided to indulge in as well, had cheered me up.

We went visiting a cousin of Chandana and then, instead of going to see the Kali Temple, as planned, I chickened out on doing what promised to be one of the most intense experiences I could go to in India and decided that we would go to a movie at a mall. It, too, was also planned, but as we started out so late, something had to get eliminated from the itinerary. I needed a break from India, from wandering, from heat, from the unpredictable and I wanted to go somewhere familiar and safe, a nice air-conditioned, dark movie theater where I could get lost in a good story for a couple of hours. Besides Chandana had had a very eventful and fraught morning herself; I suspected she was emotionally nearing her personal edge, exacerbated by the fact, perhaps, that she was still graciously trying to accomodate and make this fussy and exhausted traveler happy.

I was surprised as we were driven up to the mall to see people walking in. I thought every self respecting Indian who was not playing tour-guide to the likes of me, was glued to the match on tv. Rai certainly was, which is why she wasn't with us. But the mystery was cleared up when we went into the mall and found hundreds and hundreds of people cheering for some great cricket moment that had just been shown on the massive tv screen hanging in the atrium of the mall.

I kind of liked the idea that Chandana and I were going to escape the madness, yet not be too far away, like the safety of falling asleep in a peaceful room while you can hear the party your parents are throwing downstairs. Indeed, in quiet moments of the movie, I could hear cheering from the multitude two stories away.

Going to a movie in India is supposed to be a treat. So many people back home told me to do it. I think they meant a real Bollywood movie which would be packed and filled with hoots and hollers and people dancing. Instead, Chandanda and I went to a quiet family drama about an Indian family living in London.

The movie theater was as posh as any I've been in. There were only about 12 people in the theater. These two points were a plus.

But then the movie started without the foreplay of coming attractions which is criminal, if you ask me. On top of that, the volume was so loud that the voices were actually distorted. I had to plug my ears in order not to be in actual, acute, physical pain. Then, everyone but me was TEXTING. CONSTANTLY. Obviously this is a culturally acceptable phenomenon. Even Chandana, who is as respectful as a person gets, was texting. At least people weren't talking. Or maybe they were, I couldn't possibly have heard them over the volume of the movie.

Believe it or not, and there of those of you who know me who will really be challenged to believe it, but I actually made my peace with ALL that, as I became more and more engrossed in the family drama. I told myself that this was how movies are enjoyed in India and that I needed to chillax and I tried narrowing my focus and tilting my head to just the right angle that the four people whose phones I could see light up every 6 minutes were not quite in my line of vision.

Things really got good and going in the film; I was thoroughly engaged. The father and his favorite daughter finally had THE talk we'd been dreading and waiting for. The daughter had run out, the father looked like he might explode, AND........ the lights popped on and a sign came on the screen that said, "Interval."

Remember when I said that maybe we needed less one-act plays and more intermissions to absorb a story? I take it back. I think this is bullshit, especially in a quiet family movie that was not made to be broken in half!

I was teetering on the edge of sanity. The day had felt like a series of false starts and now in the safety of a dark movie theater, a sanctuary I am long familiar with, I was pulled right out of my comfort zone, which I was really working hard to stay in, onto foreign and shaky ground. Chandana was excited because Indian movie intervals mean popcorn. I bought some from the bloke roaming the aisles like peanut hawkers at baseball games while the texts were flying from every other movie goer to someone or other in the outside world and I felt like an alien on a planet that looked like a planet I had lived on once, but all the rules had changed. I tried to accept that this was my problem, my hang-up, my immense pet-peeve. I was glad that Chandana was having a good time and took a deep breath and tried to be grateful for the experience as it was and not how I longed for it to be.

When the interval was over, I took another deep breath and plugged my ears and re-submerged myself in the second half of the movie, which I'm sure would probably have moved me to great emotional depths if I'd been able to just let go and be in the present and accept the way things were instead of judging and needing and whining in my monkey brained head. By the time we left I was convinced for the first time since I'd come to West Bengal that I was actually an American at heart and not a Bengali misplaced at birth. I was legitimately homesick for the good old USA.

At 8:30 we emerged from the cinema back into the greater South City mall to the sound of thunderous screaming and applause. The cricket match was on it's sixth hour and going strong. In fact it had two more hours to go. Chandana and I went to a lovely Spanish place a floor down from the movie theater and had dinner and watched the end of the game.

Facing different directions at the table, I could see a large screen and Chandana could see a slightly smaller one. I understand nothing of cricket so I was really watching the fans in the restaurant to understand when something good or something bad was happening. From what I could see the people in the restaurant were geniuses. They seemed to be able to tell even as the the ball was leaving the bowler's hand whether it was going to be an out or not. He would throw and the restaurant would erupt in screaming, then the batsman would hit and his ball would be caught and he would be out. It took an hour before I turned around and saw Chandana's tv to realize that there was almost a 30 second delay on my tv. All the other screens were in real time. The fans were looking, I now realized, at the smaller screens, screaming, then I would see what they had already seen on the larger screen.

Eventually the game came to an end. I can't really tell you why or how or why they didn't actually call it an hour earlier since that's when it became clear that the losers had no choice but to remain losers and that the winners had already won. But at some point there was a pitch and the game was over and INDIA HAD BEAT PAKISTAN!!!!!!

I was in San Francisco when The Giants won the World Series. That was crazy. When India beat Pakistan in the semi-finals yesterday, it was lunacy. Our restaurant crowd was fairly restrained, but you could hear mayhem on the streets outside. Charmingly, our waiters all turned into 7 year old boys and jumped and hugged and beamed the sweetest smiles any child whoever got their greatest wish has ever beamed. One smartly dressed Indian woman caught my eye and playfully gave me a thumbs up, then a few minutes later while on her way out to join the revelers she stopped and blew me a kiss. I blew her one back, then she blew me two, I reciprocated, she blew four...and so on till she'd made it out of my line of sight.

The bill was paid at our table and we headed out into the streets for a 5 minute walk back to Rai's place. The streets were full of people screaming. Motorcycles were buzzing down the road with 3 or four men at a time on them, often one guy in the middle would be standing up on the seat holding an Indian flag that was streaming behind him. Fireworks were erupting over the city in patchwork explosions.

Chandana and I only had to cross one intersection. It was the only time I felt at all physically frightened for my life. Chandana was being a real mama bear, though, and that was a great comfort. People were idiotically throwing fire crackers into the maze of electrical wires that criss crossed the wide boulevard. I became increasingly nervous that one of the lines would come undone and we would be fried right there on the spot. It didn't help that the sound created by the impact of the firecracker and the electrical wire was what I can only imagine is identical to gun fire at a very close range. It was mayhem!

Sitting on the balcony of Rai's apartment listening, a short while later, to marching bands and fireworks and partiers from a safe distance, I felt on the outside, unable to understand this unfathomable, loud, crazy country where people can be absolutely glued to the tv for 10 hours straight, bringing traffic and commerce to a stand-still, all for a Cricket match while sitting through a two hour movie without texting this, that and the other person is unthinkable. I get that it was an historic game, two rivals, the semi-finals, Big Drama happening for real. But I have a feeling the people texting in the movie were getting scores and staying clued into the game while they sort of watched a movie. I was thinking about Mathew at Mundax and all our talks on mindfulness and being in the present. I was thinking about the opportunity both arts and sports offers us to slow down, to leave our life behind and to BE HERE NOW. It became clear to me that sports have become the more successful purveyors of escapism. Maybe it's the adrenaline of rooting and hoping and fearing that comes from watching your favorite team battle for scores and prestige that captures the hearts. The real-life theater of it all.....

While I pondered that, I heard the sound of a person hitting pavement on the road below. I looked down and saw that a man had fallen over on his bike. The road is under construction and there are big areas where the top layer of concrete has been removed leaving old cobbles and large potholes and a very uneven driving surface. There also wasn't much light.

Oh, and, the guy on the bike was obviously completely wasted with the drink.

Drunk Guy laid on his side for quite a while and I wondered whether I should go down and check on him. Just as I decided to get up, a man approached Drunk Guy and helped him get to his feet. Once up, I could tell the man who'd fallen was trying to convince the other guy, Sober Guy, that he was ok and he just needed a hand getting back on the bike. Sober Guy wasn't hearing any of that and was obviously trying to get Drunk Guy to walk home. They argued, though relatively quietly for two Bengali's. Eventually Sober Guy walked away, seemingly resigned to the fact that he couldn't help someone who didn't want to be helped. Drunk Guy stood for several minutes in the street, leaning precariously on the seat of his bike, trying, when the odd headlight would illuminate him, to appear as if he wasn't using every ounce of his strength to simply remain upright.

What happened next, simply knocked me for a loop. Sober Guy suddenly re-appeared with a bicycle rickshaw....he was the driver. He pulled up to Drunk Guy and convinced him to let go of his bike and to hold onto the back of the rickshaw wagon while Sober Guy hoisted Drunk Guy's bike onto the rickshaw. Then Sober Guy hoisted Drunk Guy onto the seat, made sure bike and man were secure, then Sober Guy rode off into the darkness, presumably to take Drunk Guy somewhere safe to sleep it off for the night.

I don't know why this act of kindness so astonished me. I've seen so much generosity of spirit in Santiniketan over the last six weeks, so much love and care on so many people's parts to make the lives of whole villages better. Chandanda has been nothing but loving kindness to this wayfaring stranger.

Perhaps it's the extreme poverty of Kolkata, combined with the dog eat dog energy of Mumbai, the big city I've really gotten to know in India, that gives this outsider the illusion that human life is somewhat expendable in these parts. This illusion was heightened, I suppose, by the Russian Roulette so many people were playing on the walk home, the throwing of tiny, but live, explosives into the electrical wires while several total strangers, Chandanda and myself included, frantically navigated home in the direct path of potential flailing live wires.

I don't know for sure, I just felt like in watching Sober Guy rescue Drunk Guy that I was witnessing a pure moment of love for one human being from another, two strangers who might never know each other's names. After a day of so many personal experiences of missed connections or interactions gone awry, while the country stopped to glue itself to the tv, I was touched that in a nation of over a billion souls, one man took the time to get another man safely home. Maybe it was the spirit of the shared victory that opened Sober Guy's heart to aid his fellow Indian. Maybe he would have done the same on any other night.

Either way, it was my favorite piece of theater I'd seen all day, purer than Cricket, or sitting in the dark of a movie auditorium. No one went home a loser, like Pakistan whose team will most likely have to lock themselves in their houses for a few weeks to avoid getting beaten by an angry mob, and no one checked out to text someone about something completely unrelated to the moment that was being lived.

At the end of the day, after all our foibles, our naivetes, our missed opportunities and awkward attempts at connection, we are all just humans doing the best we can to get home on uneven ground. Isn't it all we want, should we stumble and fall, to be lucky enough to have someone care enough to stop, pick us up and treat us with kindness, helping us to get to a safe place where we can rest till we are able to start moving again on our own?

Soul Food

2011-03-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

Somedays it's simply hard to get out of a funk. Despite the fact that today was cool, thanks to the extended thunderstorms that swept through the area late into last night, I couldn't shake a certain sadness for the life of me.

Actually, I think it was the weather that set me off.

