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.