My voice, once roaring and unable to be kept held within is gone. It could be gone with the swami who inhabited my spare room for three nose to the grindstone and Snicker sweetened weeks. Swami Shantanand Saraswati, aka Swamiji or Shantji, harnessed the sentences roiling around in my brain and the visions in my eyes and tapped the desire in my heart and made me, yes, made me put them to paper. Swamiji lovingly, glaringly, honestly stood his small body over my height and commanded me to wake up, realize my Truth, follow my passion. Now that he has returned into the unknown from whence he came, I have not had the impetus or the focus to sit down and write. And truly, about what? When Swamiji departed, with him went a million and one stories. True, I am currently eyeball high in plans, in plane tickets, in covering my ass while I fly far away on a two week travel. Can therefore I cut myself some writing slack? Am I priming for what will be an adventure to scribe? Nope, there are no acceptable excuses. Any way that I spin the story, I am absolutely too sucked into my Drama of Leaving to maintain a sense of clarity, to view the big picture, to step back and breathe. Which makes me off balance; in body (I practically broke my foot yesterday, awoke with a strep throat today), in mind (why is everybody mad at me?), energy (can you say p-a-n-i-c a-t-t-a-c-k) and spirit (What? Who? Where?).
I can feel Swamiji now, haunting me like a Yoda apparition, narrowing his eyes and why scrutinizing: why are you doing this? And he is so very right. Needless worrying is killing me. Why boggle my being for a Drama that I could have right here in an SF soup kitchen? Instead, I am flying to India: hassling with new passports, vaulting visa obstacles, enduring immunization pain, busting out midnight lists of not-to-be-forgotten details, negotiating planes, trains, buses and taxis for 30 hours to arrive ready to serve at a stifling hot orphanage in the middle of the summery Rajastanian desert? Why? Um, I love India? Adventure? Service? Is it worth it? Am I ready? Yep, I’ll be grounded any second now. Right after this panic attack, as soon as I unclench my jaw, as soon as I don’t sleep.
See? I caught myself? See how wonderful and mindful the practice of yoga makes one? It took but a moment, a twinkling of a swami’s eye, for me to witness my behavior. So I surrender. I laugh. I breathe. I will sleep. I will enjoy my plans and adventure as I have, until these last patchy moments. And on the plane, I will stare contentedly at the blank seat in front of me for hours. And hours. Days, in fact.
Even better, I will be sitting next to my 13 year old daughter Simone. I’m taking her to India.
For months, maybe years I have considered and mulled an appropriate coming-of-age experience for my daughters. How to usher them into womanhood in a way that feels true to me, and them, and our family? Then I was struck, of course: travel. For me, exploring the magnificence of the world and its different cultures, various traditions, expressions of spirituality and learned wisdoms cracked open the container in which I held my universe. Every country, every tribe, clan, family and human is vibrantly unique and the earth is covered and crawling with beautiful beings. Whether it be a Hmong in the hills of Thailand, a Muslim man scraping a living fishing on the coast of Sulawesi, a Tibetan boy trying to make ends meet in Pokara, a Dutch aristocrat, or an Indian woman feeding a family of eight and more; I am no more or less important than any of them. There is no one way to live. There is not just my way. It blew my ego into fabulous smithereens and I sank into the lap of community and bow down to the pain and the tragedy and the magic and the spice of this sensational life.
And so it is time. Simone is beautifully metamorphosing into an individual. At 13 she is properly engulfed and a little too enamored with the teen social scene and its distinguishing features: pop music, boyfriends, experimentation, shop lifting, empowerment, sexting, freedom, dances, unchaperoned forays around San Francisco, invincibility... A little dip into the bigger picture and maybe even the Mother Ganges feels like the right balance to her American private school upbringing for an already pushing 6 foot potential runway model beauty queen. But did I say that she attends the San Francisco Waldorf School? We sent our children to this pedagogical heaven to learn to think outside of the box, to build survival shelters, to speak many languages, to knit me some socks, to understand the value of commitment, of service. Not to shake my house in Trey Songz cranking: Girl, your body’s a problem and they call me the problem solver. But teenage city life is what it is; there is no encapsulating her and no wish to overprotect her from modern living. Ok, maybe a wee bit. However I still have the power to balance it out while supporting her education. So into the world we go. Not just any world, my favorite world: India. And we will work in an orphanage. And we will ride elephants, visit pink cities and amber forts and monkey temples and sit on buses going nowhere and trains stopping for chai and be surrounded by ritual and reverence and the nitty gritty human experience.
Yes, we could have ladled up meals at a soup kitchen in Vegas for half the hassle. But also a fraction of the thrill, a quarter of the beauty, a 1/1000,000th of the people and conversation and smiles. And I know in my heart and soul that Simone, and I, will have the time of our lives, together.
No comments:
Post a Comment