Everything Is Movement

I've been dancing. Wednesday nights. Release. I am woman. Slant of your hip curve of your thigh. Move as you want to need to feel to. In and out. Forwards, fro. It's sensual, not sexual. Shift heart over breast, breast over thigh, circle and tilt, rhythm in soul.

This is my therapy. The movement of hip and heart.





I wrote the following over a year ago. And, as our dance instructor mused "everything... everything is movement" I returned to those senior year final writing thoughts.


I was born from movement into movement. Created by two bodies in their motions of love I have continued moving ever since, first from my mother’s womb into awaiting arms and then on to my own waddling feet that have at times both stumbled and danced.
As I lay down on brown paper to have my body drawn I simply moved as felt natural and, when I once again stood on my feet, I could not have seen a more accurate depiction: a blue body in movement, dancing. Dancing forward. The figure’s movements were fluid, directed yet unrehearsed as if they were called by something unapparent to the seeing eye. And as my pastel-holding hand met paper, I began to realize the source from which they came.
Within a few strokes my blue body map was alive, bursting vibrantly. What had once been a hollow outline began to resemble a being as the chest was textured and filled.
I am a soul: a soul within a body. I am a soul that loves the crevasses of the home in which she resides, the curves and bends and fluidity of her feminine exterior, so much so at times that it is not my soul that directs my moments but my body that anticipates my soul’s desires. At times it is as if I am watching myself move, simply giving my body to the rhythm with the knowledge that its dance flows from a place over which my mind has no control.
This is, of course, impossible to depict with crayon or marker or word. We do not see souls but feel them. And while my body map portrayed one dimension of my being, a complex mind of lines and colors connected to limbs and a swelling heart, moving with ease between the contrasting shades of her background, it only begins to depict the self-discovery of my twenty-one years. There was movement and spirit within the body’s borders but no sense of the peace and desire that concurrently swell within my being.
I am a restless soul, full of both physical and spiritual longing. A colorful soul, with shades erupting from my chest and radiating outward, radiating inward, burning through each limb whenever caressed by feeling, thought, or sound. A peaceful soul, balanced between movement and calm. My body map does not tell this story, does not describe how my life has been defined by my soul’s movement, by its growth and its failings and its call—which has led me wandering under West African skies, across the Sahara and back home to Saskatchewan’s rolling prairies and my mother’s embrace, only to call me across the blue water once more.

And the monster comes a knockin'

I crave freedom. I ache for it. Like an addict, it blurs the edges of my day. This need, this next fix. You can't starve it off. This hungry monster, it's always back for me. For more.

I crave freedom the way people crave love, money, war. Power. My soul craves air. Beach fronts, train platforms, village prayers. Anything to appease the monster's lurking groans. My soul wants to see it, meet it, love it, love what's next, burst in the crashing moments of beauty and pain and revere.

I'm surrounded by leather and animal print. A soy chai tea latte. A job offer. An empty rent free apartment. A half finished bottle of red wine. Car, city happenings, lights and leather. Everything everyone dreams of.

And yet Regina Spilker spins through my ears and stirs. And the edges of my day blur. This restless need. This ache for openness. For sky and movement and ocean's sprawl. My dearest monster's call.

It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song.

"But you just got back" they say.

Got back?
Darling, I am forever going.

REVELATION

So my emotions did a 180 today and I owe it all to Eat Pray Love.

I was thinking about how she picks up and goes. And how I want that. How I love that. How I crave that. How I am restless and despite the fact that I am trying hard (REALLY REALLY ACTIVELY TRYING) I am still restless.

And then I came across this quote.

"Traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to -- I just don't care."

I realized that I don't need to pick up and move to *insert anywhere but North America* to see if I can find happiness. I already know that if I do I will find totally unencumbered joy there. Anywhere the plane should land. The type of ecstasy that makes you feel like your heart is too big for your body. I know that it resides there. It's easy for me. Your skin prickles with anticipation. On long train-rides to no-where, in run-down hostels with just a little latch to close the door. In the fumbling of foreign living. That feeling... it's the type of contentment that people write books after and others pay millions of dollars and days to find.

Hand me dysentery and discomfort. I don't care. It's mine and I love it. Hand me that colicky impossible baby. It's mine.

That's not the hard part. This is. Finding happiness here. Finding contentment in a place that brings me comfort but doesn't spark my skin to fire.

And that was all I needed. The identification of a new challenge.

So I made a happy list with a soy chai tea latte in hand. And then I decided to put my big girl panties on and own it.

