98% of such an experience is incommunicable, partly because so much happened in my mind, partly because it was so much of a non-linguistic nature, but mostly because I am not yet sure what happened in these last 10 days, if they were truly transformative or if they were a mental exercise vacation.  Time will tell as I come back to the same problems and realities, whether my confrontation of them is significantly different, and that too is probably a function of whether I keep up the practice.

Our days were ostensibly 17 hours long from 4:30 AM meditation to 9:30 bedtime.  When we weren’t eating, sleeping or occasionally walking outside we were meditating.  The only reprieve from this routine was the nightly guidance of SN Goenka, whose croaking but soothing voice explained the technique we were learning, its application and the theory behind it.  Goenka is the Indian grandfather I never had; paternal, benevolent, tangential, brilliant, charismatic, he has virtually single-handedly brought Buddhism back to India, its country of origin, and has brought Vipassana to a world-wide audience through the dissemination of centers throughout every continent where you can learn the technique.  Vipassana meditators seem to think that the method is the ancient Indian Buddhist technique lost to most of the world as Buddhism spread throughout Asia and died in its own country.  Only the lineage of the monks of Burma preserved it where Goenka was exposed to it, became a teacher, brought the technique back to India and missionized it throughout the world.

The theory and the practice: Vipassana, meaning “seeing things as they are”, deems itself a realist meditation focusing on the perception of true reality of the self as a continuing changing phenomena of mind matter continuum through training the mind to be aware of the subtlest physical sensations.  Therefore, he explains, no mantras, no imaginations, no Gods are to be used in meditation, since we are in pursuit of knowing reality as it is, not as we want it to be.  The technique begins with the awareness of the breath as it is, an awareness of exactly how one is breathing without reaction or control of what is naturally happening.  One then delves into noticing sensation around the nostrils, focusing on subtler and subtler sensual realities.  After 3 days of observing respiration and the area around the nose, Goenka initiates us into Vipassana, which is the development of awareness of sensation throughout the physical structure of the body.  From head to toe, one is to focus on the sensations in all parts of the body and notice how they are changing.  From the most intense to the subtlest, all sensations, he claims, are made up of subtle vibrations felt only by the subtle mind, indicating the true reality of the physical structure, a flow of vibrations with no fixed essential identity.  The goal is therefore to break down awareness of any part of the body and to be aware of the subtlest sensation.  As one’s awareness becomes sharper, one feels the vibrations throughout the body, the continuity of energy that is the body; not the body as a compilation of discrete parts, limbs and organs, but bunga, the dissolution of the mind/body continuum.

This state may be harder and easier to achieve.  Sometimes one may continue to experience the intense sensations that seem to congeal awareness of a discreet part or area and inhibit the awareness of physical continuity.  But such awareness towards bunga is not the measure of progress in Vipassana; it is an essential tool, but what exactly is the point of fostering this awareness?  The body experiences a myriad of states, some painful, pleasant or other, and the mind develops craving or aversion to these sensations.  According to Buddhists, craving and aversion are the root cause of attachment, the root cause of suffering, the problem which every religion seems to have as its starting point: why is there suffering?

For Goenka, sensation is not suffering, the reaction to it is suffering; the lack of awareness that whatever happens is also a changing ephemeral phenomenon, no matter how positive or negative, causes craving for or aversion to the continuation of the phenomena.  But objects are not eternal, and the sensations they create foster this habitual pattern of the mind’s dependence on the recurrence or absence of the sensation for perceived happiness.  If one accepts that this cycle of depletion and repletion can never be viewed as happiness, then one has to strike at the root cause, which for Buddhists is the dependence on sensation.  Sensations will always come only to pass, reality is indiscreet and constantly changing, so the most pragmatic habitual pattern of the mind to develop in the face of this reality would be one which truly recognizes the ephemerality of things and lives truly in the presence.  The response of equanimity, the lack of craving for pleasure and the lack of aversion towards discomfort, is the only practical way to avoid running from suffering into a misery of craving myriad finite and exhaustive pleasures.  If one has an equanimous mind, one does not react to generate craving, aversion or illusion about reality, which is not to say reaction does not happen; every cause has an effect but one’s balance and peace should not be disturbed.  When one’s own peace and harmony are sufficiently established and the coexistent good vibrations flow throughout the body, one suffuses these sensations into outward feelings of genuine love and compassion for all beings, a meditation technique unto itself called metta.

That’s the theory and practice anyway.  And I have to say that I buy most of it.  For a long time I have reticently identified myself with Buddhism, convinced it is the only empiricist and practical religion, a practice which unites philosophy (usually disassociated with practice) and empiricism (usually disassociated from ethics and liberation) in a convincing way.  But now that I feel really familiar and happy with a technique and somewhat knowledgeable of the theory and tradition (traveling in Buddhist areas helped), I’m ready to really identify as a Buddhist and use this practice.

The experience itself was entirely whack, bizarre, illuminating, intense, beautiful.  If one buys that the outside manifestations of one’s life are products of one’s inner mind states then one only really sees how that operates by renouncing those outer objects to focus on exactly how the mind works in one’s own experience.