I know, I know....geez, what makes this girl happy? She gets edgy and cranky in the hot weather, she is sad in cool weather.....

Today was perfect weather. It was Seattle in August weather. It was gentle and just the right amount of warm. It made me slightly homesick. But mostly, it made me feel the conflict I have about leaving Santiniketan (and eventually India) even more acutely.

Traveling is soul food for me. I get that. I learn the most and feel most alive when I am out in the wide world soaking in new adventures. But, I am also a nester. I need a home-base, a place to to return to. So, even though I crave travel and getting out and exploring the planet and different cultures, I've always known and felt drawn to eventually return to my cozy spot in Seattle.

This trip is different. For the first time I don't know what it is that I am going home to.

Wait. Wait. Don't get me wrong....my house, my friends, my family, ALL are just as rich in soul nutrients as traveling and I miss so many incredible people that I cannot wait to see in just over a month.

It's just that, today anyway, the reality that at 41 I don't have a family of my own, a partner waiting for me, a career that is sitting patiently but anxiously counting the days till I come home, has really hit me in the gut.

Here, in India, in this town I'd never even heard of 6 weeks ago, in a part of the country I'd vowed not to go near, I can see a need, a purpose for being here. There are people, like Chandana, that I could work with to help other people live better, healthier lives.

But could I really leave the safety and security of my beautiful house and my network of friends and family so far away? Could I abandon the opportunity to act in Seattle on a more regular basis with a community that I respect and look forward to playing with whenever the chances arrive? I have, after all, spent almost 15 years paving that particular road. Could I handle the upheaval that moving to the other side of the globe would entail? Would I want to, even if I could?

These questions started to consume me today, so I did the only sensible thing: I took a nap. With the sense of an impending spiral into depression still looming when I awoke, I decided to go for a bike ride. Once on the bike, I made up my mind to cross the safety barrier of the Santiniketan wall and to go into the village just on the other side.

Here I was almost consumed by something else entirely: joy. Everyone wanted to say hello. I even ran into a few students of Antaranga School who live over there. I pulled the camera out and was virtually mobbed.

People started coming out of the woodwork and fairly demanding that I take their pictures, though you'd think I'd forced them to stand still and pose based on the expression they offered to the camera.

Parents insisted that I take their children's photos. Things were happening so fast and I was surrounded by so many people, hands everywhere...on me...on my camera...in and out of the frame...that looking at the pictures I am struck by how many other interesting things ALMOST got captured on the camera, like the kid with his hands on his hips in this one.

I wish I knew the Bengali word for "goofball."

And, below, is my all time favorite kid portrait, ever. I take no credit. Like I said, things were happing so fast, people were in and out of my field of vision in a flash. This was completely the luck of the draw.

It was also pure chance that the last house on the village road turned out to belong to one of my favorite kids from the evening school at Antaranga and he was home and his family invited me onto the porch for tea. They gave me the seat of honor, which is to say, they gave me the only chair and the extended family and friends from all around came and sat on a mat on the floor. It was just sunset, so too dark to take pictures. So, just imagine a very small space with 4 or 5 women with 6 or seven toddlers, the young man from the school, and in the only other chair that appeared out of nowhere, a woman who had to be 200 years old if she was a day. Ok, she only looked it, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Just inside the door to their one room house I could see an elevated bed covered with clothes and below the bed a fresh crop of potatoes were being stored. On the edge of the porch a woman lit a fire using dried leaves on the concrete floor and made tea which she thankfully got good and boiling before pouring it into cups. I was offered the only serving with powdered milk and a large plate with more than my share of crackers.

Conversation was initially aimed in my direction. Questions about wether I had children and if I was married came my way. When they found out the answer to both inquiries was "No," they all gasped and decided that I would be a very good wife and mother. A high compliment coming from that group. Eventually, the women turned to village gossip or news and I was left to play with the kids, both human and goat, that ran around my feet.

At one point, my Antaranga student's grandmother, who was one of the most striking and elegant women I've ever seen with her long flowy grey hair and lithe limbs and natural ease in a sari, noticed my arm tattoos. In fact, she was the second or third lady that day who had grabbed my arms and made pleased noises to find them tattooed. It's a tribal custom here for the ladies to tattoo their forearms. I think finding my arms to be tattooed helped me to be less foreign.

The tattoos are of identical design, the one on the left arm says, in french, "I am the gift", the one on the right says, again in french, "You are the gift." I was struck by the admiration of the tattoos coming today of all days, because sitting on the porch of that tiny village hut, I no longer worried about my aimless feeling life, my singleness, my childlessness. These women and children, this afternoon, was....IS.....ARE....the gift(s).

As much as having tattoos on my forearms is a crazy thing to do as an actress, I really love them, because even with the messages permanently written on my body, in plain sight, I forget them sometimes. When I do, some angel leans over and grabs my arm and points and reminds me why they are there.

A Palm Wrapped In A Plum

2011-03-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

Tensions are rising here in India. Storms are brewing. Lightening is flashing and thunder is rolling. The skies above Santiniketan let loose today, rain was followed by hail. For several minutes the temperature plummeted and I got the tiniest taste of shivery winter, which was quickly followed by a spike in humidity and the moodiness of the skies rolled through the classroom I was teaching in; Chandana and I bickered and no one seemed to want to focus, least of all me.

This morning I went to look at a piece of land that is owned, in part, by a friend of Chandana's named Konika. Out in the middle of nowhere, the large parcel is dotted with palm and mango trees. While we surveyed, a very large monkey galloped across the plain and for a split moment I felt like I was on a savanna in Africa which, now that I've been in India so long, feels just that much more exotic. Konika is a very slight woman who comes across as shy, but she can surprise a person with sudden bursts of quiet laughter and strong declarations about this or that. We shared a rickshaw last night and she got in and embraced me full on to break the tension that comes from trying to share a teeny tiny seat with a total stranger.

Konkia lives in Kolkata and makes a living doing some kind of social work. She also comes to Santinketan regularly to help Chandana and her crew develop new recipes for their line of organic food products. She is a busy, single by choice, nearing middle age lady who longs to live on the land, farming, using solar power and building a model village for the next phase of planetary development. Out on her land, Konika fairly shone.

When I came home, Nicole called from Bodhgaya where she is learning to meditate. I don't know if she is sitting under Buddha's Tree of Enlightenment, but she could. It's there. It also sounds like she could use a little peace of mind. She was sounding a little bitter about India. After swimming with the dead cows in Varanasi, I think she is a little travel worn, tired, hating the constant adjusting that it takes to live day in and day out in a country that is so foreign, a place where even the beds can piss a person off. I can sympathize with her there. Beds are very hard here in India. Though I find that it doesn't bother me so much anymore.

After the phone call, I came down with a splitting headache and had to go to sleep. Maybe I was channeling Nicole's angst. Maybe it was leaving the house at seven to go riding in a rickshaw, which is hard on a body. I don't know.

Later still, I made a pile of stuff to send home. I'm cleaning house of all the clothes I won't need for the next month, as well as a pile of gifts. But it feels itchy and dumb and even slightly hateful in that 14 year-old, "I HATE THIS!" kind of way. My room is looking less like I live here and more like I'm just staying here for a few more days.

As of two minutes ago, I am typing in the dark. The electricity has gone out. Hows that for a metaphor? I feel I don't even need to elaborate on the correlation there....oh, ok....instead of feeling plugged into this place....I'm all out of juice....or something like that.

And, just like that, the lights come back on. Ah, sweet rejuvenation.

Walking with Konika today I wondered if I was subtly being wooed to buy into her land. Out of the original 9 investors, only a few are even slightly pro-active about building, and only one other person is truly gung-ho. I walked with an open heart, inviting myself to really consider the option.

Tonight I find myself caught somewhere between Konika in her village of the future and Nicole feeling so far from the familiar comforts of home. I could see myself living out on the land here in India. I could see going to work everyday at Antaranga or the cyber cafe I've daydreamed with Chandana about starting; I can see my friends here being my friends for life. I can also picture my friends and family and house back in Seattle and I wonder what kind of lunatic gives up all that sweet comfort for the heat and dust and madness of a place like India.

I suspect there's some kind of hybrid possibility. I dont' know what to even picture when I say that. It's not like India is right around the corner from Seattle. But maybe there's a way to have it all....???

I can't get these trees I saw today out of my mind. They were out on Konika's land. There was a plum tree wrapped around a coconut palm. I can't get over the beauty of the two disparate earthly creatures, utterly entwined with each other. Plums in my mind speak of warm, but moderate, climates. They are delicate, feminine somehow. They produce fruit that is sweet and juicy and fleshy. Coconut palms scream HEAT and radiate masculinity and sturdiness and a real survivor mentality. They make fruit that is hard, seemingly impenetrable, difficult to eat, but the water of a coconut has healing powers.

Somehow, that is the life I want, the life I imagine for myself, a coconut palm wrapped in a plum tree kind of a life. Or maybe that's just me. Maybe I am a plum tree wrapped around a coconut palm.

Maybe both statements are true.

The lights just went out again, which seems like a sign. No answers are coming tonight. The storm has left it's mark and we are just going to have to sit in the dark and wait for the lights to come back on or the sun to rise....which ever comes first.

Simple Pleasures

2011-03-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

Well, the rain did come yesterday. Somewhere. We only got a few drops in Santiniketan though, but the storm did its job without local precipitation and lowered the temperatures so dramatically that I was able to sit last night for several hours without turning on the fan. Even today, it remained cool enough to take a nice nap and then a sunset bike ride.

I have been hard at work making a website for the homestay I'm living in and another for Ahimsa, the NGO that Chandana works for. I've been teaching kids how to do stage slaps and getting other kids to write a book of poetry. Finally, I've ironed out some of my remaining travel plans. I'll go up to Darjeeling for a week on April 4th, where the air at the moment is a little too cool at 37 degrees F. After that, I will come down from the mountains to the Ganges and the holy city of Varanasi. I've still got two weeks at the end of my trip to pin down, but it looks like I might be going to Jaipur in Rajasthan after all.

Shifting my focus, even in the planning stages, to leaving Santiniketan has left me feeling unfocused. I've tried to write several blog posts on things like the kids at Antaranga or the women in the Chitra group who all have stories worthy of their own best-selling memoirs. I am so much IN it here now, in the world of this little town, into a routine, nestled into my house and alone time when need be, socializing and checking in with Chandana about work and life and gossip when the mood strikes that I'm finding it nigh on impossible to step out long enough to write from here.

I've thought once or twice over the last few days that I could easily be back in Seattle I feel so acclimated, so used to being here. But now, in buying train and plane tickets for the next legs of my Indian adventure, I am reminded that I am only a visitor to this little town on temporary leave from my "normal" life.

It is a temptation to start to disengage and pull away from my new friends so the actual parting will be less painful, but, so far, I've managed to curb that impulse.

But the emotions are getting a bit jammed up and, like I said, I haven't been able to write. It seems like all my thoughts and feelings and stories are now crowded in a small room, such a confined space that I can't make out any individual thread clearly enough to untangle it and put it down in clear, bright words. It's like if every story I want to write for you were a person, they would be packed like commuters on a Mumbai train, pinned against one another, packed like the proverbial sardines, immovable.

Maybe I have to imagine all those stories at a train stop and wonder which one would get off now and which ones are still waiting to get off further down the line.