Heartsnaps

I have this picture... I find it captivating. Perhaps because I can’t quite pinpoint the essence of its beauty. Is it the memory contained within its four corners, the accents of yellow and brown and hope? Is it in the blue balloon on the edge that turns you to look downward from the sky? Or is it the thousands of footprints in the sand that surrounded his unmoved waiting feet?

Whatever the reason for its charm, I have grown a profound love for it. It was not by my hands or eyes, but for some reason I feel as though a part of its beauty is mine.

Thoughts to Live By

Ohh city of expectations and fabulous blonde bodies, how you attempt to change my pace and steer my direction.

But no no, not so fast. Because I've got this nice little red leather book that has the more sane musings of out of Los Angeles Kristen. And damn she is good. Because she knows about the dark hole and the not so open skies and the pressing needs for one thing joyful. Each day. Just one thing joyful.

Because not all of life is a sleeper class train ride to inexplicable freedom.

When I left Ghana I wrote one of my most beautiful journal entires. I felt like I was being torn away from another world, an exotic universe in which I was able to become a beautiful version of myself.

But there are no "different worlds". Different elements, yes, different colors and rhythms and cycles of life. But just one world, and just one you. It's your own different elements and colors and rhythms that you're seeing.

It's intimacy.

So instead of spinning musings about the lifetime seemingly contained in the past 10 months (to be fair, I think "the end of Indian days" did the job) I had only simple thoughts when returning home:

I hoped to be well on my plane journey home. I hoped that my planes would arrive on time. I hoped to get home. I hoped to be able to eat when I got home.

And I hoped that in the months and years to come I remember that there is beauty in every crevice of being.

So in a month of Los Angeles living I have not found a job. I have not created a fancy-shmancy look at me go life. I have not met new people.

I have had a lot of tea. I have begun to learn how to salsa. And I have found ecstasy in the most exquisite samba class that makes your hips sing "damn, I feel like a woman."

And I wasn't sick on my plane journey home, my planes did arrive on time, I did actually arrive home (didn't believe it until I saw it) and I have been more than able to eat.

So I guess that makes for Life: 3.... Kristen: 7.

But as long as I am shaking my hips to a drum beat, who's keeping score?

The Waiting Room

It's pinks and tiles with magazines and puzzle pieces strewn. There's an immense fish tank on the side. Bright, lively. I suppose meant to distract from the radiating elephant in the room. The woman across the way led a crusade to clean it. She doesn't say the reason why, but we all know it's because the last thing you want to gaze upon is a reminder of life turned to death.

People come in pairs, in twos. It takes both feet to move forward, both souls to move through. Mothers and sons, daughters and fathers, couples and sisters and friends. An elderly couple from Nebraska, a middle-aged woman and her Caucasian son; three women come together with the red cooler of 1:20pm treats; the Asian man and his brownie-bearing mother.

There's only one woman who comes alone. The nurses meet her before she reaches half-way. Because it takes a pair to move forward, to move through.

My week-day pair colleagues make this their space in different ways. Some's shoulders are drawn in with their own waiting room burden; others dose with ease. Fingers leaf through magazines and Wooden's words, frustrated hands fumble at puzzles. There are those that chat.... brain prostate pancreas..... And a hand-full are just happy to wait. I like to think that they are basking in the comfort that those nice little radiation beams will keep the other half of their pair from meeting the dirty fish-tank fate, shoulders drawn open.

And so the four legs (or six if you are the red box treat-bearing trio) sit. A lifetime of people divided by two. A room of anxious, sick, hopeful pairs. Equally awaiting.

I find this unspeakably beautiful: that you can't guess which one until their name is called.

Mo(u)rnings and Beginnings

Here, at the beginning of days.

Beginnings, morning dew, another chance at compassion.

I am discovering that sometimes just doing is an act of loving. It is not clever, it is not large in scope or depth or reach. It is not even beautiful.

But it is a subtle act of love. Bearing each morning, reaching out fingertips to shaky anxiety-ridden hands.

It is harder to hear peace when your mornings are clouded by traffic instead of calls to prayer; it is more difficult to find silence when you don’t have the peace of mind to close your ears; it is more challenging to mend when you feel cracked (not broken); it is so much easier to admit what makes you happy when it is already within your grasp.

And somehow it is surprising that it doesn’t ever not suck. Like new mothers we’re conditioned to forget the labor pains, the growing pains. Awestruck by the beauty of our creation, of our babies and friendships and perfectly sculpted dreams, we forget the months beforehand. We forget the swelling feet, the swollen hearts, the rashes of body and soul. We forget what it feels like to have your skin on fire, knowing that only the birth of what you most desire will give reprieve.