Before we started, Stacia and I read two suitable books, The Doors of Perception and Stroke of Insight.  The former, cause well duh, but the latter is the autobiography of a neuroscientist who had a stroke that wiped out the left hemisphere of her brain, the side that is totally analytical, linguistic, category based, devoted to linear temporality.  When this side of the brain was soaked in blood, she experienced only the right hemisphere, the one that feels more sensitive emotions, love, empathy, spiritual unity, the beauty of the present moment and all that.  On the first few days, I therefore viewed my experience as a battle between my left and right hemispheres.  Trying to quiet down the left hemisphere was like trying to get a sycophantic, nerdy and obnoxious child to shut up.  I might be in a pure meditative trance and my left brain would butt in, did you know that in the French Revolution, the Third Estate divorced itself from the nation as soon as it wrested power from the aristocracy, leaving the poorer classes embittered and providing explanation for the later bloodshed?  Yes, my right brain would say, I know that cause you are me, but shut up, I’m trying to experience reality.  But, the incorrigible left brain would pipe in, the capital of Mongolia, the country north of China, is Ulaanbaatar.  Did you know that?  Shut up!!  My left brain would stubbornly go into retreat only to come back sinisterly with a Remember when that girl cheated on you and broke your heart?  Didn’t that suck?  Don’t you feel bad about that?  Then a groovy track floods my brain, then Rachmoninoff. And then randomly, I wonder what it would be like to be an expert on music of the subcontinent, sounds and sights of India filling my head.  And again I would focus my attention on the breath with this nosy monkey mind hounding my every attempt to feel peaceful and present and to resolve my problems of craving and aversion.  As someone insightfully noted after the retreat, “I used to think dreams were so random until I realized how random my mind is.”

That battle never really goes away.  Stuff always comes up.  But those nagging mental distractions started to diminish for me as the days went by.  At first I thought I was supposed to throw them out of my mind and focus entirely on the breath and physical sensation.  But no, my teacher said, these are sensations to be observed.  They are background, and a good meditator reaches the state where these things stop coming up because of the training of focus but also because indulgence in them has been exhausted.  Exactly what comes up in the mind is as insightful as any observation of the body.  One really learns what the mind broods on when one doesn’t give it stimulation, the scars that continually resurface, the obsessions that train mental awareness, the conversations and memories that replay themselves like tired actors reciting lines on the 15th show, endless iterations of past experience, future expectations.  My mind can be extremely petty and extremely creative.  So what is it that my mind is really occupied with these days and what should be my equanimous response?

Privilege:  What is it, who has it, worldwide suffering of want and people decking themselves with stuff they don’t need?  It is financial, it is upbringing, it is opportunity, it is exposure.  My tendency can be comparison, which grows into class warfare and down-with-capitalism models, bitterness towards my friends and first world comrades who have been born with so much and disingenuous sympathy for the plight of the world’s truly deprived.  This means bitterness towards myself because I am one privileged, first world, elite college brat.  This grows into confusion about what I should do, go to heal the world’s suffering? follow the hipster model, get a working man’s job to prove I can do it? or elitely see such work as below me and investigate things that don’t matter to the majority.   Such aversion towards privilege produces manifold bitterness that prevents me from feeling what I really need to feel: gratitude, and only from gratitude comes true use of privilege for the good of myself and others; otherwise privilege is squandered.  I don’t want to lose the awareness of privilege, but only equanimity can counter that awareness in a productive way.  Awareness and equanimity, two wings, Goenka says, of the same bird.

Music:  My mind just won’t shut up.  I’m glad that it operates in the way it does, this obsession with sound.  But sometimes when it was most quiet, the most beautiful melodies would arise.  The silence was fertile soil for creativity, as opposed to the continual running of the same track in my head with the It’s-a-small-world-afterall syndrome.  Debussy said that all beautiful music arises from silence in a dialectic and dynamic relationship.  And so I named my thesis Musiciens du silence.  Endless drum beats are not for me.  So sue me.

My relationship:  naturally, this one’s been on my mind ever since it started.  It has been through a lot of intensity, beauty and strife, and it’s somehow still going.  The car accidents that we went through I think were good examples of reaction to a sensation that multiplied our suffering.  The things themselves happened and this can’t be denied.  No one should expect us not to feel traumatized, depressed and victimized by the sensation.  But I know I multiplied our suffering manifold by creating bitternesses, imaginary victimizations, anger, frustration, comparisons, the result of putting a mind habituated to craving and aversion through severe stress.  If a mind full of equanimity, love and understanding had gone through similar circumstances, it would have come to acceptance much earlier, not using one bad situation to poison a relationship.  I am only lucky, whatever happens to us, that my amazing girlfriend could forgive me.  I have thought a lot about how I can be a better and more caring boyfriend.  I think the fact that we are both coming out of this 10-day experience together can only have good effects for us, whatever form we take.  Surprisingly the car accident itself was not a subject of major brooding, perhaps a good sign that its traumatic effect on my brain is several diminished.  Cars still suck, btw.

Future:  I am at what Stacia calls the odyssey state of life, the liminal, in-between searching stage at which I basically have no convincing career path. I go back and forth on the grad school issue and I realized during this retreat that my craving and aversion towards it says more about my changing mind state and lack of real conviction than about the thing itself.  Like in India, I was always like, look at all the things in world and all the ways people make livings; why would I want to spend my 20s cloistered in a library? And then I come back here to face the lack of opportunity, the current economy, and I’m like well grad school is really all I’m qualified for so I psych myself out to do it.  But grad school seems to be the only thing to do especially when you don’t look for anything else, so I realized that my desire for or against grad school is desire for a quick fix, which is not something I really need because I have the time and resources not to hop on a band wagon just to have security.  Plus, academia in the long term is not a secure career at all.  This is not to say I won’t apply in the fall or in the future but this should not be done from lack of search of other options.  I have been blessed to have a lot of exposure to the world, through travel but also through growing up in non-mainstream communities that made me aware that plenty of Americans are not the mere tools of capitalism.  I want to devote at least an hour and a half a day to researching schools, jobs, internships, opportunities and then to actually getting involved.  And then if I decide to apply to grad school, it will be not a reversion to academia, but a worldly awareness that this is the path, out of all the others I know exist, for me.  I need to learn to live with the fact that I don’t know what I’m going to do (no one ever does exactly anyway) and that that’s totally okay as long as I am educating myself on possibility.