Hmmm.... Ok.

What would the first stop be called? Let's try "Simple Pleasures."

The image that steps out of the train first is of two little girls, each 13 but small for their age who go to the night school at Antaranga.

I don't know their names. I should. They have told me. But Bengali names and I have a little bit of difficulty understanding each other. Plus, I don't work with the night school kids more than a few evenings a week. We have been making a book of poetry. I sent the students out to observe their lives and then asked them to come in and write short pieces in Bengali about something that made them happy. Actually, I asked them to write about something that affected them, moved them in some way, and they all chose to things that made them happy. Then we translated the poems into English, after which they wrote the two versions of their poem side by side and illustrated them. As several kids were absent after the revelry of Holi, this process has been drawn out and students have been finishing in stages.

Last night I waited for the last 4 kids to translate and illustrate, which left me pretty much hanging out with the other 15 kids while they did any homework from their day school, the government school, where class sizes of a 100 students or more make it impossible for anyone to get individual attention. As I sat against the wall on the floor, one of the 13 year old girls nudged her way to sitting on my right side, the other girl scooted in to sit on my left. The girl on the right plopped her English book on my lap and started reading from it. It was a lesson in the Past Tense of verbs. The girl on my left leaned in and started to read out loud with the girl on my right who was sitting now with her elbow resting on my leg. As they continued to reach deep into their brains to put sound to what they were seeing on the type-written page, their little heads leaned in and the three of us were almost forehead to forehead to forehead. I would correct them, if needed, and they would try again. It was the simplest of teaching moments, and one of my favorite ever.

When they were tired of reading, the two girls took to trying on my rings and generally being goofy and trying to tickle me. The boys who were half-way working on the other side of the room started posing and asking for me to take "one picture please."

From an adjacent classroom, a gal of 14 or 15 was basically playing peek-a-boo with me, going so far as to sometimes get up and run in to my room and then run back out.

One of the two older girls who was still illustrating her poem, paused to tell me all nine of her names, this included her English name, Anita, and her nickname, Honey. I loved that this girl, who I must admit is one of my favorites, had the same nickname as my big sister. The Indian Honey caught my eye right off when Eva was here doing her art workshop. Honey is a girl just on the line of becoming a woman, with a serious maturity that hints at great sadness which makes me love her. I sense that she is fighting to become herself in a place that doesn't make much room for girls to own their power and their independence. I have tried, as best I can without making it obvious to everyone else that she is one of my favorites, to instill in her my belief that she is someone special.

It's really unfair to say that Honey is one of my favorites, because when my mind wanders over all the faces from the night school at Antaranga, I feel such love for each one. It's a group full of character and light. And last night, as I sat there on the dirty and dusty floor, mosquitoes buzzing, I couldn't imagine any place on earth that was more wonderful.

There are so many simple pleasures here in Santiniketan.

The way rickshaw drivers sit in their rickshaws waiting for customers never ceases to please me. They do it in such a way that it feels like they arranged themselves deliberately in the most beautiful and artistic way possible.

The way ticky tiks, or geckos, are constantly flitting across the walls tickles me daily. Once I learned that geckos were called ticky tiks in Bengali they became even more fun.

The absolutely brilliant nimbu panis that Munglie, the cook here, makes for me every day. It's a special lime juice that is calibrated to be just the right amount of salty and sweet as to be thirst quenching and utterly delicious all at the same time.

Seeing Saris drying on the lawn, simply stretched out on the grass. It's delightfully colorful and completely practical.

The fact that tiny little food shacks that still operate much as they must have 100 years ago can be entirely covered in chalk drawn murals such as this....

....makes me want to literally jump for joy.

I could go on and on. As my days here dwindle, I'm going to have to be diligent about soaking all these pleasures in without holding onto them too tightly. Maybe finding out what other stops my writing train needs to stop at to let some of these pent up stories out will help.

I'll think on that while I climb into my mosquito-net tented bed, another simple pleasure that affords me a moment everyday of indulging in the sense of adventure that comes from going to sleep in a place that requires a mosquito net to cover the bed.

Rain Dance

2011-03-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

The sky over Santiniketan has turned grey and a yellow heaviness has filled the yard outside my window. One minute a slight breeze comes through, the next I feel the humidity spike and I start to sweat, then relief descends again.

Thunder has just begun to rumble and it seems almost certain now that a downpour is imminent.

This morning at Antaranga I made machines with my class three kids. Using their imaginations and their bodies, this group of 7 year olds first made a bicycle, working out all the intricate parts that come together to make the whole.

Next, I took a leap and wondered if they could make a machine to make rain, blessed rain, rain that my heat soaked body craves with each additional degree on the thermometer. I asked the students what parts we would need for such a contraption. One girl cottoned onto the idea right away and raised her hand and volunteered to be the water. Next, two girls decided to be the bowl that held the water, this was followed by a gal who was the wood that made the fire that heated the water. Of course, vapor made by the heated water followed, then two boys stood on a chair and started booming like thunder-clouds and, finally, the last two girls stood up and magically transformed into rain dancing on the ground.

I don't want to get ahead of myself here and I don't take any credit, but if it starts to rain today, then tomorrow I'm asking those genies at Antaranga to become a machine that makes cool breezes, and peace, and an anti-nuclear meltdown reactor, and vast green fields of rice and mustard seed and whatever else the villagers around here need to build robust and healthy lives, and, just for fun, a transporter so I can pop over and see my Mom and then get a margarita with all my friends in Seattle, then see my niece in NYC, then come back here and finish my trip.

The breezes are kicking up.

Lightening is striking.

Thunder is rolling.

What is going to happen? What is going to happen?

Signs

2011-03-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

The hearts are back. I noticed them starting up about 10 days ago. Rocks, cow patties, a large drop of water on the bottom of a cup. I had begun to think that they weren't going to show themselves in India, that the symbology of this land would be different. Who knows, maybe the planet was using other words and I wasn't listening so it decided to speak my language.

I haven't been taking pictures, except the one above. The hearts have been coming so fast now that I'd find walking anywhere difficult if I was stopping to document the hearts along the way. They actually started up right after Calcutta and my weekend with Martin, which I'd begun to imagine was a sign of things to come in that department. But since he has moved on, I'll have to trust the hearts are up to something else, up to sending me a message I'll figure out sometime down the road.

My last post brought such love and support from friends far and wide, many of whom reassured me that my mope-fest was looking like a global phenomenon. Misery loves company, and I did find it soothing to know that I was not alone. It is yet another sign that some energy links all us crazy humans, animals, the planet itself.

When I got up an hour ago, I went to check my email and found that gmail had decided to bar the door. While I paid the gate-keeper with my secret password I was overcome with a deep fear that something bad awaited on the other side. Sure enough, there was an email at the top of my queue from my dear friend Margaret telling me that another friend, an actor named Mark Chamberlin, had quite unexpectedly passed away. As I understand it, he was in a bike accident on Sunday, but was well enough to be slated for release to recover at home, then he took a turn for the ultimate worst. I want to write more on this later, when I am not in shock, when so many people are not reeling from the sudden loss of this dynamic, healthy, sometimes difficult, often charming, and quixotically sweet man.

In the meantime, I want to honor the hearts, the connective tissues that weave us all together. I want to shine light on the subtle signals the Earth throws in our path, the messages that our deepest, intuitive gut-senses whisper to us in a steady stream. I feel certain that if I keep an eye and an ear out I will discover that there is a thread here in India that when I pull it, tugs at your heart or mind. I am sure that when you speak into the cosmic tin-can hidden in plain sight in your neck of the woods, that I will hear you all the way over here.

Maybe, eventually, we might also be able to read the signs, to understand what they mean and where they want us to go. Today, I simply take comfort in noticing them and trusting that establishing contact is enough for the time being.

Mope-aholics Anonymous

2011-03-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

India is hot.

India has been hot since I arrived, don't misunderstand. Compared to "my" moderate Seattle and to the parts of the globe that have been ravaged by winter over the last two months, India has kept warm and cozy, at least the parts I've been in.

But sometime in the last week the sun shifted in such a fashion that even the way its rays shine onto the ground have a different, more aggressive slant to them. The afternoon air turns almost white with glare. Now, it is more judicial to close the house up entirely around 1 o'clock to keep the fresh heat from making the old heat trapped in the house utterly unbearable.

Sweating is quickly becoming the natural order of things. Chaffing follows. Sitting still, if at all possible, ensues.

This is only the beginning. India will continue to get hotter as the days tick by. April, I'm told, will be unfathomably hot. If it is, at the rate I'm going, I shall have to take 19 tiny showers a night just to stay cool enough to sleep. I'm already up to three 30-second spritzes between 10 when I go to bed and 6 when I get up for the day.

My mood seems to be reflecting, in a distorted fun-house fashion, the change in temperature. I am irritable, melancholy, quick to judge. Perhaps this is because the heat is affecting my digestion and for the first time since I arrived in India I've had a more than fleeting bout of travel related stomach ailments. Maybe it's because Martin has written to say that he has decided to "move on" despite the fact that I "have awakened feelings in" him.

It could just be that my time here in India is growing short. I find that I am occasionally beset with fits of inner conflict about going back to my life in Seattle. Certain moments, I simply cannot imagine it. Other times, especially when people get to talking about the Indian government and the absolutely ass-backwards way that certain programs, health, education, and human services especially, are run, or not run as the case may be, I feel sure that I would go mad if I tried to make a life here.

One small example involves the process of adoption. If an orphan can be adopted, which isn't always the case for some reason, it takes at least two years for a child to move from the chaotic orphanage to their new home despite the fact that they have been assigned to a couple that has been approved and is waiting to nurture and to love them, not to mention able to relieve the state of the burden of feeding and clothing the child. I defy anyone to satisfactorily explain to me how this is a good or wise or logical or prudent or humane way to do things.

I told you I was grumpy.

I didn't even go to teach this morning. My stomach, and my emotional barometer, felt too delicate. Like the humidity in West Bengal which can rise from 30% to 70% at the drop of a hat or fall just as quickly, my constitution threatened to be just as unstable. Instead of teaching I fell fast asleep for three hours, sleeping past lunch (no big deal) and awaking in time to feel the sun ramp up its super-powers. I shut my windows and now am hiding away in my sweltering cave, hiding from the even more oppressive heat outside, my obligations, and anything or anyone that might ask me to be present and accountable.

I could, actually, be moping. It's been a long time since I have moped, so I'm not sure. But the permanent pout I've been sporting all afternoon is a pretty good sign.

I talked to Nicole today. She is in Varanasi hanging out with some boatmen and swimming in the Ganges which, since she told me she just saw a dead cow float by, seems like a rather, well, insane thing to do. I felt jealous, though, that she is out in the crazy world, taking risks, while I am moping in my dark room.

It got me thinking about that last three weeks in April that I'll have after I leave Santiniketan and before I go back to Seattle. Whatever shall I do? As the Celsius rises, I am aware that my ability to move with any speed or even joyful sense of adventure will be severely handicapped. But, time is running out.

The prudent thing is to do what the English always did at this time of year and disappear into the hills around Darjeeling. I'll probably do that for a week. Then I must see Varanasi myself and though I'd like to swim in the Ganges I'd rather do it from farther up stream where dead bodies aren't a regular feature: Rishikesh, maybe? I leave from Delhi on the 28th of April, so it is looking like Jaipur will have to be axed from my current itinerary.

