I Had a Moment...

When I realized that my heart could wrap itself around the entire Thar desert, blurring outside out the window as we made our way from Jaisalmer to Jodhpur. I suddenly realized that I could wrap it around that whole desert and all the people and all the troubles clinging to their sun-stained shoulders, and even after wrapping all this in its embrace there would still be room for more. And I couldn’t image living with it any smaller, for my heart to feel any less full.

Of course my heart is a balloon, its size fluctuating with the temperature of the air inside of it. And today if feels a bit smaller. And soon enough on another train ride it will be uncomfortably large again.

I didn’t make any new years resolutions for 2010. Partly because I was distracted by ringing in the new year with the maharaja’s brother, but party because I got something right in 2009. I got a long of things wrong, but I got one very important thing right: I threw off the shackles of caring who thought what and I WENT for it.

And going for it had various consequences. I made some blunders, I fell for someone it would have been in my best interests not to, and I wound up smack dab in the middle of Punjab freezing what little is left of my butt after a 3rd trip to the H. hospital.

But I went for it. Heart first. All heart. All the time.

I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I fling it forward. I lay it out before passer-byers, a red carpet for their approaching footsteps. And, as a result, it is dirty and trampled and flattened and large.

I live in a world of idealism. I live in a world where a man meets a woman, flies across the country after just a weekend meeting and then marries her. I live in a world where people who shouldn’t possibly be able to keep in touch do, where people who shouldn’t be able to make it work can. I live in a world where best friends joke about riding camels together on Christmas and then DO. I live in a world where relationships of all kinds withstand weather and distance and time against every odd. I live in the world of a hopeless romantic where the bursting green blades of grass around her village dance, a world in which living is, above all else, poetic.

So I’m not ashamed of heart first living, of caring too quickly or too intensely. I’m not ashamed of laying my heart out before passer-byers, of feeling the trample when the world is unfeeling or ignorant or cold. I’m not ashamed of wanting to hold on to people when I should say goodbye, I’m not ashamed of reaching out when I should bid adieu. I embrace all this feeling that explodes within the confines of my skin.

All heart, all the time.

It’s that which has made the moments.