Portland: Loving the present means loving Portland.  I often view Portland as what it is not.  It is not the capital of the art scene.  It is not a diverse city.  It is not a sunny place.  To focus on what is not is to focus on illusion of what I want something to be and not on what is.  I came back to Portland with the awareness that I could go live anywhere in America or the world.  I made a choice to live here because my mom is here, my friends are here, Portland is a vibrant beautiful young city where there is space and time to pursue one’s own interests with the resources for most of what you could imagine.  So New York has 100 times more going on than you could possibly take advantage of and Portland has 10 times.  But it’s like the Cold War nuclear arsenal when we made enough weapons to blow up the world hundreds of times over.  How many times do you need to blow up the world?   Loving Portland means learning what Portland has to offer me and what I have to offer Portland.

Gradually my mind realized how much these issues were on it and it came up with the above attempts at equanimous responses.

The 10 days creeped by, but they successively did change from one to the other.  I had periods of intense trance, absorbing vibrations, supreme love but also of calculating what proportion of the course I had left, constant mind wandering, wanting just to speak, frustration, boredom.  To both these pleasures and discomforts I practiced equanimity with the knowledge that this would all be a thing of the past very soon and the more I practiced the more I’d benefit in the long run.  And when noble silence finally did end, everyone in the course exploded with joy.  None of us really knew each other linguistically, but we had all bonded through this experience, and the last day was spent therapeutically relating our experiences.  Stacia glowed the first time I saw her after 9.5 days and I was relieved; we discovered that our fellow meditators are generally really cool people.

My previous experience with meditation has been limited and confused.  At a few introductory sittings, I was advised to just follow the breath, to focus the mind on the breath and nothing else.  What exactly the point of this was and how it was connected to the larger ideas of liberation as well as the development of non-attachment and compassion was always vague.  But I always noticed a positive change when I would devote myself to that experience, a step towards turning off the mental wheels that trip me out about this or that to envelop myself in the present reality.  Now feeling more established in the technique and theory, I think I am more capable of seriously pursuing this path, intending to continue a daily practice.  It can only have good effects it seems to me.  Yesterday I walked from my house to Stacia’s and it was pouring rain and I was so soaked, but I really didn’t care.  I felt really at peace, seeing the people in the cars and feeling sorry that they were missing out in this experience.  This morning I woke up and felt the familiar confusion of how to spend my time and what to do, but this time I was detached enough to see what would come if I identified myself with that sentiment: depression, confusion, anxiety, desire for quick fixes. So I meditated, made a list for the day (writing this entry was on it) and am sticking to it.

I was always suspicious of blogs. I guess I’m a bit suspicious of things relating to the internet in general. I think the internet is a huge advance from the media of 20 years ago, depending on how you employ it and how you regulate your use of it. But it also feels like a distraction. And blogs seemed to me like a mode of virtual emotional promiscuity, a virtualization of human interaction that really serves to just alienate all of us. And I do think the internet has this effect. Things like Iphones seem to me pretty ridiculous, not because I don’t see their use but because the abundance of the information age seems to me completely contrary to the principles of meditation, mindfulness, and the art of being content absent stimulation. With the internet always around and especially when it’s in your pocket you never have to know how to entertain yourself, how to be with yourself and only with yourself.

I’m disturbed that depressions are depressions. In India, people might be miserable but not depressed.  I mean not having enough money to live on sucks, and I am certainly privileged not to be subject to the plight of so many of the world’s people, even though my assets have a negative sign in front of them and no matter how much stuff I sold and no matter how much the insurance company might pay me off cause they stupidly insured a felon, I will not be debt free for a while. It’s weird that people are depressed when they can’t find a job, but when they have a job they hate their job. Is that observation insufficient to prove that a whole lot of people are unhappy just with being, with the very fact of their existence? That some people can’t find ways to be happy without the distraction of having to go to work; that they can’t find peace and passion and joy when life demands the least of them frightens me. That people, when stripped bare of stimulation, just don’t know what to do with themselves.

I’m going on a 10-day retreat with my girlfriend at the beginning of April to see what my mind does in isolation. I’m intimidated and I think it will be hard. But I’m probably also way too excited to do something that sounds to most people pretty much boring as hell. I hear from so many people, “oh man, that sounds intense. I could never spend that much time with my mind.” Yeah it will be intense, but if you can’t be with yourself, without internet community, without the Iphone, without going to a bar to kill your braincells, then who can you be with, and furthermore what is the point of living? Distraction until death? That kind of seems what the West is about. And some of those distractions are incredible and cultivated and spiritual, and I love us for what we have created, but what do we do when it all goes away? Suffer? Why? This is why Buddhism makes crystal clear sense to me.

