In the afterglow

I'm sitting at my own desk but I'm still in limbo after a 25 hour trip with 2 stopovers--Malaysia, Taipei, somewhere in the middle of the night-day-night. We started at midnight and it's tomorrow morning for my body. So much I never had time to write about so maybe I can begin in the aftermath even if my brain is fuzzy.
Sometimes when I travel a long time I'll miss the oddest things like songs. Once I remember being gone 6 weeks to Bulgaria and missing Fred Astaire... The only song I really missed this time was Dylan's "Thunder on the Mountain" and I just now put it on..."Forget about myself and see what others need." "I feel like I sucked the soma out of a thousand cows." Visions now in my head of loping cows showing up in the oddest places, especially the only time I saw them move fast--the night they came stampedeing at us on a dark empty street. Brought back images of Pamplona when Steven ran with the bulls and I was the only woman I saw hanging in any doorway...One of the crazier scenes that humans can think up for fun.
Music was always an element in the background in India. Sometimes the Muslim call to prayer or general background wail would go all night. Sometimes the Indian pop mix would sound like ska or reggae. I guess those Arab and Portuguese traders got everywhere to leave their print on the African/Caribbean drummers and vise versa. I kept myself amused when I'd see what songs would turned up in my head without even thinking or noticing right away. The oddest soundtracks for events happening. Dumb songs from the past that would just appear and perfectly and hysterically suit the moment. So little Western music actually heard that it was a treat when I heard Guns 'n' Roses' version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" at a cyber cafe. The most beautiful repetitive song. Axel's final warbled note is so haunting.
So good to feel a good mattress today. If you like HARD surfaces you'll love India. Mattresses were never thicker than 4 inches and often thinner. Made no difference in the better hotels. I asked for extra pillows and wedged them in. It was worse on the trains. Very sore hip bones...
Our stay in Mumbai was a good transition to home. Much more westernized with the first females not dressed in saris. Slacks, jeans among the youth. We showed up at Sanjay Bhangar's apartment only knowing that he was a 9/11 activist. We were on the 10th floor of a building right on the shore of the Arabian Sea. He is webmaster/programmer/videographer who took us out sitar shopping. We each bought one and brought them home today.
Went with his parents to hear Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammud Yunus who came up with the idea of micro-loans to the very poor. He simply felt that poverty was UNNATURAL. That you can help to remove it, not by throwing money at it but simply by PAYING ATTENTION TO IT. He created Grameen Bank which is thriving on lending them $30-100 loans. Other bankers are still telling him it can't be done. He turned ALL the assumptions upside down. Now people can buy a cow, an auto rickshaw, etc. And they always pay back the loan. The trick was giving the loans to WOMEN. 85% ! That way the money got to the children first, not sidelined to alcohol or anything stupid. Very hard job convincing the women to take the money at first. Very little confidence. But they've done beautifully. Very inspiring. Sat with a woman professor who teaches attitudes toward marriage as depicted in British plays. Timely subject for India.
My last night Sanjay and I went to a Blues concert of Walter Trout and the Free Radicals, with guest stars Bernard Ellison, son of legendary Luther Ellison. He was like a young Jimmy Hendrix on the guitar, as was Walter himself--who had a great voice. Then Guitar Shorty came on and blew everyone away, playing his guitar with every surface of his body. Did two leaping summersaults with guitar in hand, then lay on his side and walked/swiveled around in a circle. He must be 65+. I'd seen him at Cosey's Blues Bar in Sherman Oaks. I think he played with Hendrix and many others in the past. It was fun hanging with Sanjay's friends and a great way to spend my last night. Sun night they were in line with us but different flights. Just enough time to give them my 9/11 bullet point card and a little rap. Walter was already in the know.

Leanna went out with Sanjay's wonderful parents and got to share their shared experiences of open marriage, pretty cutting edge for India... Sunday went to an arts festival and they had booths selling ethnic stuff that looked as if it could have been on the Third Street Promenade. Finally an instance where the local hip people were recognizing the trendiness of their own artisanage. Watched traditional Indian dancers with the harmonium players and drummers sitting in the corner of the stage. As elsewhere, watching Sanjay and hsi friends, even in Mumbai the cops are more harsh on "public displays of affection" than they are on pot smoking...

Today the traffic in LA seemed so mild and organized after the artful dodging on the roads of India. Truly like fish swimming in the way they just blend together when they come to intersections, sometimes going in the opposing lane til someone lets you through and thinking nothing of it. Truly a continuous intuitive miss-you-by-an-inch, read-my-mind-where-I'm gonna-go flow. Cut in front of anyone or cross through on-coming traffic right in their face and they expect it.

Going through endless checkpoints and scanners in the airports, even when we were just in transit, reminded me of how the 9/11 fabrication has made everyone such sheep; what a sham we are living in and how they are training us to be afraid and herded around. They took Leanna's contact lens solution and her toothpaste but left my bottles. So spotty. They sure were rough on our sitar cases...!
Can't go very deep now. G'nite and thanks for so many great responses. I've been talkin to myself but glad many enjoyed my sharing this. Community is wonderful.