Because tear-glistened eyes of joy wash the burden of growing away.

Until you’re back cradling labor pains, remembering the consequences of what it is to build and grow.

Heathrow Marks a Change

Two thirds of the way back to Los Angeles living, belly full of anti-diarrheals and a soy chai tea late (because you didn’t think that a major case of Delhi belly could keep me away from Starbucks after 9 and a half months, did you?), and heart brimming with… who knows what. Pick an emotion, chances are it’s swirling around somewhere in the upper left cavity of my chest.

I thought that being ready to leave would make it easier to go. But nothing eases the ache of bidding farewell to love. We’re not built to love and then leave, even if we know that we are not meant to stay.

And so the girls’ smiles are etched under my skin. And walking away from them (perhaps forever) leaves ever-hidden scars.

I spent my last Indian night in the New Delhi airport, skimming the lettering of my diary’s last 9 months of musings. It was time to depart, and yet when I left I could hear in the distance the chorus of my heart’s breaking strings.



April 15th, 2010
Three weeks and one day. Three weeks. Three weeks? How did this happen? Where did the time go?

Well, to summer and winter and spring and then to summer again. I suppose that that is where it went. To August and then December and then April’s mid mark. It went to friendships and Manali and Girls’ Club and heating water on an open fire outside; it traveled with Kelly to the dunes of the Thar Desert, returned back to Sotla’s brittle cold; it went, hours and months at a time, from Himalayan hills to the Gange’s flowing spirit; it found D’s frantic head nod, and suddenly time has departed.

I have been challenged and rewarded and torn and encouraged.

And I wonder how 8 months has changed me. I wonder if I am different than that terrified girl in the Dehli airport, brushing teeth in the upstairs bathroom of the domestic terminal, in disbelief at what madness awaited her.

I now know what madness.
And what joy.

The End of Indian Days

I’ve ended out the more personal segments of this (rather long) diary, but I think it still provides the general gist of another closing cover…

May 19, 2010

Here, at the end of Indian days.

Kerala is another world of green and blue, their shades grayed by falling rain. Palms line the lake’s walls, little floating islands of sprouting greenery interlock and then move separate ways again, creating little shifting bridges that, while begging to be walked across, would sink under any approaching toe. The sky’s tears ebb and flow between trickle and storm, but with the kind of green they grow I can’t imagine they carry any drop of sorrow.

After Goa I felt almost flung back into India, completely unprepared. It was amazing how easily I slipped back into the lush life. Cocktails, beach wear, western company. Easy. Nice, even. Goa and not a care in the world. What’s there to worry about when the sea salt floats your weight and your worries. Nothing, sir-ji. It’s all a world of blue and gold.

And then after a 14 hr train ride (which turned into a 21 hr one after an unnecessary 7 hr delay) reminded me to be on guard, put my angry face on, don’t play with strangers.

I re-read the last blog I wrote but didn’t post. My eyes welled up with tears, because I remembered what immense joy India has brought me.

D and her head not of a thousand smiles.

Imagine your life as a novel. 21-year-old woman, fresh out of college. BA in her backpack, world at her feet, one-way plane ticket in hand. Hers is a world of courage and dreams and possibilities. Everything beyond that first plane-ride to Seoul is an unknown.

And then she makes it through the first leg of an unending journey, and throws it all to the wind. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. But it is, really, so daring? To do what you love, to live honestly with yourself, to take chances.

Or is it simply as it should be? This one way journey forward. This eager wide-eyed FRIGHTENED 21-year-old girl. Because in my mind she is. She’s too terrified of what comes after what next to think about it. So she focuses on next, and then next, and then next.

All the way to a sweltering Punjabi village.

Maybe this is a mark of wisdom. Just focus on what comes next. Because what comes next changes everything thereafter.

And everything thereafter was of but a dream. But not. The dust roads, the constant greetings, the trial and error and failure of foreign living. Intimate living. Because there is nothing left to hid from yourself. Not when it is 44 C with 32% humidity and every stable force in your life is gone.

Movement, movement forward and sideways and backwards again. We do not grow in linear fashion.

21 does not become 22 and a half overnight. There are seasons, crushes and loses. A floor is constructed, yellow paint is splattered over walls and bodies, girls begin to come. Real life and poetry intertwine between trials and triumphs………

.

Usually the 1st of the calendar year marks new beginnings. Before for her it is February’s dawn. The sun reappears after months of hiding. Maybe, actually, the world is not so very cold.

The days and weeks and memories that pass are colored by the people that shade them......