I probably love being unemployed more than is good for me. But I’ve been spending my days reading, riding my sweet bike, rediscovering my aptitude and love of music on the piano and guitar, and, yes, the completely awesome instrument that is the sitar. I’ll be playing at an Indian cultural night at Reed this Friday (only took a week and a half to get asked to play somewhere). Another friend who studies sitar and I met up with an Indian engineer who is also a tabla player, and we are going to accompany the eating of delicious Indian food and the drinking of special lassi (I still love Reed though I know I should recede from the community). I really want to get into playing sitar more and now that I know someone else who’s into it and a real live Indian tablist, I might be in good shape to pursue it here in Portland. I’m also taking piano and guitar lessons, immersing myself in jazz and Rachmaninoff (if Dostoyevsky had composed he would sound like Rachmaninoff). Despite the seeming paucity of opportunity in the world at the moment and especially in Portland, which has one of the higher unemployment rates in the country, I sense, perhaps foolishly, the incredibly privileged position of having too many opportunities to choose from. I am hopeful about a job as a teaching assistant at the Portland French-American school where I would basically have to speak French to French kids and children of Francophilic Americans. I’m really excited about this possibility, and it seems like great work experience. But what I really want to do is get a degree in jazz guitar at PSU, which would take me 2 years and would ostensibly prepare me to be a real live gigging (and teaching) jazz musician, which sounds pretty sweet, even if music is in the end only a hobby at worst and a supplementary career at best. Or I could go get funded to go study what I love in an academic way. Or I could go to law school and try to change reality in a practical way. Or I could use my settlement money to live in the third world for literally years. The multiplicity of choice can for some people be just as paralyzing as having no choice. I feel like the privileged don’t take the risk to change their lives, because, well we could do a lot of things, couldn’t we?

But I am so happy to reconnect with Portland. Being away has allowed me to realize how enormously important my community of friends and loved ones is to me. I’m moving back into my old house, a beautiful old 1906 Victorian with a balcony overlooking Portland’s (well, generally lackluster) sunsets upon beautiful downtown and the west hills. I love that house; there was a lot of drama in it before and the people I lived with were not always ideal, but now my old bandmates live there, some of my best friends in Portland, and I am already taking advantage of the opportunity to be living with excellent musicians and friends.

Being deprived of so much as traveler makes me appreciate the smallest things, and this creates in me a burning sense of joy and gratitude. India teaches you not to expect anything, so when so many things go my way in this first world paradise we live in, it’s a constant novel surprise. I’m sure this will fade. It’s the good side of culture shock.

People ask me if it’s weird or difficult to be back. Usually I say that’s it is surprisingly not weird. I think it’s because there was no way I could ever really feel a part of Indian culture. Leaving India meant that all the constant stimulation, discomfort, strangeness, and insecurity just disappeared. I have taken refuge in the first world with the rest of my privileged sisters and brothers (wealth, like religion, is such an arbitrary thing being mostly based on geography). And because India was so different and because my life in Portland is so different and I deal with completely different feelings and priorities, I feel mostly disassociated from the things I felt while I was India. I do miss it though. People ask me what the first thing I wanted to eat when I landed in Paris was and I say, without skipping a beat, Indian food. Western food is boring and bland. For a couple of weeks, my body craved nothing but exotic spice and flavors, and there’s really no better place in the world to be a vegetarian.

But the biggest thing that bothered me while traveling was the deprivation of resources, the fact that I couldn’t, when I felt inspired, go play piano whenever I wanted to. Such resources, for me, are the basis of my creativity, and without that stability I’m just an observer. That’s exactly what I needed though. I was pretty prescient really. I think I knew that after 5 years of college, I’d need some distance before responding responsibly to the pressure of figuring out “what to do with my life.” And now I feel excited to be part of home, to build my life, and happy that Portland and more largely the Great Satan (America) is my home and I love it. We liberals do love to hate America, but as an American abroad I was able to find what I love about this country to defend it (mostly from Europeans). We have the best jazz, rock, classical music, whatever you want, literature, the Beats, the original hippies, theater, movies. We have some of the world smartest people, we are the center of Western contemporary art, music, academia, science, and technology. We are fucking awesome, and just cause some douchebag who wasn’t elected twice was tragically able to wreak havoc doesn’t negate our awesomeness. Every civilization has its Nero, but not every civilization eventually lets its ex-slaves rise to the top.

India has a special place in my heart. I probably will want to go back there sometime but only when I deserve it. Like when I’ve completed something as momentous as college and just need to chill out. Mostly I’m happy to be home. That’s all I’m trying to say. But if you, like, know of any jobs please call me.

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02

There are six of us here at the moment and it’s surprising to be surrounded again by highly intelligent literati who are all devouring books in the center of Paris. Certainly a far cry from India, and part of me feels wary of all the intellectual self-indulgence. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem as important to me as it used to. But lively debates and wine drinking have characterized every night, so I can’t complain. The sitar case in my hand proved an intriguing mystery to all of them, and they were constantly compelling me to bring it out. I played for them last night, and, though I know I’m a bit rusty for not practicing basically anything in the past 2.5 months, they were wowed by the beauty of the instrument. I’m realizing that, in the West at least, I can impress and intrigue people more by playing the sitar badly than the guitar well. If I busked for example with a sitar, people would stop in curiosity and probably throw out some bucks. But people can’t be bothered to stop and listen to every hippie with his guitar. I see myself this summer at Saturday Market, on Hawthorne or Alberta, 1st and last Thursday with a pick up on my sitar, wearing my Indian hippy clothes, playing the part.

