Closing the Books on the Past To Make Room for the Next Adventure

If you followed my previous long journey when I went to Europe a few years ago you may recall that I kept hinting at a Large Story that I needed to figure out how to write...a story that was the climax of that trip....far too grand a tale, I felt, to wrap up neatly or blog-style.

Well, over the last few years I have been struggling and struggling to put it into writing.  I have no trouble telling the story to friends over bottles of wine, with an hour or two to really flesh it out.  But writing it.....I just couldn't.

After I bought my ticket to India I hired a wonderful life/career coach, Denise Barnes, for four sessions to be spread out over two and a half months to guide and cheer-lead me through the writing process so that I could close the books on the "old" story before setting off to discover a new one.  Funny thing was, even though we got the writing juices flowing pronto and I found a solid voice for the story after the first session, I still couldn't navigate my way through writing the whole tale.

However, Denise did coach me through quite a powerful mental block: she helped me to finally feel confident in my abilities as a "light worker".  With her energetically holding my hand I took the first steps towards believing that I have something unique and valuable to give to the world by virtue of my exploration of it and reporting on it.  All I have to do is trust my gut, take one step at a time, and keep careful notes.

Over the same few months, I made the long-distance acquaintance of another wise-woman, Victoria Pendragon, who has a site that I've followed for the last few years called sacredearthsevenelement.com. I introduced myself because she was looking for free images to replace the copyright protected photos that she used for her cyber tarot deck in order to make a sellable hard-copy deck.  I had a picture that I took on Iona that had always reminded me of her Tower Card; I wrote and asked her if she'd like to trade my image out for her old one.  She did.  This led to several of my travel photos being incorporated into her deck...a high honor for me, as I feel she is a very gifted healer and light worker.

On Sundays Victoria doesn't post her usual daily readings, but sends out tutorials on the meaning of one of her cards.  Yesterday she highlighted The Tower; naturally, she included my photo.  She was gracious enough to give me a shout-out at the end of the post and I wanted to repay her with the history behind the picture.  

Lo and behold, in a matter of minutes I found that I had written The Story.  Granted, it doesn't have all the back-ground I thought it needed in order to be impactful, but it is The Story.    (If you'd like some of the history I might have shared in an oral telling, you can root it out by sifting through the blog posts from the spring of 2008).

So, to close the books on Europe 2008...without further ado...I give you: THE Story (as told to Victoria Pendragon).

A different shot of "The Tower" 

I built that tower at the end of a very long (3 month) quest around the British Isles....a quest I was called to go on, without being given the reason, by the universe.  The night before had been a full moon....I had spent the new moon, two weeks earlier, in Glastonbury casting wishes for clarity and a sense of purpose into the Holy Well....and I was sure that my long awaited epiphany would come to me on the full moon on Iona...I mean, if you can't expect an epiphany there, where can you???

But none had arrived.  No prophetic dreams.  Nothing.

So I'd slogged through the rain and sheep poop across the island to the beach where pilgrims have gone for thousands of years.  This beach is famous for it's pebbles and it was, indeed, covered with millions of the most beautiful pebbles I have ever seen.  

I sat amongst them all, in the rain, building that tower feeling very much at sea and forsaken and at the end of my energetic/spiritual rope.

And I gave up.  I started to walk home.  But then I turned around and decided to walk out into the water on some big boulders (so, surrounded by water, but not IN the water)...

....and I yelled into the surf, "What's it all about?" and I found myself saying out loud, "Love."  

Well, this didn't surprise me because all along my trip I'd been followed by hearts....heart shaped leaves, flowers, wads of gum, puddles, rocks, I had been photographing them for months just to make sure I wasn't going out of my mind:

So, somewhat petulantly, I threw back to the universe, "LOVE...OK...LOVE...I give.  LOVE....".

At the Holy Well I'd "received" a mantra: "Weaving a tapestry, putting in light."  Now, the mantra expanded to: "Weaving a tapestry, putting in light.  Weaving a tapestry putting in LOVE."  I stood on that boulder arms wide open yelling that into the sea.  And then I thought, that's all I can do....my epiphany will obviously come after I get back to the states...maybe years from now...

I began to walk back.  There was a little tidal pool filled with a thousand pebbles, shallow and warm.

So, I decided that the one thing I hadn't done was infuse a prayer into the water....a practice taught to me by a wise man in Australia.  Its a simple practice, you just put your hands in a body of water and say a prayer and by being clear and open-hearted, you infuse that prayer into the water which takes that prayer and sends it around the world.