And then there is joy in the different shades and shapes of 5 adolescent girls. One with the slight chub of puberty, white stains on her chin, high class and English with a little mini attached to her hips. There is the fair one, long braids a light brown with village boys peering from afar. She is the coy one, the Jane Bennett of them all, always smiles but without an accompanying tale. There is the lean pretty one, name of 3 and smile of pearls. Sometimes there, sometimes not but always joyful. There is the one who is a little slower, a little younger, but full of kind surprises and her “is” English is a joy to hear. And then there is the rascal, the bottomless pit of curiosity, the one so brimming with life that you can’t decide if this is her first or fortieth time alive. She is either desperately excited for living because she doesn’t know what comes next, or indescribably joyful because she does.

And so the weather’s brutality is kept somewhat at bay by these characters and their voices, their stories overlapping to create a bizarre wall hanging of Rajasthan’s colors and Sotla’s morning call to prayer.

And this living, what was meant to be an adventure becomes… life. Days come and go, doctors trips and blood tests, calls hope and open-ended prayers. Highs and lows, just like the rest of the time zones.

But the clock and the motor keep moving, and August morphs into April and 21 becomes 22 and a half overnight, the passing between them but a mirage, save for the pages and memories that document their belonging.

Train rides lead southward and, at the end of it all, there is nothing left to prove. The self-competition is done, starved off with the last giardia strain. When you search for your limits and find that they cannot be found, that they are more vast than you’d ever hoped you live in the comfort of their open space. A little to the left or the right, it doesn’t matter. You are still in the grasp of possibility.

Possibility is everything. It is enchanting. The possibility that, when we allow it, reality surpasses our fantasy.

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the hands of time…

Green, green, green, and then blue.

From green to green to blue again go the colors and days, until August becomes 22 and a half and bags have been packed and flights have been bought and then threatened with cancelation and then prayed over.

2 suitcases, Goa’s brown tan, and D’s head nod with the tilt of a thousand smiles.

My Hearts

I'm writing this on May 6th, 2010. I'm a week shy of 9 months in India, and the sun has set on my last Sotla day.

By the time this reaches the blogosphere I will be back in Los Angeles comforts. Village streets will be a month away from my present tense, separated further from my being by the weeks of (yet to be determined) crazy travel in between my return home.

I'm spending this evening packing, sweating over the prospect of not having any train to anywhere for vacation, and looking through my pictures of Girls' Club. My last Girls' Club.

I am overwhelmed with joy.

I wrote recently that it is just life here. No more romance. It is days and evenings and mornings and happens compiled in between. This is as true today as it was weeks ago. Mostly, it's just life.

But that doesn't stop the poetry.

My heart breaks with love for the girls I have spent the last 9 months playing and talking and arguing and sitting with. They are exquisite, unique, full of life and yearning. They are teenagers, stubborn, moody, temperamental. They are immature, lacking in any real concept of the world outside of their own being (as many budding teenagers as are. Or rather, as many human beings are). But they are kind, and considerate, and inquisitive. They are brimming with life. And, at the finale of this all, they are the 5 beautiful reasons why Sotla stole my heart.

Life > Romance

I was talking with my good friend M. the other day and she asked me about the state of my soul (because this is what oburoni loves do). And truth be told, I don’t know if I have ever felt this way about my soul. My soul feels so… quiet. Which it never is. In twenty two and a half years, I don’t know if my soul has ever has been calm. Most days it is both fire and ice.

But I’m not freaking out about leaving in a month and a half. I’m not freaking out about the black hole that is my future. I’m not devastated about leaving. I mean, after spending this morning with P., I was reminded that I will be sad to go. I have met people here who are extraordinarily beautiful, and they have made my life radiant.

But days come, and days go, and you live into them and then out of them and then into them again.

I was telling my parents the other night that I don’t feel like this has been an experience. Ghana was an experience. But this has just been… my life. And each day just feels like living.

M was telling me that one of our good friends A. feels similarly about her abroad life. It’s not romanticized. It’s not hugely overtly emotional. It’s just her life. Good days, bad days. Her people are there, her job is there, her life is there. She said that it is like falling in love for the second time. You are grounded. You feel things less intensely.

That doesn’t make it less beautiful. But maybe it makes it more real.


India has meant falling in love for the second time.

M. was saying that the way I write about India as an experience. And I do. I write romantic. And for a long time I felt romantic. For the first 7 months it was another experience, another challenge, another opportunity, another set of stories.

Then it just started to feel like LIFE.

I don’t feel the need to come home and talk at length about India, or outwardly mourn for the village life I will have left behind, or tell people the ins and outs of my time here. It is what it is. I am here. And then I will no longer be.