I’m really happy I was able to come back to Paris as part of free stop-over on my (also free) Air France flight. I studied abroad here 3 years ago and I didn’t leave the city on the best of terms. Coming back has been a form of reconciliation but also a demystification from an older and more sober perspective of the city with which I was so intoxicated. My main purpose was to take advantage of the arts and in the past 5 days I have seen the new museum of the Monet Water-Lillies, the Dali Museum, the Debussy Museum, the first Nouvelle Vague film (Le Petit fugitif), concert of Janacek with explanations, a classical guitar concert, an old-time jazz piano show, a jazz jam show and a classical concert of mostly 19th century French composers. Tonight I’m going to see the National French Orchestra play the Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concerto followed by a party with an open stage where I might break out my sitar.

I admit, with a free place to stay among awesome people in an awesome bookshop in an awesome city, I have an inclination to stay for longer. But really I’m tired of being uprooted. The more music I see the more I feel frustrated at being out of practice. And really, I speak French. I don’t want to hang out in Paris with a bunch Anglophones no matter how cool they are; I already made that mistake once. And if I were going to stay in France, I wouldn’t even want to stay in Paris. Lyon sounds like a much younger, more lively, less expensive, less bourgeois city. I feel really ready to come home and make some plans for productivity of some sort. So I’m leaving for Atlanta tomorrow and will be in Portland this coming Tuesday!

Paris is really the polar opposite of India, from the insanity of chaos to the insanity of over-refinement. It is a welcoming feeling to come back to the first world. I remember Paris seeming congested, chaotic and unsafe, but after India, it feels so calm, this city of 10 million people. In India, I had a persistent, never ending feeling of insecurity, not fear of Indians themselves, but of the constant unpredictability and discomfort, the feeling that at any moment, something would fall apart or collapse, a constant sense of unease. In the first world, things work pretty much as we expect them to, and I hope not to take this for granted. During the trek I did over a week ago, I made a list of all the things I was looking forward to leaving in India; that there would be

No more being accosted to cries of “hello sir, buy something!”

No more pungent odors No more trash everywhere and rampant littering

No more dodging cowshit, potholes, bulls, motos, rickshaws, bikes, ox-carts, people, cars, trucks, with no sidewalks for refuge

No more obnoxious and unnecessary honking

No more everything too loud

No more long uncomfortable journeys, always late

No more extreme crowdedness

No more incredibly uncomfortable beds

No more extreme classism

No more getting sick all the time

No more extreme mysoginism/never speaking to a woman

No more being lied to, cheated and manipulated for money

No more being treated/feeling like a rich person

No more fear of cops

No more wanting to go home

No more constant movement

No more bargaining

No more Nescafe

No more 1st world guilt on a daily basis

No more servants

No more being addressed as “sir”

No more lack of hot water

No more drinking mineral water

No more feeling out of place

No more being stared at

No more mangy, lacerated, crippled animals

No more beggars crippled by their parents

No more overly pushy hospitality

But now that I’m secure here in the first world, talking about literature and politics over wine, these things all seem like charming elements that come with the territory of being in India. I know that what I’ll really miss is the

No more cows

No more antiquity

No more restaurants where you can smoke hash and lay down

No more myriads of color

No more incense everywhere

No more saddhus

No more cheap Indian food/eating out all the time for nothing

No more ancient wisdom

No more Ayurveda

No more temples

No more huge mountains

No more spontaneous bizarre conversations

No more constant chilling

No more meeting people from all over the world

No more drinking straight from a coconut

No more bhang lassis

No more constant comfy weather

No more facility of getting around without a car

No more authentic chai

No more freedom to go wherever whenever

No more tropicality

No more cheap music lessons or concerts

No more reading great Indian literature in India

No more children thinking I’m a celebrity

No more cheap massages

No more diversity of roaming animals

I miss it already. They say you hate India until you leave and then you miss. I didn’t at all hate it but I see why westerners who couldn’t adjust might. India leaves a profound impact on you. I’m not at all sure the direction that this experience will take me in. Perhaps it was only a brief window into the other world that exists on this planet and perhaps I will readjust quickly, my life changing little. But that experience is also tugging at me; the privilege to feel guilty is tugging at me asking me what I’m going to do about all this, and I really don’t know. The problems feel monumental; I feel like we’re approaching the apocalypse. While the 1st world is falling into inevitable decline due to no longer being economically competitive, the third world is developing but towards inevitable environmental catastrophe. Going into my little jazz performance program seems at the moment incredibly callous, but at the same time I want to go into my little jazz program. Awareness is the first step; it’s something I need sit with to judge my reaction to it.

My last week in India was spent appropriately, climbing mountains and meditating. I did a three day trek from Darjeeling along the Singalia ridge. My mom was planning to come but unfortunately got sick. Such setbacks are part of the package and she took the disappointment well. From the summit was a brilliant 360 view of the Kanchenjunga range (the 3rd highest mountain in the world) and Everest. Approaching Delhi, my mom and I stopped in Sarnath, where the Buddha first taught his “discoveries”, for a 10-day Buddhist retreat of which I only did 3 days. There were a lot of good sessions and I was very tempted to cancel Paris and stay. Someone told me that if I chose to stay, it would be wonderful and if I chose to go to Paris, it would be wonderful. Only if I decided would there be regret. So I chose to go to Paris, since I had been looking forward to coming back to this city for years, and it’s been wonderful. I left my mom in Sarnath. She’ll be spending 3 more weeks doing Vipassana before coming back to Delhi by way of Agra to come home, meaning that I have her apartment to myself for 3 weeks when I come back! A good way to transition back to Portland, find a place, find a job (yeah right), etc. My train back to Delhi was 6 hours late but fortunately I had left a 15-hour window for just such cases. When the plane finally took off, India started to flash before my eyes (self-induced for dramatic effect I’m sure): all the kilometres traveled, all the sights, the sounds, the beauty, the ugly, the smells. If I ever want to take a break from Western Civilization and live in tranquility I can always come back.