People always talk about how big India is and, therefore, how hard it is to see everything. India is actually not that big, just increasingly hot and always hard to get around in. The diversity of the country also becomes a looming factor when contemplating the next move: will the next place be more or less conservative than where I am now, will it be primarily Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, will it be hot, cold, dry, humid and do I have the right clothes, can I get there by plane, or do I take an all night train, or must I chance a bus????

I should not be asking these questions today. They feel like itchy wool sweaters worn on already sensitive, and very hot, skin.

I keep telling myself that the lethargy and the irritability that arise as the temperatures begin to soar are important aspects of being in India; they are part and parcel of the whole experience. I cannot separate out these lousy days of adjusting to the extreme weather and pretend that they are aberrations. I must not punish myself for losing time and experiences because I am not out and about every possible moment. I've only got to find a way to give into the shift in dynamics, to respect the heat, and to discover what smaller worlds are waiting behind shuttered windows in the still realms of this country where extremes of every kind, weather, geography, religion, politics, social status, shape its essential mysterious beauty.

But can I start to do all that tomorrow? Today, I only feel like moping.

Painted Blessings

2011-03-19T09:24:00.000-07:00

There was a brief period when I was a teenager when I thought it would be nice to grow up and have a house that was neat, orderly, and decorated with white walls and furniture. I can't imagine what possessed me to want that. All I can think is that my body must have been changing too fast and my parents were separated and my new high school was ten times bigger than my grade school and I thought if everything was just simple and white and put together that I might feel the same way inside.

I grew up to have a house filled instead with chaos and color. Color on the walls, more color in the many things hung in the Victorian style, which is to say everywhere, on top of the walls. Multi-hued and many-patterned pieces of cloth drape the furniture and useless beautiful things of every shape and size pollute the shelves and table tops and rob them of their innate purpose which I've always supposed was to organize ones belongings and to keep the environs free of too much physical noise.

Imagine my excitement then when I was told that I would be in India for Holi, the Festival of Color and the official arrival of Spring. I'd seen pictures of Holi before I came and wondered at the faces covered with bright purple, red, yellow, green paints. After I arrived, when I told people how long I was staying, the first thing they would say was, "Oh, well, you will be here for Holi then."

Holi is a word that always carries a charge. Indians and foreigners who've been to Holi always light up a bit when they describe the ritual mayhem of painting the whole of India and each other in every color under the springtime sun. They also always look at my fair skin, my shapely bosoms and follow up their praise of Holi with a caution which essentially, though not in so many words, translates to, "Be Careful. Men are going to want to 'touch' you."

Yesterday, Holi Eve, as tiny Santiniketan filled quickly with tourists from Calcutta, the color factor on the streets rose precipitously. Everyone was dressed in their finest Saris and suits and paraded, as best they could amidst the throngs of bodies, through the campus and the village shops. Gold jewelry and diamond nose rings glittered on the girls and the men looked dashing in their long flowey robes of saffron and white.

Wagons of paint powder appeared on every corner, some loose, some in small plastic bags. Children were hawking necklaces of red flower blossoms to be worn in the hair. Stalls selling food and drink shot up out of nowhere and had a full house of patrons in the blink of an eye. Cars zoomed within inches of children, dogs and each other, honking as if honking could make a hundred humans and fifty cars magically disappear thus clearing the road so that the honker could have the safe and swift passage he, above all others, so obviously deserved.

I had an early bedtime, last night, in order to be bright and bushy tailed for the 6 a.m. departure to the university campus and my first Holi celebration. Chandana, who was sitting out the early morning festivities, arranged for Minou and Jahor and Rocky to be my bodyguards so that no men could "touch" me.

Rocky was thrilled to have an excuse to miss her daily tutoring sessions, as if Holi wasn't excuse enough. Minou was, I think, nervous to be in charge of me. Jahor was, well, something...I can never tell what Jahor is thinking. I, myself, was a wee bit scared, but mostly of putting on my sari and making it out of the house in time.

When I awoke the sun wasn't up yet and the wind was blowing. In the night a rainless storm had whipped things up and a large chunk of a tree had landed on the other side of the house from where I sleep bringing the electrical lines down with it. We were without power and water. Jahor was already in fix-it mode; he would be lost to me and my security detail. Minou and Rocky and I, therefore, set about dolling ourselves up. I should say, that Minou and Rocky set about dolling me up, wrapping and pleating my sari, putting kohl on my eyes, getting my hair just so. Jahor even took a break from his duties to watch, obviously impressed, or was he amused, at my complete transformation from westerner to West Bengaler.

Chandana came to inspect me, then the house, and then set about calling the electric company while simultaneously prodding us girls to get a move on so that we could get a good seat for whatever lay ahead. I didn't really understand where we were going and why Chandana wasn't joining till later.

Eventually Minou and Rocky and I set off and discovered that at 6:15 in the morning hundreds of people in saffron were already streaming in front of us towards the campus. Rocky took my hand firmly in hers or wrapped her arm through mine depending on how strongly she felt I needed to be minded. Minou kept hold of me more lightly; sometimes I would feel her gently grasping a fold in my sari, or I would notice a finger tucked into the waist of my skirt. If things got too crowded too quickly both women would take hold of an arm and try to navigate me through the multitude, often at cross purposes and I would have to gently but firmly tug one of them back, or simply make some noise to let them know that, as amazing as I am, I cannot actually go in two directions at once.

We thread ourselves through the small gate onto the grounds of the university and headed to a large field where a stage was newly set along with a series of fences that prevented most of the spectators from getting anywhere near the main stage.

As we walked, Rocky, arm linked in mine, kept asking and saying and asking again, "You nervous? You nervous? I think you nervous. Why you nervous? You nervous?"

When I could get a word in edgewise, I admitted that I was a little nervous, but not extremely. She was not convinced and would start up again, "You nervous. I know. Why you nervous?"

We didn't even try to get close to the center action but stood, instead, about ten rows back from the edge of a bamboo fence to the far far far right of the stage. People were sitting on the ground in front of us; the plan was that eventually we would sit after Minou's sister and brother-in-law found us. I tried to teach the Indian gals my Seattle dance-floor technique for saving space for a friend who has gone to the bathroom. But my wide stance was deemed inelegant and we tried to hold our ground firmly but demurely by simply standing. I was dubious that this technique would work.

Sure enough, after half an hour or so, an old woman with a small grandson pushed her way through the crowds and in front of us and plopped down at our feet, sending my security detail into a tizzy. Harsh words were exchanged. The old woman refused to budge. I was told by Minou and Rocky to sit so that more room wouldn't be lost and so that my legs wouldn't cramp up . It was already getting to be too tight a squeeze. A second woman soon muscled her way in and sat to my right in front of Minou and Rocky. More shouts were exchanged. This time I was angry and in very clear English, I told the new arrival that she was very very rude. The interloper pretended not to understand, but I think she did. Still, she did not move.

The crowd waited some more. Eventually I had to stand, my poor legs were just not getting the circulation room they needed. Soon music began to pour out of the loudspeakers surrounding the area and just in front of us and to the right, in the paddocks, a stream of children, dressed in red and gold, started to walk at first towards us then, turning, streamed passed us in profile towards the large center area now well beyond sight, congested as the grounds had become with people.

Before the dancers turned, just as they appeared, I was assaulted with hands and angry voices from spectators behind me and to the left who had decided that I, above all others who were standing, needed to sit in order for the view to be clear. Considering everyone to my right and behind was standing (and Indian), I thought it was incredibly strange and prejudicial that I was singled out. That's when I really understood that at 5' 5" I, who am short in America, am almost Amazonian in India. I knelt long enough for the dancers to clear the turn and thus become visible to all those poor souls who could not see for the first 45 seconds of the show due to my enormous size.

For what seemed like an hour, variously clad school groups danced past us, some clanking sticks in rhythm as is the Tagorian tradition. Just when I thought I was going to have to push may way out of the pressing crowd to get some space, the seated folks in front started getting up and we all began moving into the center of the field together. I sensed the colors might be on their way, but my handlers weren't communicating very well. In retrospect, I think Minou's stress level was rising; once the color started up, she was going to have to be on her guard.

At first I was seeing no color, people were just generally milling about. Off in the distant center stage another round of dancing had started up. Rocky told me to secure my camera away in the plastic bag I'd brought for color protection, giving me a clue that paint was imminent. I switched my camera for bags of paint that had been waiting patiently in the, now, camera sack, and handed a color pouch to each of my protectoresses, keeping the bright green for myself.

Within minutes I began seeing people with smudges of paint, just a few people and a little paint. I didn't know what to do, how this thing worked. I knew I was supposed to only offer color to women, to be on the safe side. But who was supposed to make the first move?

Minou and Rocky were holding onto me, pulling me again towards some unbeknownst destination; eventually we ran into women they knew. Here, at last, was Minou's sister and a friend, or daughter, or cousin...?

While we introduced ourselves a woman suddenly appeared at my side and said, "Happy Holi." She then proceeded to gently stroke my cheeks with her paint powder filled hands. I had finally been anointed with the color of spring, well one of them. I can't remember which color came first, but soon I would be good and covered with pink, green, pale blue, dark blue, purple, orange and red powdered paint. I, in turn, would then say, "Happy Holi," and bless my blessers with my own chartreuse Holi dust.

At first it was just women that came up to me, but once I'd announced, by virtue of my multi-colored head and face, that I was game, men started to approach and ask if they, too, could add to the pallet that was me. Sometimes 10 or 12 men would appear all at once and Minou would turn lioness and pull me clear, but there was really no need. Everyone who sought me out kept to the proper painting zone which seemed to be anywhere from the clavicle up.

Since the powder was flying I kept my camera hidden away, but the same could not be said of other folks; I was a favorite photographic subject. I wasn't too surprised for, in a sea of beautiful brown subjects, I was one of only four white ones that I saw all day.

I began to feel a little bit like a sacred cow who is kept around just for the good karma of feeding it, as more and more people went out of their way to come up to me and to add to the growing pile of color stuck to my hair and face. I don't know if it was simply a novelty to touch a white woman, especially if it was a man doing the touching, or if they actually thought it would be good luck, but I felt like it brought people a particular flavor of joy to put their own seal on my Springtime facade.

I do know that it felt auspicious to me, to be dolloped with color from so many strangers, some of whom also took the time to introduce themselves and to ask where I was from, was this my first Holi, was I having fun. The strokes of their hands on my face were, for the most part, so careful and loving or so genuinely playful that I never considered being nervous or frightened, especially because as they painted my face or head they were always saying, "Happy Holi" which became a sort of prayer left in the touch and in the color, a prayer and a blessing, one that I returned in kind, if the bestower had not painted and dashed onto the next lucky soul.