Maybe part of this is growing up. I think part of it is the realization that you are not actually that special.

After your first abroad “experience” you think that you have just seen the world in a way that no on else has. Look at me, I went and lived in (insert exotic location here). You feel so GOOD about yourself, like you have all this knowledge and experience and wisdom. And it’s true, you do. You have seen and experienced something wonderful, something profound, something new.

But then you grow up and realize that everyone is doing rather spectacular things with their lives. You realize that someone who has lived longer and committed to a life partner, who birthed and fought with and raised their children, that someone who has loved further and weathered more sunsets knows (excuse my French) a shitload more than you do.

And then you get over yourself.

And then you just start living.

I don’t feel special anymore. Yes, I moved to an Indian village. Yes, I started a small women’s empowerment program. But I am simply doing what I love, just as I think most of us are (or are trying) to do.

And sometimes it is romantic.

And sometimes it is shit.

But mostly, it’s just life.

What to do when extraordinary becomes your ordinary?

When you weekend in Delhi, taking overnight sleeper trains and avoiding markets because of the recent terrorist warnings.

When you openly read a book banned in India for twenty years at a bustling train station/metrostation/street corner IN INDIA. (Thank you Rushdie).

When your two month life plan involves more trains and Varanasi and Nepal and elephants and Hyderabad and LUXURIOUS living and sisterly love.

When you just live through your days because market smells that make your stomach twist and Punjabi suit wearing and butter chapati are just moment markers, just the usual daily grind.

When it's so hot that you substitute juice for food until evening falls.

When your best friend in your village is a 13 year old that carries her poundage in sass.

When, wherever you go, you have an oburoni love fest to go home to.

When signing online makes you lonely because it seems so false, so arbitrary, so far away from raw real living.

When you look back at the past couple months of empty blog posts and realize that you've lived it instead of written it.


You GO BIG.
Add then you go home.

My Day As A Pilgrim

I accidentally joined a pilgrimage in Haridwar, trekked with the thousands to the banks of the racing Ganges River whose current is colored by petals of pink and orange. The ghats are overflowing with people, people who have come to both bathe and worship. Naked Nagas (Hindu holy men) sit covered in ash, their followers surrounding them. The heavy afternoon breeze is warm, still holding the day’s heat as it streams southward with the water’s flow.

It is in the middle of the mixed chaos of people, water, and breeze that I stand. An intruder, an onlooker, a participant, just another face in the crowd.

Haridwar is spiritual. It is old. And in the pandemonium of a festival that happens here every 12 years, it is also peaceful.

So I stood on a bridge overlooking the ghats on either side, watching overturned offerings of incense and flowers rushing on river-top below me, and everything swirled. Thoughts of home blurred with my village surrounding, the voices of passer byers and of those whom I love.

Very little of my time here has been spiritual. It has been adventuresome, it has been challenging, it has been uplifting, and it has been at times lonely. My Bible remains unopened, my journal traces few thoughts on the here and the thereafter.

But there, on the banks of the Ganges, in the warmth of the wind, there was a peace that does not come from work or labor or contemplation. In the midst of my current chaotic belonging, despite the daunting unknown, there was calm.

And they say there is only one way to know God.

This Is Just Straight Crazy

I started making a list of things that struck me as "different" (we won't say 'strange' because that has some judgmental connotations) when I first arrived in India. Because nothing is strange anymore. Anyway, it started out as a couple things. I stopped at five full pages in my journal with more to come.

Some of the toppers:

When K. arrived in India she asked who owned the cows and how the owners found the cows. A legitimate question, considering that there are cows everywhere and they all look, well, the same. How do you know where in Delhi your cow has wandered off to? A legitimate question. Turns out I'd never even wondered. I simply accepted that you let your cows run wild. How DO you know where your cow has gone?

Babies on motorbikes. That's all I'm sayin'.

Apparently we're moving houses. I find this out when I walk past the renovations on the corner. They're digging a latrine. Oh, intriguing, why exactly? Because you're moving here. In April. Hello life changing announcement delivered without a qualm. All I know about this move I have gathered from the children at After School. Because all of them come up to me saying "new house! New house!" Yes, great, new house. Thanks for letting us know.
"So, why are we moving?"
"Mmm I don't know."
"Are people moving into our house?"
"No your house is closing."
"Interesting. Are Mama and Papa B moving?"
"No they is staying."
"Ok. If you find out when we are moving will you tell me?"
"Theek hai. Okay"
"Shukriya!"


I had to explain a tampon to my Indian mother. Without being able to use a common language. Wanting to crawl into a hole and wither away doesn't even begin to capture my sentiments.