I end this blog with the superlatives of my experience in India:

Most liveable cities: Darjeeling, Katmandu, Pondicherry, Kochi

Most relaxing places: Goa and Kerala

Most organized: Jaipur, Pondicherry, Kerala

Least organized: Varanasi, Gorakhpur

Favourite state: Kerala

Best food: Kerala

Most spiritual places: Bodhgaya, Varanasi

Worst experience: getting badly sick over and over again with insomnia in Varanasi

Coolest Instruments: Sitar, Sarod, Sarangi, Santur, Tabla

Favourite Indian food: Paneer butter masala, thalis of all sorts, Dal Bhat, Momo, naan, chai

Most physically challenging experience: Anapurna Base Camp Trek

Most valuable experience: studying sitar

Most memorable experiences (in chronological order): the view from Anapurna base camp, Varanasi concerts, my cute young yoga teacher telling me “this is 10 days yoga and much improve your asana”, the Taj Mahal, walking around Pushkar holy city in a holy Bhang daze, Dancing to techno on the Goan beaches, driving scooters through the Goan countryside, the ruins at Hampi, going on a houseboat with my dad, seeing the swarms of Tibetans around the Mahabodi temple (marking the Bodhi tree) with my mom, seeing Kanchenjunga and Everest at once, meditating on it all in Sarnath. Best Beer: Hayward’s 5000, King Fisher strong Least favourite city: Delhi

Coolest travelers met: American study abroad students in Varanasi and the French 20 somethings I traveled with for 3 weeks

Best books on India read:

Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children; The Ground Beneath her Feet; East, West; the Moor’s Last Sigh

Arundhati Roy: the God of Small things

Kiran Desai: Inheritance of Loss, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Charles Duchaussois: Flash

Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love

William Sutcliffe: Are you experienced

Bhagavad Gita

John Keay: Into India, India: a History

Yann Martel: Life of Pi

Rudyard Kipling: Kim

Aravind Adiga: White Tiger

Herman Hesse: Siddhartha

Best Newspapers: The Times of India, the Hindu, Hindustan Times

Other Good Books read in India:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

Tom Robbins: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

So I leave for America tomorrow. I’m excited; it seems like an interesting time to be there. Thank God Obama got elected, cause really I wouldn’t have come back.

Peace, Om, Change, Love, Namaste and all the rest.

See you soon.

Andrew

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/

However, I’m excited to get back to my life again. I luckily got to see almost every place I wanted and do everything I wanted. I trekked in the Himalayas, began a semi-serious study of Indian music, experienced Indian music in one of the cities where the tradition is the most alive (Varanasi), studied yoga in the holiest city in Hinduism (again Varanasi), got to travel by myself and with great friends I met along the way, swam in the Goan oceans, traveled with my dad, stayed in ashram, traveled with my mom, and experienced the Birthplace of Buddhism. Not bad for 4.5 months. The only thing I didn’t do that I had planned was a meditation course, and I decided not to because I can do the same exact course anywhere in world (10-day Goenka-Vipassana course-http://www.dhamma.org/). These are donation only courses that are all over the world, so I’m hoping to do a course with Stacia at the beginning of April two hours north of Portland. It’ll be strict and difficult: minimal food, constant meditation, 4:30 AM to 9 PM schedule, but I think it will be transformative.

Rishikesh was great. It was a respite from the high-paced traveling of the past few weeks and even months. I admittedly only did one yoga class there (it’s the world capital of yoga) because I was tired a got a cold which I still haven’t recovered from. But I don’t expect too much of myself while traveling. I’m a creature of routine; it will be much easier to reestablish the practices I’ve been interested in and have learned about here when I have a steady home to myself. My mom and I stayed in a beautiful ashram, adorned with Hindu statues, where people from all India and the world come to do yoga and worship on the Ganges. We hiked to a water fall and toured the ashram where the Beatles stayed for a couple months, Paul and John creating the songs that grew into the White Album while George learned the sitar. Ringo, always the odd one out, found the comforts lacking and returned to England early. The ashram had been abandoned 25 years ago, and touring it felt like touring ruins of the modern world, chairs left in cobwebs, files strewn across the floor, wall bearings falling, and everything in a state of decay. 1000 years from now, perhaps that will be what it is like to tour the remnants of the ancient civilization of America!

A daily puja (worship) ceremony accompanies the sunset at Rishikesh overlooking the Ganges where chants, kirtan, clapping, and bhakti style Hindu devotion can’t help but raise the spirit. So much more lively than anything white people are originally responsible for. I mean, I’m a devotee of Western art, but attending mass no matter how beautiful the music is and going to a classical concert are occasions of solemn piety. I enjoy the informality and chaos of Indian worship and performance. I imagine puja would have parallels in the west only in black gospel. America’s music, its soul, to me, is black, or, really, a composite of extremely mixed race.