I said the juiciest prayer ever.  I prayed for peace and love and harmony for everyone I could think of by name and then everyone else whose name I didn't know, as well as for the planet and all its critters.  It was a long long prayer.  Upon occasion my eyes would drift open and I became intrigued by three particular rocks...and when the prayer was done and I was sure that there was no more I could really do to incite an epiphany, an epiphany that was OBVIOUSLY not coming anytime soon...I indulged my curiosity and picked up the three rocks, one at a time.

The first was tiny and white and irregularly shaped with pin prick orange and blue spots on it....I pocketed that one for a kid I nanny upon occasion.

The second looked as if it was going to be heart-shaped....of course, knowing my luck....but it wasn't.

The third was a very ordinary egg shaped rock...grey...with a pink line running down the part I could see...and I love a rock with a wishing line on it.  I picked it up and slowly turned it around to make sure the line connected on the other "side", because we all know...the line has to connect on the other side to be a valid wishing rock....but as I turned it around I realized that it did not circumnavigate the stone...instead it appeared that God had taken a pink sharpie and drawn the outline of a slightly irregular, but Hallmark worthy heart onto the pebble.

I stood up and tried telling myself that that was a perfectly normal thing to find.  That there was nothing at all extra-ordinary about finding a rock with a perfect heart drawn on it amidst millions of other pebbles that don't have hearts...and to find it right after I said a prayer for love into the water right above it...."PERFECTLY NORMAL!"

But as I walked away I suddenly felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach...I doubled over and collapsed to the ground and started sobbing....and I knew in a flood of insight that the Earth had been speaking to me all along the way.  It had been speaking AND listening to me..the whole time.  It had been telling me that Love really is the only answer.  I also believe it was telling me that it can be healed...we can be healed....and the healing starts with love.

Now I don't think I'm special...I think the Earth is speaking to all of us..listening to all of us...I just happened to be in a space where I could pick up on the signals...

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ~Lin Yutang

Lest anyone think that I don't understand that going to India is gonna be a challenge....let me reassure you...I GET IT.

When I tell people that I'm going for three and a half months, they inevitably ask me what I'm going to India FOR, what am I doing to DO there.  My response is always, "I'm going to see India.  Or at least a small part of it."  Sometimes I'll explain that it's a "calling".  But usually I just stop with, "I'm going to see India."

That is the simplest, truest answer.  But just as folks asked me if I was going to Europe "for work or pleasure" a few years ago, people, in their search to understand my quest, tend to try to categorize the reason I might be going to India.  Usually they offer such boxes as "Yoga?", "Meditate?", "Live in an Ashram?", before they get to "Work?", or "Fun?"(for some reason people rarely associate "Pleasure" with India).   When I wrote about fielding that question before going to Europe, I talked then, as I have here in the past week, about being "called" to travel.  But if you read between the lines of that post, you might recognize that I suspect the trip to Europe will turn out to be a great deal of "Pleasure."  And, it was.

My impending journey, on the other hand.....I suspect this trip is very much about "Work."

Starting on a clearly superficial level, let's examine the energy it is bound to take just to be in India for 102 days without a time-out.  I'm a person that is used to my alone time.  I need it.  When I was in high school I used to ask my mom to go to the movies sometimes just so I could have the house to myself.  All I would do is watch tv, or read a book, but somehow just having one other person in a seven room house felt like too much of an invasion of my personal space.  I get sensorially overwhelmed in Fred Meyer if I haven't had the perfect amount of beauty rest.  I sleep with ear-plugs, a noise machine, a fan for more white noise, and a pillow over my ears and that while I live on an incredibly quiet street with house-mates that tend to be asleep before me insuring there will be little banging around to wake me up.  And now I am getting ready to go to one of the most over-populated countries in the world.  It's chock-a-block full of people.  Filled to the gills.  And all those people make sound, fill the streets and, soon, the edges of my personal space.  And I don't think Fred Meyer has anything on the sights, sounds, smells that are going to flood my senses in a constant stream once my plane touches down in Mumbai.

For the last month or so, I've been thinking of that quote above...."No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow"...especially when I wake up, my head cradled by 7 insanely well worn down pillows, on a pillow-top bed, feeling like a princess.  Every picture of every hotel bed in India that I can afford looks only slightly more luxurious than a straw mat.  Ok, I'm exaggerating.  But they tend to be very thin mattresses with one very anemic looking pillow.

I miss my bed already.

But whenever I start to grieve for the soon to be separation from my bed, my thinking expands to a slightly less superficial realm.  I begin imagining all those souls I will encounter who have no pillows, no beds, no walls to shut the world out when they sleep, eat, go to the bathroom.  My mind wonders how in the world I will process (sensory overload aside) the devastating poverty, sickness, filth, and desperation that I've been told to expect.