We went to a cricket match in Chandigarh on Saturday night. There were cheerleaders. We're talking American status cheerleaders. White girls, sleazy body tight outfits (complete with plastic red skirts), fake straight hair, bones sticking out every which way, and awful dance moves. I gaped at them the whole game long. How, in the name of all that is holy, did you end up in an Indian cricket stadium? And then to top the entire glittery silver and gold fiasco off, as they ran from the field, the crowd threw paper airplanes and empty cups at them. A reaction of seduction or hatred, I am still not sure.

I have been living in a rural village for 7 months now. And if that isn't out of this world ridiculous, I don't know what is.

Some Days I Feel Small

Some days I am reminded that the world is not bus rides and fairy-tales and happily-ever-afters. Not for all of us. Not for many of us.

I'm back to summer Kristen, which means I am back to the roller-coaster of hourly emotions. It's something about the smell. It smells like summer-time again. One whiff of the sweet Punjabi air and my heart races back to six months ago, to the same queries, the same questions, the same bursting hopes, and I open the living room door half expecting for the old characters to return.

Increasingly it's as if the past six and a half months have been but a dream, even though I am living in it, now. It's as if I am living a life that changed me but never actually came to pass.

And today was a reminder of WHY. It was a reminder of why I am here, of why we soldier on, of why my mind and heart spin from the whirlwind of oppression that women face simply because of their sex. Simply because we are born, simply because we are.

It started this afternoon as I was perusing the New York Times (yes, a favorite pass-time). The "World" section begins with a piece on an abuse case that has roused India's middle class --- a adolescent girl who was molested by a police officer, who came forth about the abuse, and who suffered the most dire consequences imaginable. Her life, literally, became a living hell. First came her expulsion from school, then her brother's arrest and torture, then the threats that the same fate would befall her father. She poisoned herself at 18. The police officer has, finally, been convicted. He will serve 6 months in prison and pay a $22 fine.

Then I went to the shop to buy beer. It is my roommate's 21st, and so I am the party orchestrator (which means I am the dal chef and beer purchaser for the evening). As I turned to leave the shop a man walked past and, subtly, as always, lightly touched my hindquarters. Just barely, of course, so that it can pass as just an accident. I AM ENRAGED. Seething. But what do you do? Chase down this stranger who may or may not have grabbed your ass and pummel his face before breaking the backpack full of beer bottles on his head? It's demeaning, it's infuriating, and it's incredible how one unprovoked touch can cut the very core of your being. You feel... small.

And then the final blow of the afternoon came when the recently filled out surveys were put in my hands. Someone who I deeply adore, someone who I admire, someone who I can say is possible one of the most pure human beings I have ever met answered that, in all of the hypothetical situations cited, domestic violence is sometimes justified. Not never, not always, but sometimes.

Justified... justified... justified.

Even the dead cement floor heard my heart break.

So today I am reminded of the walls, the roadblocks, the deeply engrained prejudice, the mistreatment, the centuries we must overcome. I am reminded of what it is to be a woman, of what it is to feel small because of your rage, of what it is to have a passing hand's touched seared into your upper thigh like a scabbing tattoo. It's like the layer of skin is enlarged. You can feel it, even hours after the touch is gone.

Today I feel small.
And all this, every ounce of it, is personal.

The Day The Earth Turned Orange

"Will there be many people in Anandpur Sahib this weekend?" A asks.
"A., there will be people in Anandpur Sahib like there is water in the sea."

People flock to Adanpur Sahib, the second holiest temple in the Sikh religion, for the Holi Festival. The roads to this pilgrimage cite are as overwhelmed as the vehicles that grace them: caravans of trucks, tractor, and car interrupted by honking buses whose passengers cling from doors, windows, and rooftops.

The weather has changed (once again) and I can feel the last glimpses of spring loosening their grip to summer's unwavering heat. While this means that there are severe days to come, it meant that we rode in rooftop perfection: sundrops and warming air mix with honking horns and voices. For me, this is freedom. One sunlit rooftop bus-ride would have been more enough to soothe the itching, stirring feeling that has crept into my bones this past week. But, perhaps as fate would deem it, the aching and wandering heart of my heart were no match for a Saturday sunny pilgrimage.

And rooftop bus-driven freedom was just the weekend's warm-up.

As M. explains to me, orange is one of Sikhism's colors. This explains why my green world has been displaced. Orange erupts everywhere: flags and turbans, car decorations and flowing scarves. The further we drive the deeper these colors are transformed until our surroundings are but specks in this earth of orange.

