The question isn’t “what’s it like to go to India” but rather “what’s it like to come home after going to India?”
How do you process the fullness of ten thousand direct experiences?
India is fertile, fecund, messy. It's a generative breeding ground of anything you could imagine. Of everything. Of suffering, of ecstasy. It’s outside my comfort zone in so many ways. It’s lifeblood undiluted. To tap it is to drink the eternal. It rushes up on you. Just to walk from the temple back out to the street is more sensory input than I gather in about a month at home. So I was unprepared for how willing my heart is to keep time with her mesmerizing and unrelenting metronome.
A little insufferable after a two week visit? I know. Sometimes I can barely stand myself.
Home is the life I have built, the life my husband and I have built together, the one we are building upon. I treasure that. But right now, home is also sanitary, antiseptic, sterile. If my heart is back in the temples then--who is here? Surely more than just a brittle husk. But less than all of me.
How do I hold it together?
Which world do I live in?
Am I this way or that way?
Dishevelled and barefoot or neatly turned in the latest aerodynamic cross-trainers?
I know, I know. Obviously, I'm both ways. And more. I’ve certainly been studying long enough to know that these identities must be compounded rather than cleaved. I'm not this or that but this and that. To use Douglas's model, India is not me at all. Yet it’s something like me. And of course, ultimately, it’s nothing but me.
But even so, this is a peculiar period of shifting identity, of fluidity and recognition. It’s like wearing someone else’s clothing. Someone who is just your size. So everything should fit, right? Still, look carefully and the whole thing hangs just a wee bit off.
We were warned, "don't go home and wear it on your sleeve." It’s good advice. Note to self- do not sail down the aisles of Stop and Shop garbed in full sari. But how do I keep the Shakti (power) alive? I’m not content to simply treat it as a memory, a place to fondly revisit in occasional recollection. Dead temples don't interest me and neither do dead memories.
I think that to carry experience forward in a living way, it must become a new foundation, a new ground upon which to build. So--what to build? How will India point me in the direction of who I'm to become?
How do I grow into it and out from it?
Hmmm. . .I’ll guess I'll have to get back to you.
ps: photos to come. I promise. Am working out software issues.