My friend Jane related a quote from a teacher of hers who said something like, "India will either make you insane or crack your heart wide-open."  I believe it.  And I believe that any place that has that power will take a great deal of energetic work to navigate it without going crazy.  And it will take a great deal of courage to let India into my psyche, to let my heart crack wide-open.

I guess what I'm going to be "doing" in India is learning how let go of what I think I need in order to be comfortable, challenging myself to see India as it is (thanks Zach) without going crazy, making peace with the mosquitoes and the constant stimulation and the massively challenging socio economic disparity, not just between how I live and so many people live in India, but between how so many Indians live in relative opulence while millions of their countrymen live, sanctioned by the caste system, hand to mouth in filth I cannot imagine.  I will be working to understand a culture that is so vastly different than my own without trying to impose my needs and beliefs and worries and sensitivities onto a people that are pretty ensconced in their own needs, beliefs, worries and sensitivities.

In the midst of all of this I will get to see some pretty cool things, hopefully I'll ride an elephant, take some pretty pictures, and do all those things that tourists do for "fun".  But I need to make it clear that this trip feels like a job to me.  A job assigned to me by my soul.  A job that will be hard, challenging, exhausting and, hopefully, very very rewarding.

There Are Three Types of People

When I tell people that I'm going to India I invariably encounter three different responses:

1.  Oh, My, God, I LOVE India.  YOU are gonna LOVE it.
2.  I have ALWAYS wanted to go to India, that is so cool.
3.  Huh.  I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in going to India.  None, zilch, nada.


I haven't met anyone yet who is luke warm on the idea of going to India.

Since I have always wanted to go, I figure I've got a pretty good handle on why people in category one or two say what they say...though I suspect there are almost as many reasons, really, for going to India as there are people who go....but lets not get too existential about it.

I can even wrap my brain around many of the reason people might be hesitant to go to India: the poverty, the over population, the dysentery....even, as one person said, "the smells".

But I have really been baffled by what some people have said about why they don't want to go to India.  Before I tell you what that is, let me say first that these people in question are compassionate, warm, smart, caring, socially involved and evolved human beings...which is why their viewpoint startles me so.  They say, "Why would you want to go somewhere so different, so foreign.  I have no interest in being somewhere like that.  I would feel too uncomfortable, it would just be too weird."

Because they are friends of mine, I feel comfortable asking, "Let me get this straight, you have no interest in seeing a land that old, getting an opportunity to learn something about a culture that has survived for so very long?  You have no curiosity about life in a place that is, exactly as you said, so different from our own?"

And always, ALWAYS, they reply with complete confidence, "Nope, no interest what so ever."

I have to say, "that takes guts to me".  I admire the chutzpah it takes to admit to such a glaring lack of curiosity about one of the oldest and most fascinating countries on the planet.  I know, I know how judgmental I sound....and I suppose it would be untrue to say I'm not feeling at all judgmental....but, it is mostly awe and a strange kind of respect and mostly bewilderment.

Look, there's a lot of people I don't have much desire to know better or have much curiosity about...most of them fall to the far far right of the American political spectrum.  So, I get it.  We all have our boundaries, the places we feel uncomfortable or uninterested in exploring.

But for me it is exactly the foreignness of India that makes it imperative that I go.  And since our world is getting smaller in so many ways, we can travel more easily, we can be on the other side of the globe in a matter of hours, we can video chat with loved ones on the flip side of the planet to let us know how we are doing.  We have an unparalleled opportunity here in the 21st century to meet people who think and feel and live and pray differently than us and to understand them.

I'm as guilty as anyone else, even more guilty than some, of relying on facebook and technology to keep me connected to my friends and world events.  There are times when I feel rather isolated, or I should say, I cherish my alone time and online networking keeps my world a little more open.  But I also feel like so much of our world view is shrinking to the size of our computer screens.  And just at the moment in history when we have the opportunity to see so much of the world with relative ease and speed, we have been seduced into being afraid (or is it apathetic?) of it.

Hey, I know not everyone has the time or money to go to India.  There are so many people who would love to go, but have families to raise and to get through college.  So, it's not the lack of leaving for India that baffles me, it is lack of curiosity about seeing such a place.

We must just be wired differently.  I need to see the poverty, to know the colors and smells, the dirt, the dust, the mosquitoes, the toilets without seats, to see how billions of people experience the world around them when it is so different than my own.  I have been incredibly privileged  in my upbringing, as have many Indians.  In having a roof over my head for all the days of my life.  Food, clothes, clean water. Who knows...maybe it's guilt that makes me yearn to see a country that may very well shatter my perceptions of my very comfortable life.  Maybe there is something in me that needs to awaken from the complacency of living, even in these dark economic times, in this very affluent first world country where, in theory anyway, we all have the chance to live with clean water, food on the table, roofs over our heads.  I don't know....but I do know that I just cannot conceive of not wanting to see India at all.