And then the food phenomenon occurs. To our left, to our right, on every side and in every direction are loud speakers and make-shift temples set for meals. As is the custom here, long mats are laid out, steel plates placed at feet, and enormous buckets of dal follow handfuls of chapati. This delights me everywhere, always. Every person, of every status, sits on the ground and dines together, indulging in dal-soaked chapatis as fingertips meet lips. A perk, if you will, of attending temple.

But now these open dining rooms are everywhere. Public restaurants created by whoever (everyone, it seems) with loud speakers announcing the menu. Teenagers and young men affiliated with these different "restaurants" fling themselves in front of cars, climb on the front of buses, stand erect in front of approaching motorbikes in efforts to get anyone, everyone, to join in the feast. FOR ME THIS IS HEAVEN. People are physically forcing us to eat their delicious, savory food. I am riding on a bus roof through Punjab at March's door, the world is bursting with flavor, and every 300 feet there is another dining opportunity. Our bus stops for lunch, and then two minutes after we begin again we stop for chai (cups of which are lifted to our rooftop seats). It then spent the next hour and a half dodging stands of food and fry and juice.

The day of orange continued just as it had begun: surprising, delightful perfection. Anandpur Sahib was overflowing with people, with bare feet caked in dirt traipsing to the temple's doors, the sound of prayers mixing with the beating ribbons in the breeze. A harmony of spring's abrupt arrival and end. Afternoon faded to dusk, and evening's arrival was greeted by diner under the full moon and the temple's glowing lights, colors dangling from the white peaks as a backdrop to a outside meal with silent strangers.

I fell asleep on a mat in a building hosting pilgrims from the guduwara nearby our home, awakened later in the night to discover that I was surrounded by sleeping Punjabi women, smiled for the small girl curled into A.'s side, and easily returned to delighted slumber.

The World We Love

Some mornings words spill from my fingertips and tongue without hesitation, without reservation. They are called forth from clarity, further accentuate the crisp colours that define the walls of my village life. Other afternoons they lurch, unsettled, because just like my spirit they feel uncomfortable, unsure.

This is one of those afternoons.

I see myself now through the mirrors of others. I see my transformation through their pauses, their reactions, their perspectives. Living here has made some of my limbs larger. They've refitted out of necessity. And these awkwardly sized limbs seem to grow larger still through their eyes.

I wonder what Kristen I would have been, had I not been here. I wonder what pieces I would lack had I not adorned my mind with the gold and muir of this world. I wonder who I would have loved, how I would have grown, what I would have indulged in, where I might lie. I wonder what life I might lead, did I not lead this one.

I wake and sleep and breathe in a world where life IS. Life is determined. You find joy in what you are given, what you have, instead of seeking, seeking, seeking more. Instead of choosing, choosing, choosing and then wondering in between. And, as a seeker, as a chooser, as a wonderer and a wanderer, it has been a difficult world for me. It is a world in which my limbs grow to awkward sizes, in awkward fashions. It is a world in which my limbs turn my strut to my limp.

And because of limps I walk differently, I pause, I see. My henna stained hands are bruised, calloused, worn in. But only because they have turned so many stones, braced against so many falls, touched so many textures.

Yet this world is one of many. One of many that combine to make mine. I do not belong here. While making chapatis on the fire to the acoustics of chirping parrots is a beautiful belonging, an experience that very few encounter and I have had for six and a half months, it was not one into which I was born. And it is not one I will keep. I will take burnt fingers along with me and I will return "home" to build a new home, to find a new path, to make a new choose. I will keep moving, keep seeking. I will not remain squatting in front of flaming logs, flipping flour as the bread turns from white to gold.

The most terrifying moment of my life was when I realized that my parents were human, that they were flawed, that they too stumbled. That they didn't have a life plan that extended from now until the end of their days. That they too, were seeking. The second most terrifying moment was when I realized that there is no "moment." There is no defining choice, there is no blessed assurance, there is no right or wrong. We are, each one of us, people. And we are, each one of us, continually trying to build a world we love. Both now and then I will be but a human being, a wonderer, a wanderer, a dreamer. I will be but a chooser.

But, with henna worn off my palms, I will be a chooser that knows that it is not the choice but the waiting, the loving, the wanting and the fighting for the choice that give our hands and hearts rest.

Love, Actually.

At the beginning of "Under the Tuscan Sun," Diane Lane looks at her run-down house, into which she is about to throw her heart, and tells her neighbor all the dreams she has wrapped in its brick walls. Its yard will hold a wedding, its rooms a baby, its walls a family's laughter. And she means for her. It will be her wedding, her baby, her family.