Around nine, my security detail, which had grown with the addition of a few class friends of Rocky, shepherded me back towards home. To get there, we had to pass, again, through the gates of the University. In order to manage the crowds, someone in their infinite wisdom decided not to open the large gates that block the service road, but instead to funnel thousands of souls through a gap in the fence that is only one person wide. As we approached the brief passageway, Minou and Rocky had hold of me, one from the front, the other from the back. Minou made a start through the gate, pulling me, at the same moment a man was pulling his wife in the same direction, and several other people, too, tried to get out while even more tried to get in. For a minute or so we were all stuck, like a human log jam. I was pressed against a fence, Minou's arm pressed even harder behind mine into the wall and I thought, "I might actually be crushed here while all these crazy people insist on being in one square foot of earth at the exact same time."

Minou gave up and let go of me and pushed through, the man pulled his wife and I had a split second to try and clear the gate. Just as I entered the stone walled entry/exit an older woman tried to shove me out of the way in order to come into the grounds.

"Are you nuts," I thought, "there are a hundred people moving in my direction. You are a salmon swimming upstream!"

Ok, I actually panicked a little, too. There was no way I was being bullied back into the human traffic jam, so I forced my ample hip out and fought my way to freedom using my Amazonian size to hip-check the crazy old lady. The woman screamed after me, "Idiot!" as I happily embraced life on the outside of the campus walls.

My security detail. Minou is leaning on the wall, Rocky is sitting out in front.

When we got home, the electric company was fixing up the house and breakfast was served and Chandana got ready for her foray into Holi. Around ten, I set off again into the color zone with my Santiniketan hostess. She finally explained that the morning show is something everyone should see once, which is why she sent me, but that the locals always wait and go to the university around 9 or 10 when the tourists all think Holi is over. While the Calcuttans stream out into the town, the Santiniketanites sashay inside where small groups break out into the various schools, music, art, etc., and dance freely, spontaneously, joyously without the pressure of performing for the outside world. As Chandana and I explored the various schools, more paint was added to my color soaked skin, pictures were snapped, conversations started.

Chandana had not read my blog from last night where I wondered aloud what it would be like to be in a crowd of thousands of suddenly uninhibited Indians who don't allow themselves to frolic the other 364 days of the year. She said to me as we walked past citizens of all ages, sizes, shapes and religious backgrounds, "It's amazing, isn't it, to see all these people letting lose when they aren't allowed to at any other time?"

Sometimes I think Chandanda and I are sharing the same mind.

Taking the long way home, Chandana and I decided to stop and see and paint everyone I know in Santiniketan. First there was Dr. Ganguly, then my land-lady from the old house, and finally, we went to see Chompa and Bishar who I hadn't visited since I'd moved out two weeks ago. I was greeted by Chompa loudly, as you might expect, and with hugs and color. She enquired after my care taking and told me that she'd been dreaming of me and saying goodbye over and over in her sleep. Once again I wished I could understand this woman who continues to bless me with her love.

Bishar opened his bag of paint and, smiling broadly, set about making sure that any spots on my head and neck that might have been neglected were now fully saturated and well attended to, Holi-speaking.

Before we left, Chandana made plans to have the family for tea.

At some point in the day it occurred to me that Spring was also arriving back in the states. I'd actually not put two and two together before that, while the year plowed on in these parts, the seasons were doing their changing of the guard back home as well. So, egocentric, I know.

"How fun would it be", I thought, "to go around from house to house, from state to state, visiting my friends and family back home and sprinkling them with the colors of Spring, being kissed with color from their loving hands and hearts?"

Tonight the full moon will dip closer to the planet than it has been in 15 years, giving us all an extra dose of lunacy. Chandana and Jeanne and I will sit on the roof, drink rum and cokes, watch the magical moon sail overhead and leave the mayhem to the streets around us. It is not without a tinge of sadness that I will keep my distance from the revelers, but I think that my life is so full of color on an average day that I have no need to over-dose on it tonight. I will, instead, take all the paint strokes of the day, plant them in my soul, and let the moon-rays nurture a fresh crop of color and love to keep the coming year blooming with joy.

I will, as well, send those seeds home to all of you that I love and miss who are so far away tonight, and to those wonderful few who are reading that I don't yet know. I wish for you all an early and lasting Spring and dreams of purple, red, yellow, blue, orange and so much more to color your days and nights for years to come.

Mid-morning paint break.

Holi Eve

2011-03-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Sleepy Santiniketan has turned into a mini-Calcutta in the span of a day. Tomorrow is Holi, or Dol as they call it in West Bengal, the Festival of Color marking the arrival of Spring. Thousands of people have been streaming into town since this morning, cars are jamming up the roads, tensions are rising.

I feel a little bit like a kid on Christmas Eve who doesn't know what Christmas actually is. I know there are lights on buildings (like Christmas), stalls with food and arts and crafts have sprung up over night, and people are selling bags of brightly colored paint powder.

It's the paint that has really got me both nervous and excited. That paint is going to be tossed willy nilly onto anyone and everyone. Santiniketan favors "dry Holi". In the farther north parts of the country, they do Holi wet, often with manure mixed into the balls of paint for extra adventure.

I have a red and saffron sari for the occasion and red flowers waiting in the fridge to deck my hair with in the early hours of the day. We have to leave the house at 6 in order to get to the viewing stands. Seems there is dancing with some kind of sticks starting at the break of dawn. After that, all hell breaks loose and the powder starts to fly. Chandana has arranged for Minou, Jahor and Rocky to be my guardians lest any big city Holi Hooligans decide to get fresh.

On top of all the Holi craziness, the moon will be full. Not just full, but closer to the Earth than it has been in a loooongggg time and closer than it will be for a long time after. So, La Luna will be tugging extra hard on all our inner compasses, stretching out the edges of our comfort zones and blurring the lines of right and wrong, black and white, up and down.

Holi seems to have a lot of mythology around it. My favorite story that I've heard is that Holi was the one day of the year that girls from lower castes were allowed to hastle men from the upper castes, essentially it was pay-back time.

Walking through the streets tonight I could feel the anticipation of fun and frolicking that awaits us all tomorrow. As the people are streaming in, the walls are coming down.

What must it be like to let loose in a country where letting loose is not really done? Especially on the full moon when craziness is apt to happen regardless of flying paint and dancing and thousands of unskilled frolickers leaping into their own forbidden zones?

That is what I'm about to find out.

That and what I'd look like if I dyed my hair pink, or blue, or yellow, or purple, or bright red.

Or, all of the above.

Dopplegangers

2011-03-16T19:58:00.000-07:00

When Gary and Nicole and I were in the Backwaters of Kerala, I encountered a couple of different folks who lit up when I said that my name was Morgan. Turns out there is a Tamil god whose name is Murugun, which sounds exactly the same as "Morgan" to the untrained ear.

I thought that was pretty cool.

I found out yesterday that Murugan is Ganesha's bachelor brother. Even cooler.

THEN I found out that there is popular a Tamil character called Quick Gun Murugan. Super Cool!

Here, my friends, is my Tamil Name Doppleganger:

THEN, when I was searching on YouTube for Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera I discovered that there is also a Tamil doppleganger of that song! AND a music video from some movie called Pukar.

So, for your further viewing pleasure. Que Sera Sera, Indian Style!

How It Strikes Me

2011-03-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

I am living in India. I am not on vacation anymore, or on hiatus from my "real" life. I have taken up residence in India. India has taken up residence in me.

Cows in the road, dogs sleeping lazily wherever they please, sparrows the size of doves, none of these surprise me anymore. They are a part of my life. I get up early in the morning, just after the sun. Not because the dogs who howl all night long have kept me up, they haven't. I am immune to their incessant bays. It is the birds calling and chattering away that get through to my slumbering mind. I go into my little kitchen which has been newly equipped with a kerosene burner and a toaster so that I can begin my mornings slowly, solitarily. I open my door to the outside world and the second gated door that keeps me locked safely inside while I sleep. I set up a low slung chair at the top of my steps and sit and sip coffee and watch the birds do their morning dance. Today I fed them scraps of my toast to bring them closer to me on the ground.

I roll up the mosquito nets that cover the windows, I pull back the curtains, I open the shutters if they have been caught in the wind and closed a little in the night.

I check my email. I get frustrated with the infuriating speed of the Internet. I should have faster speeds but the Internet guy has royally slacked off and we've been playing phone tag for over two weeks. Chandana has been the heavy and gone to his office to intimidate him into action, but that's only gotten him so far. Yesterday I decided to call him every 10 minutes to see if that would get through to him. I felt like the boy in About a Boy buzzing on Hugh Grant's door: buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz...... Unlike the boy, I am still waiting for a reply.

Around nine I get dressed and load up my bike and head off to work. Monday through Friday I teach at Antaranga. I've started doing a little show with the 8 and 9 year olds. They are writing it, based on an Indian folk tale that they told me. On Sunday's I work with my Chitra girls. In both cases, I am amazed each day how much we are able to understand each other despite the fact that we do not really speak each other's language.

At Antaranga my biggest challenge is that one of the women teachers doesn't speak English and yet wants to tell the kids what to do. She can't know what they are to do, because she hasn't understood me. She bosses them. Sometimes she pulls them forcibly where she thinks they are meant to be. As a visiting teacher, part of my purpose is to give the regular teachers another method of working from which to draw from. She doesn't understand my method of working. I am comfortable with the learning curve. I know that the kids may not understand what we are doing perfectly today. But tomorrow they will have absorbed it somehow and they will get it more right, and the day after that, even more right. That is if they are given space to fail and to find their own way of understanding.

I've discovered that "imagination" is not a word that translates easily into Bengali. Imagination is rampant in these parts, but when I use the word, people look at me as if I've spoken martian. This makes teaching how to use the imagination very difficult, but fun. I've had to go about it slyly. I've had to trick both the students and fellow teachers into using their imagination without asking them to use it. It wonderful for my teaching skills. I'm having to relearn how to teach everything I thought I knew already how to teach.

At 11 or so I ride to the shops or back home where I write or work on the website I'm starting for Chandana's Ahimsa programs, which is where my Chitra group gets it's funding. I usually eat lunch made by the ladies who work in my house, I nap if it is hot outside....and it's always hot. In the evening I may go back to Antaranga for the evening classes, or write some more, or read, or visit with Chandana. There are nights coming up where concerts have been arranged, visits to villages, I'm not sure what else. People are gently anxious to make sure that I am entertained. Last night I kept to myself and went to a cafe for dinner and started to read a new book by Vikram Seth, An Equal Music, that made me weep at almost every page.

Santiniketan is easy to live in, once you accept that the well may literally run dry in the night and therefore there is no way to wash in the morning. The electricity, too, might go at any minute. Shopping for groceries is something you can only do between 10 and one and then again between 5:30 and 9, except on Tuesdays when you can only go in the morning and Wednesday and Sundays when you can't shop at all.

I am beginning to get a feel for the strange interplay in India between what is locked away and what is always kept exposed. It is a common sight to see men peeing in the street. I've even had cab drivers stop, get out of the car, walk to the back of the car and unzip to pee, then they get casually back in the car and continue on. Indian's can sleep anywhere too, especially the men, sidewalks, fences, the edge of the railway track, the street.

When Nicole and I were waiting for the train to leave Howrah station we watched a young man of 16 or so, use the spout in the middle of the next set of tracks to take a bath and brush his teeth. Hundreds of people were around him, either on the platform opposite or the train right next to him. He took off all his clothes, except his underwear, washed with soap and water, used deodorant that he'd kept in a plastic bag along with his aftershave which he put on next, then he opened up a brand new undershirt, put on his pants and a belt 4 times too big, and a cleanly pressed shirt. He combed his hair, brushed his teeth and looked a million bucks. You'd never know he lived on platform 9 of Howrah Station, where he also, it turns out, went back to work selling fruit when his morning bath was done.