I mean, putting the economic disparity of and in India aside, there's all of this to experience:

But if you fall into category three and I still can't arouse your curiosity...rest assured, you don't have to go....I, however, seem to have no other choice.

As a footnote...to those people whose response to my leaving for India has been something like this, "Who do you think you are: Elizabeth Gilbert?"  I say, as much as I admire Elizabeth Gilbert and loved her book Eat, Pray, Love, there were independent women who traveled solo to far off places long before she came on the scene.  My desire to go to India lived in me long before she was even married, divorced and traveling to Italy, India and Bali.  But, to be fair, I think she gave many of us the little extra push we needed to step out of our comfort zones and to say, "What the hell.  Life's too short.  I'm gonna buy that ticket and see what happens next."

Another Reason to Visit India...

To meet this man....though, I'm not planning on going to Chennai.  Maybe I'll find many more of his kind....

India....the world within

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. ~Lillian Smith.

I'm going to India in a few weeks.  Of course, if you know me at all, this is old news....because it's all I've been talking about for weeks. Months.  Well, years.  In fact, this trip will be the realization of a very long-standing dream. 

It seems wrong to start off talking about my love affair with India by mentioning my love affair with England, or at least English history, but that is probably the way it began.  Like most young girls I went through my princess phase.  I loved books about castles and pomp and circumstance and gilded life.  King Arthur and Camelot took up a lot of room in my imagination to be sure, but also the more concrete and recent true life tales of the Elizabethan court, Queen Victoria and her Empire, the Wallis Simpson scandal, Elizabeth the Second, her kids and, of course, Diana.  But I also just loved the simpler England of small country homes and cottages with ordered little gardens, cobble-stoned streets that twisted and turned and, in my mind, were filled with Jane Austen characters and Pip from Great Expectations.

This love for everything English rippled from my reading life into my movie watching life, and this, I think, is where India started to come into the picture.  All the way back in my young girl-hood I was utterly captivated by The Little Princess and The Secret Garden, two stories about lonely English girls who don't fit into the upper class English world.  In the tough times that plagued them, both girls drew upon their earliest memories, happy memories, rich and colorful memories which happened to be in India, an India ruled and ordered by the English colonialists who governed it. When I was younger I thought the civility of the English was somehow romantic, the white cotton dresses perfectly pressed, their unflagging order in the chaos of a "heathen" nation; it was probably the sort of order that I yearned for in my own chaotic childhood. 

So many tales told about England that have captured my imagination are rooted in India where behind all the orchestrated pageantry of the English living abroad lurked the beauty and unfathomable kaleidoscope of India which seemed to be part of the life blood of any British character in any story of that ilk.....Jewel in the Crown, A Passage to India, and my favorite, Heat and Dust.  If you haven't seen it, Heat and Dust came out in 1983 when I was 14.  The movie follows two women, a young English officer's wife who arrives in India in the waning days of English rule and her niece who comes to India 50 or so years later to find out more about her aunt who was led astray by an Indian prince.  It seems the longer a character stays in India, the more in danger they are of eventually abandoning their ordered English lives forever because they fall completely in love with the visceral, sensual heartbeat of India itself.  

Over the years I have morphed into a woman who has come to realize that she, also, does not seem destined to live an ordered life and I often feel as if I don't fit in with the expectations of my society.  Looking back at my younger self, I wonder if I loved those tales not because of how very British the British were, but because I secretly yearned to abandon my fears of not fitting in, of not ever really being capable of living an ordered life.  And now it has become a calling, this need to go to India.  There is, somewhere deep inside me, a voice that says, "I must go to India", the way people are called to be artists or doctors or politicians.  Crazy, perhaps, but like with artists, politicians, doctors it feels connected to my work in this world, whatever that may be in the years to come.  And as vague and unsupported as that may sound to you, it is only slightly less vague and unsupported to me...and only because I hear this voice so clearly.  

But just because the voice is clear, doesn't mean I'm not put off by the utter mysteriousness of the quest.  In fact, I decided that I would go to India three years ago and set the goal of going when I was 40 and told everyone who would listen that I was spending part of that year in India....but didn't.  On September 6th, 2010 I turned 41, and I knew it was time to stop saying I WOULD go to India and actually go.