And at the end of the film her friend turns to her and smiles, saying "I guess you got everything you wished for." She hasn't gotten married, or pregnant, or created a "family." She hasn't received or given love in the form she wanted to. But, looking at the wedding and baby and family before her, it dawns that she did, indeed, receive all that she wished for.

Life continues to surpass even my own expectations. All my wishes come true. All in ways I never wished them.

There were no red roses on Valentine's Day. No romance. No Halmark cards with sweet nothings mass-produced. There was just love. Love in plenty.

My time in India may very well be cut short. Ineffective medicines and deteriorating health may yank me (body and soul) from S.'s warmth. June's homecoming may very well become March's return.

Yes, life is what we make of it. We are not helpless bystanders in the whirlwind of our years. But sometimes life happens to us. Sometimes life happens to us, and then life goes.

As an adolescent I pictured my 22-year-old self as living in a posh apartment, sipping on cocktails in skin-tight black dresses, coming home to a stable handsome romance. Instead of a posh apartment I dwell in a dusty plain home. Instead of sipping on cocktails I drink chai in jeans. And instead of a stable, ordinary, handsome romance I am involved in what can only be described as a "romance with living."

I moved to a rural Punjabi village and found love in every way shape and form I never imagined it. I moved to a rural Punjabi village and, I suppose, got everything I wished for.

And sometimes we cannot hold our wishes forever.

Sometimes life happens to us, and then life goes on.

Happiness Is Fleeting

I woke at dawn this morning to a wet sky, stood at the S. bus stop at 7:45 am watching school children clad in gray uniforms climb onto small, rundown yellow buses. The weather now resembles Autumn in California, or (even closer to my heart), July storms in northern Saskatchewan when the sky is a mix of gray and blue and the wind stirs both hair and leaves.

I have been really, truly, wonderfully happy for the past couple of days. I am living in perfect simplicity and simple perfection. Sunday afternoon was spent sitting in the sun, watching the boys play cricket, New Zealand and British accents mixing with Punjabi calls, the long wavy hair of the young Sikh boys watching on the sidelines streaming as they ran to pick up stray balls. The light rain arrived in the afternoon, so V. and I sat inside the top room of his house with his sister, sharing oranges and guava, sipping on chai and discussing Valentine's Day and illegal labor in the United States to a soundtrack of rain and Punjabi Bhangra. As the afternoon faded we made our way to the wheat fields down a dirt footpath and stood around the new well as his mother and uncle gave offerings of porridge and incense to the gods.

But this is not forever. And it is not meant to be. It is exquisite because it is fleeting. This February-Autumn sky, the falling light rain, the cheerful welcomes of A. as I walk past her home on my way to M.'s shop, the fall of V.'s face when I decline chapatti or karna or tea. This is not forever. This too will end. This too shall pass. And its beauty will rest in prior instead of present days.

But this happiness is mine to hold, now. And it will be mine to remember. And it will be mine to earn again.

Twitterpated

It’s Sunday night. The end of January is near. I am alone in the living room, Pete Yorn’s voice echoing in the space usually filled with voices. But tonight only my thoughts and my blanket accompany me. And I have had a splendid day.

Love strikes us all differently. For some it is warm: growing, aging, into realization. For other it is sharp, bright like summer lightening storms.

July storms in Saskatchewan light up the entire northern sky, jutting against climbing evergreens peaks.

I am a summer lightening storm sort of girl.

Today I walked at dusk through wheat fields. Fog and mist hug the green tips sprouting from the ground, cling to the barren trees that line dirt roads, hang suspended from the gray-blue darkening sky. This winter fog creates space, defines that which is otherwise hidden. You can, literally, see the un-seeable. Instead of blanketing, this mystic wet gray reveals.

Turns out I’m in love. I’m love with Punjab and the life I have created here. Before I was in like. But this is not like. Because like fades with dysentery and giadria’s four month bowel hell. Like dims with aching and breaking heartstrings. It crumbles before the constant discomfort, the constant frustration, the constant struggle. When distance forces goodbyes like tears, retreats, and surrenders.

But love….. love grows. Love sees past the hurt. It looks beyond. Love rises above the chilling cold instead of recoiling before the frost. It floats, warms itself with the heat of compassion, takes rest with friendships in January bloom. Love wraps itself around the constant discomfort, sooths the constant frustration, has patience with the constant struggle. Love is not blind--- no, no. It is forgiving. Love forgives us what we sacrifice in order to embrace what we gain.

And tonight… tonight, after five and a half months of romancing, tonight it is love.