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I've been up since 5 am and still dreaming I'm in India--usually dreaming I'm sleeping in some cramped quarters. Yesterday the same dream only shocked to feel my underwear gone from under my clothes. Then I awoke and realized where I was and that I wasn't sleeping in my clothes as so often happened.
So what residue remains besides this annoying little pearl of a hemrrhoid after sitting for 30 hours total on the way home?? IT'S NOT FUNNY! The only other time I got to have this lovely experience was driving a hard seated camper a long way out of Canada and getting caught at the Peace Bridge for hours...

People ask me if India changed anything (else) in me. Many said I should write a book. That's encouraging since Leanna and I happen to have been wanting to write a book for a few years, now about all of our generational experience of America and India. I keep trying to put into words what I experienced in India as far as any spiritual breakthroughs that one might seek or even EXPECT as according to some friends. Like step on the soil and it's instant illumination. Since I have followed some kind of spiritual path my whole life, I had plenty of memories of those hyper high breakthrough moments that I wish would just become continuous, and consolidated by such a pilgrimage...
Since the last time Leanna submitted a book for publication, they told her to write her personal story, I will try to write generally and personally about this subject, this visit, this one person's interaction.

Many such 'spiritual' experiences started around age five when I was really out in some kind of zone with Jesus and Mary and many of the martyr saints-- I loved to draw them from a little picture book with their veils and wounds. My mother hammered together a little toy-like altar for my room... Mostly playing in forts made of branches that we'd build in the woods (in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania), nature made me feel that I was resigned to becoming a nun. Okay, I also wanted to be a dancer... endless tapping and acrobatics--I'd cartwheel through rooms as a form of ambulation, but I still knew I had to become a missionary. Turned away at age 13 as too young.
But the ecstatic moments were great esp if I could be alone in a church, as in our exquisite high school chapel with lifesize angel statues... I'd sit there often at lunchtime or sneak in at night. Or out at the Franciscan mother house at Stella Niagara, a gorgeous convent school right below the cliffs on the edge of the raging green Niagara River. They had an ornate gothic two-directional altar, the one for the nuns facing away so you could only HEAR their angelic choir echoing back to our side through the lacey marble screen. Truly otherworldly.

After courses in Eastern Religion, I discovered Gurdjieff. I also landed in a grad school seminar with the poets' poet, Charles Olson, a true larger than life Gurdjieffian ubermann. Enormously inspiring but just in time to watch him die. Started going down to New York weekly to be in a beginner Gurdjieff group led by non other than Lord Pentland, the head of the Work in the United States, and the most brilliant, awake man I've ever met, truly seeded from another planet or antoher dimension. From the Scottish Sinclair family of the 'Da Vinci Code'.
I was hooked and from this new path I chose Rene Daumal, student of Hinduism and Gurdjieff as my doctoral thesis topic. Got to interview all his cronies from the thirties and forties before they died off. Spent 11 years trying to tie in all the Sanskrit Poetics studies, his surrealism escapades, his translations of ancient texts, and show how this and G. influenced his work, all while discovering acupuncture via Tai Chi--sword, knife, long stick etc., studying in Hong Kong, starting first clinic at UCLA.

Last night I was cooking with Adam, heating up Sheephead fish that Steven caught Sunday ocean fishing, still punctuating everything with more hugging in the novelty of just being together. He asked what pop songs did we have that feature sitars since I just brought him one. I said "Hurdy Gurdy Man" that I'd just heard on the plane in Robin Williams' "Man of the Year". This was one of Adam's favorite songs at age 8-9 when we were both (re-) discovering Donovan together. He just saw him for the third time last week and adores him. We play a lot of duets together and quickly racked up our list of his perfect songs: Catch the Wind, Season of the Witch, Sunshine Superman, Colors, Mellow Yellow. Then he pointed out how upbeat his songs always were so that you don't even realize the hopelessness he's sharing, even when he said something as sad as

For me to love you now
would be the sweetest thing
t'would make me sing

Ah but I may as well
Try and catch the wind...

Adam said, now if that were Johnny Cash singin that, he'd put in some sarcasm & frustration in AHHH I MAY AS WELL try and catch the wind. But Donovan is always so upbeat, there's no complaint or lament or 'screw this' attitude. As he spoke, the movie "The Secret was going on in the background and I thought how all this was regurgitating all the thoughts in my mind as I try to distill the newest layers of life lessons from the land of India.

On our first day in India, in Delhi at Akshardham, the brand new gorgous, colossal first Hindu temple in 800 years, there's a statue of a person trying to chisel himself out of a huge chunk of rock. On the picture of this we were looking at last night is written: "You are the Stone. You are the Chisel. You are the Sculptor." All this leads up to what I really want to say, BUTT....

to be continued-- that pain in my ass needs moving.