30 hours of traveling brought me and my mom to Bodhgaya, the birthplace of Buddhism where the Buddha attained enlightenment meditating under the Bodhi Tree. The place is small but chaotic and has become the focal point for international Buddhism. Every Buddhist country has a monastery there, and pilgrims come from all over the world. Buddhist culture, which is an international movement throughout the world, feels so much more inviting than Hinduism, which feels much more culturally specific; Hinduism is for Indians-they don’t proselytize; you’re born a Hindu or not. One realizes in Bodhgaya how many Buddhists there are in the world! Tibetans who live outside Tibet, the only Tibetans allowed to travel (mostly from Dharmsala where the Dalai Lama is in exile), come in droves of pilgrimage during this time of year. It’s hard not to fall in love with Tibetans; their presence is illuminating and comforting. It’s also hard not to sympathize with their plight. The Chinese have moved in and effaced their culture for the past 50 years; Tibetan culture is more vibrant in India than in Tibet itself. They crowd around the Mahabodi temple which is built next to the Bodhi, clicking their rosaries and prayer beads, swinging prayer wheels, chanting “om mane padme hum” (“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”), prostrating endlessly towards the temple center, all in deep meditation. But they also do things like put on “Free Tibet” concerts, which we attended; more like Tibetan pop karaoke, but the singers were quality.

We attended a few times a daily Zazen (Japanase Zen) session, which is a meditation session in which a drum begins to beat monotonously, literally beating the thoughts out of your head. Then it leaves you in that space of nothingness for 30 minutes. Very powerful, and, for me, an effective way to prepare for meditation, which can be difficult to access without time and preparation. I’m excited for Vipassana! We toured the beautiful monasteries and found the International Meditation Center, where my mother is going to be staying for the rest of her trip. She’s planning on doing Vipassana there for 3 weeks! Pretty hardcore. I’m really glad I got to go to Bodhgaya, definitely one of the most moving places I’ve been to.

We have made it to Darjeeling after deciding not to do the trek in Nepal do to unfeasibility and lengthy travel. We’re both glad that we did, as Darjeeling is so charming, British colonial remnants mixed with Tibetans and Nepalis.  Darjeeling makes it up with Pondicherry and Kochin as the only places I’d consider livable in India, and that is because, sigh, of colonialism in all three cases. There is a Bell-tower here in the Westminster style and the familiar ring resounds at the hour. Clubs for rich English of a bygone era are converted into hotels for rich tourists. Buddhist gompas (monasteries) line the hills. Darjeeling is, as you’d expect, full of delicious tea that even a coffee drinker like me can appreciate.

We were surprised that it is warm enough to do a three-day trek on a ridge overlooking the third highest mountain in the world Kanchenzunga. It’s visible from Darjeeling but it’s too cloudy in the valley at this time of year, and it would be a shame to miss a glimpse of the Himalayas, the only one my mom might get to have. So we’re leaving the day after tomorrow to freeze our asses off even more than we’re doing now, guided by a delightful, long-haired Tibetan dude.  It’s great traveling with my mom.  We get along well.

After that, only one more week. We’ll go back to Varanasi so I can show the city to my mom and pick up my sitar. And then I’ll do a three-day meditation retreat in Sarnath (the place of the Buddha’s teachings, the Mount Sinai of Buddhism 10k from Varanasi) with my mom before heading off to Delhi to leave India.  but also . I get to stop off for a week in Paris in between!

I’m happy and blessed that my life in Portland is compelling enough to come back to, and moving back there seems more like a progression than a regression. I am hopeful for America at this moment; I’m such an Obama devotee and have probably too much trust in him. But we’ll see. Compared to being abroad 3.5 years ago when I encountered a constant barrage of shit for our “fascist” country (even from Germans hah!), it has been great to be respected abroad as an American. The rest of the world is inspired by us and they are hopeful too. I hope we won’t let them down. To be very honest, if John McCain had won, it would have been clear to me that the Republican majority was entrenched in America and that we are completely on a downward slope of barbaric idiot conservativism; I’m pretty sure I’d have become an ex-pat, maybe moved off to France, though Sarkozy isn’t exactly inspiring either.

I’m having more and more thoughts of not packing off to grad school and sacrificing my 20s to a library. There is much to experience and do if I have the motivation and the discipline. I have a lot of reservations particularly concerning what an academic is in the humanities/fine arts, a critic at the periphery who didn’t do the things that the people he admires did, who doesn’t get to decide where to live, who sacrifices job security until the age of 36 to write papers no one to few will read or care about, works constantly, sacrifices reading the literature of the world for a narrow niche of boring academic writing, etc. blah! At this point I see these two immediate paths I could go down: one would be the cosmopolitan/alientating life of being a grad student, being paid to live in a city like sf, ny, chi, boston to study the music of the world and rub shoulders with cultural elites. Or the provincial/comfortable alternative: do a jazz guitar performance program at PSU (relatively cheap as OR resident), live in Portland, build contacts in the music community, actually play music, see where things go with a certain someone, live where my mom lives, maybe become a high school teacher and live a life of relative leisure. At the moment the latter seems much more appealing. Plus, the main attraction to something like ethnomusicology is the opportunity to be sent to another country and study music. But, as I’ve already mentioned, I can do that anyway with saving and planning and without institutional support. I’m hoping curiosity can carry me further than the academy. But we’ll see what reality brings.

So many thoughts of the future cloud my mind, but mostly I feel present and grateful for my experience, that (so far) it has been a success with no major setbacks. Only when I was getting sick often was I breaking down and feeling incapable, but I dealt with it and found another route; things have been looking up since. It’s not over yet and I’ll post my final thoughts probably waiting for my flight to take off. I already know though that I have learned tons about the world, myself, and myself in the world, and that is invaluable, by which I mean valuable.