Yet all the windows in India have grates or bars, usually in art deco designs, but bars none-the-less. All the doors have locks on both sides to keep some people in and other people out. I haven't met a cabinet without a lock, except in the Bengal Club, originally an English domain, where presumably it is safe to leave your belongings out. It's as if things are meant to be secured, fastened to a place, hidden away, but the most intimate daily actions of humans are lived under the stares of everyone around them.

In one or two room houses where multiple generations live and sleep together, even sex becomes a sanctioned public act. I am thankful that I haven't moved into that part of India.

Much to the confoundment of the people who look after me, I have not abandoned my western sense of modesty, or of personal space, which is one of the most foreign things about me here, where no one gets the concept of keeping to oneself. But I'm loosening up in that regard. Today, as I ate my breakfast, Minou came in to take the mosquito net off the bed, to sweep, to generally be in my space, helping me. I realized after a few minutes that it has become natural to have her here, to have her gently clearing my domain while I sit in my nightgown, hair dishevelled, eating my toast. I don't bristle at the intrusion, I don't even feel guilty that she is on the floor drawing the broom under my feet. I have accepted that, for her, that is the order of things and to try and change that order would be disrespectful.

I don't speak Bengali yet. That's what gives me away, not my skin, or my western-Indian fusion of dressing. However, I'm learning more subtle Indian vocabularies. First, there are the various head bobs where the chin wobbles at slightly different angles to indicate different things: "Yes", "Maybe", "I want you to think I'm saying yes but the answer is really no". Then there is the the liberal use of "hunh," which indicates to another person that you are listening and that you have understood.

"I would like you to go...."

"Hunh...."

"...to the store..."

"Hunh, hunh..."

"....and get some lentils."

"Hunh, hunh, hunh.'

"Not the big red lentils..."

"Hunh..."

"...but the small yellow ones."

"HUNH...!!! Hunh. Atcha. Tik Atche." (That last part means, "Ok. All right".)

I've been sitting in the room on countless occasions when someone I am talking to will get a call and all I hear from my point of view is, "Hunh.......... Hunh, hunh......hunh, hunh, hunh......hunnnnh....hunh....hunh....hunh. Atcha Atcha. Tik atche."

Do not be surprised when I come back to the States and you hear me saying, "Hunh. Hunh." You have been warned.

I started to write, just then, "when I come back HOME," but it didn't stick. It didn't stick because I am home, at least for now. Chandana asked me the other day why it had taken me so long to get to India when it obviously suits me so well. I told her because it wasn't the right time. But now it is. Now I am home.

I went out to one of the Santal villages today for a festival to celebrate all the villages of the area and what they had accomplished in the last year. There were games where women had to run the farthest carrying a jug full of water on their heads and bicycle races where the aim was to go the SLOWEST without falling over. There was a dancing and drumming contest where groups from each of the Santal villages competed, a ferris wheel, ice cream vendors. All this was set out in the middle of rice paddies and thatched roof houses with dung patties drying on the walls.

The woman who lives upstairs from me, Jeanne, took me out to the fair because Chandana is out of town. As our car was taking us back home at dusk, a mist was forming over the crimson rice fields, the palm trees were silhouetted against a dark pink and blue sky. Streams of boys on bikes who were heading to where we were driving away from, appeared and disappeared again in our headlights. Oxen relaxed on the sides of the road, leaning against houses painted pale blue and red, after long days pulling bullock carts. There was nothing about the scenes floating by outside the window of the Ambassador that should have made sense to me and yet it was completely normal, completely right and I said to Jeanne, "I don't think I've ever seen anything more beautiful than these villages around Santiniketan."

I haven't. Not even my beloved Paris, or the beach in Mexico, or the Olympics rising over the Puget Sound can hold a candle to these tiny backwater towns where so many people live a simple life getting married, having babies, re-learning how to be organic farmers, weaving, holding hands, serving tea to strangers. This place is no idyll, there's poverty, drought, and child-brides, but in a co-operative fashion the native villagers, Indians from the surrounding areas and foreigners who have taken an interest have slowly, over the last 20 years, been bringing the villages not so much into the modern age, but into balance by establishing schools, nutritional programs, even a small local hospital. With help from people like Chandanda and groups like Ahimsa, these villages are becoming stronger without losing their souls, their individuality, their identities. And because of it, they have a glow about them, a sense of light unlike any I've encountered anywhere else on the planet.

I don't know what any of this means. I haven't a clue. In terms of me, I mean. I just know that today this is how it strikes me. I am living in India and I am at home, all at the same time.

The Spaces In Between

2011-03-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

I did a show several years ago in Seattle called The Shadow, a clever political satire disguised as a fairy tale written by Russian playwright Eugene Schwartz. The first act ended with my favorite theatrical line of all time. The heroine, who was not played by me, stood alone on the stage, looked straight at the audience and said, "What is going to happen? What is going to happen?" Then the stage went dark. Direct, simple, brilliant. Shouldn't the actors and the audience always be asking that question at the end of the first act?

The difference between that show, any show, and life is that at the end of act one (or two, or three), we go out into the lobby for a drink and snacks and happily pause the action, knowing that in 15 minutes or so we will sit down in the safety of our seats in the dark and the rest of the story will unfold, reveal itself without any real effort on our part except to stay awake and let it in. At the end of the show we may find ourselves moved, shifted ever so slightly from where we were a few hours ago. We might be happier, sadder, more thoughtful. Sometimes, we might be angry or disappointed in the evening's story or, worse yet, in the quality of the storytelling. If we are lucky, and I've been lucky on more than a few occasions, we might actually discover a in few days, weeks, months that we have been changed in some small way and that we cannot go back to who we were before that night in the theater opened a room in ourselves we didn't know was there.

I've never sat in my seat at the end of act one of a play and wished that I could hold on to exactly what I was feeling right then, I've never wished I could pause the story indefinitely, no matter how delicious the first act was. I've always trusted in the grace of the theater gods that when the curtains go up again, it will be time to move on to the next plot point. Even after a lifetime spent watching as much bad and mediocre theater as good and exceptional theater, I maintain a hopeful heart and relish the opportunity that each rise of the curtain offers to be transported, transformed, transfixed. I've seen so-so first acts followed up with earth-shattering second acts. I've seen breathtaking beginnings, fizzle tragically to nothing in the final moments for any number of reasons: weak plot twist, poor directing, timid or bombastic acting, even set pieces that got in the way.

The difficulty with weekends like I just lived through, is that when the curtain comes down you don't know if it is intermission, or if it has been a very beautiful and complete one-act play.

Chandana said to me yesterday as we walked to our Chitra class, "This is a sisterly thing to say, but I hope you won't be devastated if nothing else happens with Martin. It could be that it was just a lovely moment in time, and nothing else will come of it." I could feel Chandana's heart aching as she said this and as she confessed that her worry springs from upsets she has experienced in her own life.

Intermissions never come at a point where the characters would want them. The point at which it makes good theater to pause the action in a play should always leave the audience wondering, well, "What is going to happen? What is going to happen?" which means the characters on stage are left hanging emotionally, sometimes physically, definitely transitionally or transformationally. It's bad form to tie up all the loose ends in act one if you want your audience to be excited to come back for act two. At intermission the audience wants to be left in the dark while the characters are suspended in a state of yearning, yearning for resolution, for fulfillment, for a hopefully happy and satisfying conclusion to their quest. The souls in the story want what is lost to be found, what is hidden to be revealed, what is agony to turn to bliss. Not that the audience doesn't want that too, they just have the perspective and the patience that comes from living a story from the outside, not from the perspective of the characters living the story on the inside.

When you don't know if it's act one or a one act, it's hard to know if the characters will ever be released from their tender-hooks.

Over the last two days I have been wistful, sometimes melancholy, mostly in a state of pause. I keep singing Que Sera Sera, not just in my head, but out loud, to the amusement of Minou, the housekeeper here. When I think of Martin I try to picture an open road, a wide expanse of possibility, a broad avenue that may lead us to each other, or to someone else or somewhere else that we are meant to go. I try to picture this path in a neutral frame of mind, like I would feel in the lobby of a theater in the middle of a really great show. I'm trying to think of this time, Martin-wise, as a chance to get snacks, catch up with friends, freshen up in the loo.

When I was in Europe a few years ago, I tried to get to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland. I couldn't make it happen. It really bummed me out because it was one of two things on my list of things I wanted to see but didn't. Several traveling weeks down the road, practically two months later actually, I was staying on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. On the recommendation of my inn-keeper, I took a boat out to an island called Staffa where there's a famous cave and puffins to watch. The boat ride was expensive and I felt a little bit like I might have been hoodwinked into one of those tourist trap trips that make you feel like you'd rather have been back in town doing nothing rather than spending a lot of money on a waste of time. Turns out Staffa is made up of the same geological formations as the Giant's Causeway. I didn't know this until the boat was practically right up to it. By listening to my inn-keeper I'd unexpectedly turned up exactly where I wanted to go.

The second thing I'd managed to miss was the White Horse I'd seen in a documentary when I first arrived in England. The White Horse is a chalk figure in the side of a hill made centuries ago by the village up on the hill in order to intimidate other villages down below. Even with all my trains and buses and comings and goings in the English countryside over three months, I couldn't maneuver my way to the part of England I'd been told White Horse was in. By the time I was taking my last train of the trip from Edinburgh to London I was tired and actually relieved that I'd gotten the lousy window, the one where the seat is situated so that there is only an inch or two of glass behind your ear so what you mostly get is a view of how train cars are constructed at their seams. I had a good book, so I sat down and told myself it was OK not to be able to take everything outside the train in. I was being given the chance to relax, let things go.

"Besides," I said to myself, "if I need to see something, I'm sure someone will let me know."

Several hours into the trip, the train was making a broad turn, I could feel it in the slight shift of gravity. I'd been reading steadily, had felt no need to pitch my neck around to the funny angle it would have taken to look outside. But as if something was telling me to, I suddenly needed to investigate the view. We were coming around a large hill and, sure enough, there in the face of the hill was the nose, then the neck, then the torso, then the hind quarters, then the tail of a large chalk white horse. Within a minute or two the horse was out of sight. Turns out there are several white chalk horses in England. This one was the one I was obviously meant to see.

I wanted to stand up and scream and shout and say THANK YOU to whatever angel had tapped me on the shoulder just at the point when the white horse was making it's appearance. I also felt a kind of peace. On that journey I was constantly being taught that if I just went about my business and I listened to my gut and to the universe, I would eventually find myself exactly where I wanted to be. Granted, I found both the "Giant's Causeway" and the "White Horse" in totally different places than I'd expected to find them.

I want, sometimes, to hold onto Martin, onto the feeling of connection, of shared intimacy. I want to call him up and tell him how the sky in Santiniketan this afternoon foretells of rain. I also want to tell him how the sun that is coming through the clouds is both lighting up the leaves and casting tropical shadows. I want to tell him so that he can paint it. I want to tell him because he would find it lovely, as I find it lovely.