But buying the ticket was hard.  Very hard.  Scary even.  It's not just that the ticket is a hefty chunk of change, but the idea of committing to India itself is terrifying.  Over the last several months I've been wrestling both with terror and apathy.  Of course the apathy is just a cover up for the terror, a way to divorce myself from unadulterated fear so it doesn't take hold of me completely.

Ok.  I'm exaggerating.

But only a little.

You see, India is a big country.  I feel daunted by the sheer size of it.  Even though I am going for 3 1/2 months (yes, you read that right, MONTHS) I know I can only scratch the surface.  I want so much to soak all of it in, to understand exactly why I'm called to go there.  While I was reading my giant guide-book for ALL of INDIA it was like trying to pin-point which stars in the Milky way were the absolute best.  India is far away, in more ways than one and reading about it only made it feel more alien, more foreign, more immense and unknowable.  I began to feel like I could only miss out on most things instead of really soaking in a few things.  I guess, I began to get scared that my grand adventure would be marred by the nagging feeling that I wasn't seeing what I was supposed to see.  That there was no way to fulfill my mysterious quest because the territory I have to cover is just too vast.

Then there are the rules plastered all over the books: cover my shoulders and my knees, don't drink in public, don't touch any person for fear of being disrespectful or misunderstood, any animal for fear of rabies, any food that hasn't been disinfected with lysol for fear of life-long digestive problems.  Don't look any man in the eyes, don't ever be alone with a man, including taxi drivers, don't go out after dark unless you take a taxi which are driven by men...hey, wait a minute....

Add to that the poverty, the smells, the thievery, the....well, the list could go on and on depending on what I read and who I talk to....

So I had to do something.  Something that would help me find my India mojo.  The first thing I did was narrow down my itinerary to two states: Kerala and Rajasthan.  Kerala because that's where the ouija board in my heart tells me I have to go.  And Rajasthan because where Kerala is South and green and wet and lush, Rajasthan is north and dry and deserty, and I like the idea of immersing myself in two obviously contrasting parts of a giant and probably unfathomable country.  Added to those two states are side trips to Varanasi, Darjeeling, and, of course, Agra to see the Taj Mahal.

Once I'd narrowed down those specifics I found a hotel room in Mumbai for the first week after my arrival, booked two weeks in a little town in Kerala called Fort Cochin and then I put down the guide-book.  The rest of the trip...well, the rest of the trip is just going to have to unfold as it goes.

I realized that for me to go to India I have to let India reveal itself to me as I go.  I have to see it and smell it and discover how I move in it, how I own and govern myself in such a foreign landscape.  I have to meet India first before I decide how we are going to understand each other best.

I feel certain I will stumble a few times, that India and I will have a few quarrels along the way, quarrels that might be avoided or softened if I go in with more information, armed a little more with a sense of what I want from India off the bat...but that seems a little too English for me at this stage in my life.  And as my departure date gets closer and closer I find myself less scared and more excited by the impending adventure that promises to be anything but clean and neatly pressed, and, more likely, will be full of messy, sensual, incomprehensible challenges and delights.  Perhaps this is why I need to go to India now, to fall in love with the visceral, sensual heartbeat of myself.

Heat and Dust Trailer

Snapshot Sanctuary: Iona

This moment of peace today comes from the Island of Iona off the coast of Scotland....picture a small, very remote, flat, wind-swept island where pagans and christians after them have been coming for thousands of years to meditate and find their inner compass re-balanced.....off in the distance is the famous Abbey...behind you a long walk to a beach filled with stones of every color and before you an evening of sitting in the little church next to the abbey where sparrows nest...perhaps, tonight, you will come across a group of pilgrims chanting for peace and love and joy...and you will join them...perhaps you will sit and look out at the rising moon and then sleep deeply and restfully....and in the morning you will feel grounded and strong and connected to the earth...

Snapshot Sanctuaries

A dear friend of mine has been going through a rough time. On one particular evening he wrote that he was in a certain kind of "hell". So I sent him a photographic snapshot from one of my travels with a sort of verbal snapshot of being in that place in that moment so that he could just get away for a spell.

I've been doing them daily for over a week now and realize that I both like writing them and I love sharing these memories with him. It gives me a chance to recall the connection I felt to certain places, the power and gifts of the land itself.

I also realized a few days ago that this might be a great way to keep this travel blog going when I'm not actually traveling.

And if a few other people find them soothing or diverting in a moment of need, that would be wonderful too.

So....the first Snapshot Sanctuary.....

Imagine, if you will, olive groves all around and, as you walk towards town and the setting sun, you find yourself looking out over the Lingurian Sea...at the end of the path is a wee harbor and the piazza and dinner... And an overwhelming sense of peace.