But Martin is painting his own view in Jaipur.

That makes me feel a twinge of pain sometimes and I wish that I could actually, physically grasp the energetic tether that must still be there between us, I wish I could grab it and pull it and own it and hold the connection like one holds a box filled with delicate and beautiful presents. I wish I could carry the box around like a small child carries a favorite toy, showing it to anyone who will look.

But then I take a deep breath. I reach out and touch the cool tiles against the kitchen wall. I look out the window and find a bird to watch, I listen to the sounds of India which fill the air in layers. I remember that I am in INDIA.

Have you noticed how theaters are doing more and more one acts? Maybe it's cheaper. Maybe our attention spans are getting shorter. Maybe we've been burned by too many bad second acts. But I think it's a shame. I think intermissions are important. I think they give the audience time to process the first act, to let it linger in our sub-conscious a little, to let the characters, the story, the emotions percolate. In the spaces in between the acts, we get to make the story our own. The play settles into the deeper, more rooted places in our minds and hearts, switching on lights, airing out rooms, so that when the curtain goes up on the next act we are prepared to be moved a little more, stretched a little farther.

I haven't always felt this way. I understand Chandana's worries, her heartache. I think we have all had the kind upsets she speaks of. We've all leapt head first into glorious Act Ones and been sorely disappointed when the second act didn't live up to the first. I've even had the agony on more than one occasion of starring in a beautiful love story only to find myself after intermission, metaphorically, locked out of the theater when the curtain came back up. Maybe you know that feeling I speak of, life seems to be going on with gusto just on the other side of the door and you have been barred entry, discarded, left behind. The audience and the other characters don't even seem to know you are missing, or if they do, they don't seem to mind.

I think this tends to happen when one takes the energetic tether established in the the first act and tries to yank on it, tries to pull it closer, tries to eliminate the intermission. In the past I have been so anxious to find out "What is going to happen? What is going to happen?" that I forgot to live my life, to take a break, to keep myself refreshed and strong and checked in with all the parts of myself. I'd forgotten that sometimes you just have to sit on the train, let your mind go, and trust that when the time is right you will know where to look, which boat to take.

Martin told me that in England one of the football teams sings Que Sera Sera as a sort of fight song. We decided that in their case they mean to say that "What will be is that we will crush you and our team will be victorious." As Martin pointed out, it would appear that no one on the team speaks Latin.

I speak just enough Latin to know that "What is going to Happen? What is going to happen?" is that "What will Be, Will Be."

"So Easy or So Slow"

2011-03-12T10:25:00.000-08:00

When I tell people that I'm writing a blog I sometimes feel a little cringe on both sides of the conversation. I think there are some amazing blogs in the world. Blogs are a great way to write and to investigate the endless variety of unique viewpoints. Its just that it has become a bit of a cliche and it is hard to think of myself as a real writer when what I write is a blog.

On this trip, however, I am relishing the opportunity that the format allows me to try and process my experiences in real time in such a way that it translates to a wider audience. As we, you and I, have gone along for the last six weeks I've been developing a policy about what is appropriate to share and what is off limits. Strictly verboten are memories or experiences that belong to other people who are easily identifiable. I also tend to shy away from putting into the ethernet certain difficulties I've had with anyone who might read the blog, or who it might get back to. I've found, really, that I don't miss those elements for the most part and that I can tell my stories accurately and with all the emotional truth, regardless.

It becomes tricky, tho, when an intimate chapter in my life is also an intimate chapter in someone else's. It is sticky when, in order to be true to the telling I must, potentially, expose the soft underbelly of a friend, someone who will read what I have written.

This happens in a small way all the time. Chandana, Nicole, Gary have all been generous enough to allow me to narrate some of our shared adventures. My mother, over the years, has been a champ, giving me the space to write about moments in time that she might otherwise want to forget.

But the story I am about to tell is one of the scariest because I am writing it in the midst of living it, not from a vantage point smoothed out by time and distance. It is a chapter with a beginning, middle and end in a book that hasn't been fully lived and written yet......

I returned to Calcutta on Thursday. Chandana had booked a room for two nights at the prestigious Bengal Club, a relic built by the English, straight out of the days of white starched linen dresses and stiff gin and tonics. The club used to be white men only. Now they let both women and Indians in. But when Chandana's plans changed, they were going to keep the 50% deposit even though she is a member of the club and she had given plenty of notice.

I thought it might be fun to see what an English club in Calcutta looked and felt like, since that bygone era is so much a part of what fascinated me about India when I was young. I also wanted to help Chandana out and to be there for her on Friday when, after staying in other accommodations, she went for a long anticipated and wildly anxious-making interview for the US visa she needs in order to visit her son at Stanford next summer.

I also wanted to see Martin before he flies off to Jaipur tomorrow.

You may remember that I met Martin on my last visit to Calcutta a few weeks ago. Along with Nicole, we traipsed off to South Calcutta into a little village on the outskirts of the Sunderbans. What I didn't tell you then was that there were moments, brief, fleeting smidgens of silently shared understanding that had lodged themselves in my imagination and wouldn't let go. Martin and I would, in the midst of some particularly INDIAN craziness not catch each other's eye, so much as seek them out, the way you do with an old friend or lover, someone you know so well that you are sure they will be be there sharing your feelings and your delight in each strand of the experience: the beauty, the insanity, the scariness, the grief, and the genuine and simple pleasure that life has brought you to this exact moment in time.

Along with his central casting, upper middle class British looks, Martin carries himself with the comportment of an Oxford educated man who has worked for years and years crunching numbers in the heart of The City in London. Even in the escalating heat of West Bengal, Martin wears his black, lace-up leather walking shoes with dress socks. He comes prepared for the day with a largish black hiking back pack that I can only presume is stocked with any essentials he might need. He doesn't wear this pack slung jauntily, carelessly over one arm, but rather it lands squarely and solidly on his shoulders and then gets fastened securely around his waist. He is a soul with clearly defined edges, though these edges neither keep people out, nor do they, in any exceptional way, beckon you in. Unless, that is, he talks to you. Then, he subtly proffers a sweet invitation with his eyes. The invitation reads not so much as, "Please come in", but rather, "Should you decide to go exploring, I've left the door unlocked. I might be painting, but do let yourself in and make yourself comfortable."

I first got a look at the invitation on the train from Santiniketan to Calcutta two weeks ago when, while boarding the train, he saw me in my seat and said, "I hope I'm on the right train. But I've just seen my name on the passenger list. So I suppose I'm in the right place." We shared a small laugh and he went on to find his seat four rows ahead. I remember looking at the back of him and hoping, somehow, I could will him to turn around and decide to come and have a chat. No such luck. But the next day, when he arrived at the cafe and turned out to be the man Nicole and I were waiting for, he moved from intriguing to quite attractive when he said, "I'm starting a career as an artist." I mean really? What kind of guts does it take to up and declare in mid-life that you are quitting your day job to "start a career as an artist."??? By the end of the day I declared to Nicole that I had a wee crush on Martin.

"Really? I'll be. Martin?"

"He's quite handsome, once you get past the 'terribly British' exterior."

"Humph."

Well, I went back to Santiniketan and Martin's ex-wife arrived with her mom for a brief visit and a week went by. Martin and I exchanged a few innocuous emails and when these two days came up we made a plan to meet for drinks on Thursday night and to plot out a day of sight seeing for Friday. Though Martin was quick to make a plan, I had no idea if it was a "date" or not. Of course, Martin is new at being a professional artist, so he tends to play his "cards" like an accountant.....an English accountant, at that.

We decided to meet at "my place" for a drink in the bar. We greeted each other like old friends, or maybe just as new friends who are mutually relieved to get a chance to know each other a little better.

For the past couple of weeks when I would wonder about Martin, I practiced my mindfulness breathing along with the mantra, delivered in Mathew's voice, of "Be here now." Sometimes I would switch things up and chant a little, "Que sera sera," because, well, what will be, will be.

So I sat down to drinks with Martin with no expectations, just an awareness that it was a pleasure to be out with a handsome, intelligent man, having drinks (my long awaited margarita!), in INDIA, and the evening felt complete. We caught up on our adventures of the last week, and a week in India holds more adventure than the average bear of a week anywhere else. Time flew by. We decided to move on to dinner at a restaurant called Peter Cat where the line to get in gave it the air of exclusive sophistication. Martin said, "It'll be like we won the lottery when my name is called."

We sat at a table against the wall. I looked out, Martin sat across from me, with a phalanx of overly attentive waiters hovering just behind him, looking, from my view-point, like they were floating just above Martin's shoulders. They remained there, grinning like Cheshire Cats for the whole meal.

Throughout dinner we conversationally delved deeper, touching upon the inner geological strata of our lives. Every once in a while I was aware of being surprised by Martin's intelligence. I wasn't shocked that he was smart, but rather I was taken aback by the way his curiosity and intellect led him to ask questions that took me off guard, or led to his own personal revelations, none of which were mired in the kind of brackish emotional soup I'd inadvertently pre-supposed a divorced, ex-ish accountant with clear-cut boundaries, starting a new career in his early 50's might get stuck in. Everything he said, often so quietly and simply that I strained to make it out, was grounded in the present, like he was making sure he was reporting from the front lines of his inner evolution. He was neither trying to impress me with his exploits or emotional maturity, nor did he seem concerned with moulding my perception of him with an ill-formed grasp of what his future might hold. Whatever mid-life make-over he is going through, he seems to be doing it with grace and ease, putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time which made walking back to my hotel with him through the throngs of Calcutta feel easy and carefree.

Martin dropped me at the front door with a brisk kiss on the cheek and a promise to meet me the next morning at 11. I went to my room happy, smiling. I fished out my computer and sat on the side of my bed that hadn't been turned down. In India, big beds are made up of two smaller beds nestled side-by-side. Since I was alone, my personal room 16 go-to guy, had left one half of the bed dressed up in it's depressingly ugly duvet cover, essentially giving it the feel of one of those couches that some people keep encased in clear plastic slip covers.

While I waited for my travel modem to hook up to the Internet, I had a fleeting moment not of desire, so much, as whimsy and I thought to myself, "What a shame Martin has gone back to his hotel when there was a perfectly good, unused bed right here." By the time the thought was finished my Internet was up and running and I was lost to the world of facebook.

15 minutes later the phone rings. It's Martin. We'd gotten out of dinner so late, that Martin discovered the hard way that the curfew at his hotel was strictly enforced. I didn't hesitate and said, "come on over to my place. I have a perfectly good bed that is just going to waste."

Hmmm? Did I will that to happen, or had I had a premonition of things to come.....?

Of course, like you, I had a teeny tiny sliver of a doubt that Martin had really been locked out. It's an awfully convoluted story, though. I'm pretty sure if he had just wanted to come over he would have said so directly. Besides, I was quite happy to have him back again. He came up to the room and I continued on with my pre-phone call plan of taking a shower. I put QI on for him to watch; he'd never seen it and I knew he'd love it. I watched the second half with him when I was done bathing. Then he asked if he could take a shower. Of course I said he could.

It's funny how one moment can lead so simply and strangely to the next when you don't know, or think you know, what is going to happen next.

I am sitting in the bedroom and he pokes his head out of the bathroom door and says that he can't figure out how to get the water on. I go in to the bathroom and he's there in his boxer briefs, as comfortable as can be. I turn on the shower. I leave, he takes a shower. I crawl into my bed, safely tucked into the edges of my mattress. He comes out of the shower, wearing his briefs and apologizing because, of course, he has nothing else to wear to bed. He climbs into his clearly defined sleeping space. We chat for a little while about this and that and then turn off the light and say our goodnights.

I feel like we are two teenagers at a slumber party. I tell him I'm glad he's there because, "it feels festive." And it does. A grown up slumber party.

We toss and turn in our individual little rectangles. It's dark in the room with the heavy hotel curtains, but I can see that after turning away, Martin's now facing towards me. We are facing each other. The narrow trench created by the edges of our mattresses delineate his safety zone and mine.

I half want him to touch me, or kiss me, or say something, anything that will tell me what he's thinking, and I half want to relish the exact moment we are in, the moment where I have no idea what, if anything, will happen.

His hand was dangerously close to crossing over into the territory of my bed. I thought about grazing it with my hand. I shifted a little, but chickened out on touching him.

Then I had to get up to go to the bathroom (Darn my bladder). When I got back into bed it was the perfect excuse to see what would happen if my hand "accidentally" breached the outer limits of his bed. At first nothing happened, but then he took my hand and suddenly moved closer saying, in his imitable English way, "Care for a cuddle?"

It would be bad form to tell you what happened next.

I'll just say that it was lovely.

The next morning, my room-16 go-to guy who brought the coffee wouldn't allow me to carry the tray into the room and out onto the veranda, so he got a bit of a shock when he discovered that I was not alone. Martin was sitting, as blazé as can be, on "his" side of the bed in his boxer briefs. I had thrown my Santiniketan batik nightgown on and was shepherding the room-16 guy this way and that and feeling very much like I'd been caught cheating on my imaginary husband or, at the very least, cheating on the Bengal Club.

Once we'd been left alone, Martin and I went out on the balcony and sipped coffee. Neither of us had really managed to sleep because, let's be honest, it's nearly impossible to fall asleep the first night you share a bed with someone new.

I joked about what I was gonna write in my blog. Martin said, quite seriously, "Write whatever you like."

We checked in about the time spent in bed when we were, well, not trying to sleep which, like our conversational chemistry, was fresh and present, and not like any other time I'd spent in any other bed with any someone else. I told Martin about Dr. Ganguly reading my palm, which he'd done only a few days before. I'm not sure Dr. Ganguly believes that palmistry has any validity, but he's studied it from a very scientific and academic viewpoint and memorized what hand reading experts have determined that different characteristics mean. Examining the cushiony part under my thumb, Dr. Ganguly decided that sex wasn't very important to me. I informed him that that wasn't true.

But the more I thought about it, and this I told to Martin, I realized that in some ways my fleshy palm was right. I'm not really interested much in sex just for the sake of having sex. I need there to be a deeper connection, a spark, a little bit of a "what if" attached to the situation. The older I get, the more true that becomes.

However, I think Dr. Ganguly was right in another important respect, and Martin helped me remember this. Sex is nice, but sensuality is what I call "important." I'm sorry that I don't feel comfortable elaborating on how Martin jogged my memory, but hopefully you can supply your own example. However, sadly, I also know there are more than a few people who will think they know what I mean, who really don't. But you, yes YOU, are not one of those unfortunate few.

Martin and I valiantly tried to make sight-seeing plans, but we were so tired that neither of us was moving very fast. After he went to his place to get clean clothes and do some errands, we met Chandana for drinks and snacks in the hotel bar to celebrate that she'd gotten her US visa. I sat on a couch, while Martin and Chandana sat opposite each other in over-sized chairs. Chandana was glowing from relief and Martin was all satisfied relaxation. I was happy to sit and bask in the two beauties I hadn't even known a month ago. Chandana, my Indian big sister, gently grilled Martin and talked me up, but mostly charmed Martin who obviously knows a beautiful woman when he meets one.

Eventually, I had to retreat like a wilted flower to the quiet confines of my air-conditioned room for a little nap. Chandana headed to Howrah and the train back to Santiniketan, and Martin completed some travel related errands.

While I tried to sleep, a rattle started up somewhere in the room. I hid my head under the pillow, hoping to drown out the sound, but it only got louder. Finally I got up and saw that it was the door to my bedroom being blown against it's jamb by wind coming in from the other side where the bathroom vents to the outdoors. I ran across to the door on the opposite side of the room, the door to the balcony, flew open the curtains and discovered a magnificent storm was raging over, and through, and against Calcutta. Rain was pouring, wind was howling, thunder was booming and lightening was thrilling this storm deprived, west coast transplant. I had literally been waiting and wanting a good storm in my life for years. I never thought it would discover me in dusty Calcutta at the height of the dry season.

Martin came back and we realized that we weren't going to go anywhere. Instead of exploring the city, we explored each other. When we did go out to eat, I was relieved that Martin simply left his bag and hat in my room; there was no emotional tussle over whether he should go back to his place, or any of that nonsense.

At dinner in a Chinese joint with a large domed ceiling that looks like a giant engraved golden gong, the sullen waiter didn't help my slowly sinking mood. I was doing my valiant best to stay right there in the present, to enjoy the time Martin and I had left rather than thinking of the moment, 12 hours later, when we would have to say good-bye. I kept thinking of that damn Bob Dylan song which I find rather depressing, but it is on my ipod none-the-less, and now it was playing in my heart: "you are gonna make me lonesome when you go." I told Martin what Bob Dylan was saying. Martin said, "you know if I'd met you back home I'd have asked you for a drink and then I'd ask you for another one a few weeks later, and then maybe dinner a few weeks after that, and so on. Travel can somehow accelerate things, intensify them."

I kind of wished we'd met in London. I mourned for those two weeks of anticipation, for the next date, and so on.

Martin had told me earlier in the day, while we waited for Chandana to arrive from the American Embassy, that contrary to how he may behave, "going with the flow" was a challenge for him. But he likes, he said, to push himself to step out of his comfort zone (another of the many blindingly sexy things about Martin) and he just kept telling himself, he told me, "What will be will be."

As I struggled to stay present and to enjoy the date that I was actually on, I paused Bob Dylan, changed tracks in my heart and asked Doris Day to croon a little Que Sera Sera. Doris worked her magic and I managed not to dissolve into heartache.

When we stepped back out on the street to walk back to the hotel, I turned to thank Martin for dinner and he leaned over to give me a kiss. We started to walk arm in arm, but then he said, "I know displays of affection aren't really done around here." We both respectfully pulled ourselves back into our own little bubbles of airspace.

Back at the Bengal Club, tired and vulnerable we laid in bed and talked around the elephant in the room. Martin leaves the country a week before I do; we compared our itineraries for our remaining weeks in India, being careful not to voice expectation or need for there to be a meeting point somewhere down the road. As it stands, I have more freedom after the first of April; he has booked the rest of his trip with lots of commitments to various friends along the way. "But", as Martin said, "plans could change. Let's keep in touch."

Are there four words that are more dispiriting when parting from a lover than, "Let's keep in touch?"

Sitting back in Santiniketan tonight, I am telling myself what I suspect Martin is telling himself: That we've only known each other for three days. I suppose I could have made it four. I could have changed my train ticket, but I have to teach my Chitra girls tomorrow and I can't be depleted for that. Besides, Martin flies away, and we'd only have been delaying the inevitable.

Three days is only three days. Right? Like me with my writing, Martin, the newly minted career painter, is just setting off on a mission to transform his professional life, even his very identity. People can only cope with so much impute, so much change, so much possibility at one time.

Right?

At one point yesterday, in the late afternoon light of a rain washed Calcutta, Martin was lying on the bed beside me. When I sat up, my eyes took in his torso on the way up to the window and my brain transplanted us, momentarily, to St. Ives in Cornwall, half a world a way, a place where Martin and I have both been, but, obviously, not together. It was as if, after taking Martin's eyes up on their invitation to "come in and make myself comfortable while he painted", we'd jumped ahead in time and place and become happily ensconced in each others lives. Though I could not see them in the vision, I knew his canvases were all around us.

I tried to tell Martin about the vision, which lingered in the air like an impressionist painting. I wasn't very brave in the telling and only vaguely implied that we were in St. Ives, in my minds eye, together. I think he thought I said that Calcutta somehow reminded me of St. Ives just then and so he said, "I've been to St. Ives. It's very beautiful there. Great light." The impressionist painting dissolved and we were once again surrounded by the fading beauty of old Calcutta.

In the night, I'd had lots of dreams, bad dreams mostly about India, caste, and class. I'd tossed and turned, being careful to keep my sturm and strang confined to my bed. We'd decided to fall asleep without the a.c. and at some point, after my dreams had finally turned to the lighter side, I awoke with a start. I turned toward Martin's bed. He was looking at me and he said tentatively, "It's, umm, gotten a little warm, don't you think?"

I said, "Hmmm, yes, I suppose it has. Should we turn on the A.C.?"

He said, "What do you think?"

"Sure."

He got up and turned it on. While he did so, I told him about the dream that had awoken me: he'd been telling me how he'd had to change from one pair of jeans into another, but for some reason he couldn't take off his shoes to do it and he'd said, in the dream mind you, "It was a rather difficult transition."

For some reason, that made us both laugh.

When he got into bed it suddenly occurred to me that he'd been waiting for me to wake up to address the temperature question. He'd patiently been lying there without disturbing me. He hadn't nudged me awake to discuss the issue, nor had he simply taken matters into his own hands and turned on the a.c.

I am pretty sure that's one of the nicest gestures any man has made for me.

Martin settled into bed. We were facing each other. I let my arm cross the great bed-divide. We held hands. Out of the haze of sleep that was engulfing me I said, "I like you Martin."

Martin liked me back.

After Martin and I said our goodbyes in the hotel room the next morning, he went off and left me a few minutes to gather my things and check out on my own. I'd told Martin that I was going to be stoic, I wasn't going to cry or make a fuss and I had held to my word.

I walked down the third floor hall. All the room "boys" were there, smiling at me. Maybe it's my imagination, but I felt certain they knew I'd entertained a gentleman all weekend long. Surprisingly there were no leers, but rather a series of sweet, kind faces greeted me. Maybe they intuited that my heart was feeling tender, so they responded accordingly.

My room-16 guy carried my bag, took me by the atm, and hailed a cab. After the taxi ride to Howrah 10 days before with Nicole, I was fully prepared to be hastled for the fare, but the driver simply put on the meter. When we arrived at the station, he maneuvered the cab close to the door. I gave him a 100 rupee note for a 60 rupee fare and asked for 20 rupee back. He started to give me the full 40 rupee in change. I insisted he take 20 back. He insisted on handing me the 40.

I said, "don't you want a tip?" He shook his head, "no."

It was too much for me. I could feel the core of my being crack open. If I could have, I would have grabbed that taxi driver and clung to him for a full ten minutes. I would have let loose a torrent of tears.

Instead, I took the change and put it in my purse. I put my purse on my shoulder. I got out of the cab and opened the front door and collected my suitcase. I put the suitcase over my shoulder. Then I put one foot in front of the other and walked one step at a time into Howrah station.