Man I hate Indian computers! I just wrote out this entry, saved it in Word (since the internet is unreliable) and the moment I finished it, it was promptly deleted. Well, I’ll try again, but rewrites are always shorter have a slightly bitter tone (ever try rewriting a 15-page paper in college?), but let’s see…

I am excitedly waiting to meet my father at the Chennai airport. I certainly hope he’ll be there as I am exhausted from a 24-hour bus ride to get here in time. I’m happy to be traveling with my parents, because frankly I’m tired of transient relationships, and I haven’t seen anyone I’ve really cared about (I mean for a long time) in more than 3 months. Most travelers I’ve talked to are jealous I’m getting to travel with my parents. Most travelers couldn’t imagine their parents in India, so I’m pretty damn impressed that mine should be on separate flights right now to Chennai (dad) and Delhi (mom).

My dad and I will be traveling for a week and half, down to the only French colony of Pondicherry and then to the state of Kerala, God’s country: beautiful tropical canals and home of the first elected communist government (1957) with the highest literacy, health, and education rates in the nation. But communism doesn’t work, right? It’s been historically proven. Capitalism seems to be fairing much better in the rest of overpopulated, unequal, poverty-stricken India. Right…

My mom is heading up to Rishikesh, where the Beatles set up camp, to stay in an ashram until I get there on the 20^th in time for us to watch the inauguration of the messiah. We’ll be traveling afterwards in N. India and Nepal until I hightail it out of here on Feb 13 for a week in France (woohoo!) and finally back home. I’m so close yet so far away. Nevertheless, the signs of my parents’ coming hopefully indicate the beginning of the process of my disorientation (get it? dis-ORIENT-ation; it’s not my joke I admit).

The past three weeks have been really wonderful actually. The Frenchies and I became really close. I’ve never had such close friends to whom I didn’t speak English. In the past 3 weeks I’ve spoken nothing but French and pidgin English. It’s made me think again about living in France, depending on where. I think it is a culture to which I could adapt rather quickly. My Frencies were sad when I left and they gave me a postcard cut-out of an autorickshaw jampacked with Indians with well wishes for the future on the back, just like when you leave summer camp.

Well, it wasn’t quite summer camp, despite the weather, but it was pretty damn sweet. I’m glad I didn’t buy into the “I would never touch Goa cause it’s just for tourists and hippies” hype. First of all, at the moment, I’m both, but Goa is way more than that. Visiting Goa shows you how different India can be. With the highest per capita wealth, I never saw a single beggar. Colonized by the Portuguese, who didn’t leave until 1961, beautiful Mediterranean houses line the oceans and huge Baroque cathedrals dwarf temples to Hanuman et alios. This is not to laud Goa for being more westernized; rather, it gave me a glimpse of how diverse India is. It is aptly called a continent, as a Goan and Punjabi are as different from one another as a French and a Turk. I’m so impressed that India manages to function at all. As I read recently, “India’s choice is not between order and chaos, but between manageable chaos and unmanageable chaos”.

Our time in Goa was, well, licentious. Goa is freer than any place I’ve seen in the west (yes, including Amsterdam). We danced late to trance on the beach (hippies of the world, unite!), smoked and drank where we pleased, befriended everyone, rode scooters from gorgeous beach to gorgeous beach seeing everything from indigenous villages to hippies who came in the 60s and forgot to leave. The only setback was a forced a baksheesh (bribe) on New Year’s Eve to a cop who told me I needed an international driver’s license to drive a scooter. He’d have kept my license had I not given him 10 bucks to go right on driving “illegally”; I put it in quotes because, as I thought, you don’t need an international drivers license to drive a scooter. The corrupt cops made me pay them to get out of something that wasn’t even a crime. The culture of baksheesh needs to be wiped out if India is to advance.

Our days began drinking chai with the 27 year-old Indian store owner in our neighborhood who was by far the coolest Indian I’ve met; we spent many lazy hours with him, trying on hippy clothes, drinking chai, etc. Then we’d wander down a 5 minute walk to the beach and eat breakfast, swim a bit, maybe take a scooter trip to another beach. We’d invariably meet up at the same shop and pregame a night of trance music. Then we wound up in the same damn restaurant (really the same one every night) on the beach, eating seafood and blathering away in French. We had to leave for a number of reasons, the most urgent of which was my getting to Chennai in time. But it was also prudent to do so, as the arrival of the storeowner’s wife and son (arranged marriage, at least) would have put him and one the French girls in a compromising position. I’d have had to leave anyway. Decadence is great for the holidays, but there’s too much to do and see here to justify wiling my time away like that. Many westerners live there half of the year, but I couldn’t do that either. I have too many projects, too many people I love to check out of Western Civilization at this point. Maybe I’m not a real hippie; sure, I want to turn on and tune in but not drop out.

We took a sleeper to Hampi, once home to the capital of the South of India and the reason the South was never taken by the Muslims (they are the purer Hindus in their opinion). The ruins are vast, the largest I’ve ever seen, and they put Europe’s to shame (though it’s not really fair to compare as Hampi dates only from the 15th century). Temples and palaces in various states of ruin adorn a tropical boulder-laden paradise. Walking, biking and scooting around them was an awe-inspiring pleasure.

Well, hopefully my parents will indeed show up. I’m going to try to love every damn minute of this last month! Hope the new year is awesome all around.

I’m really sick of meeting some of these travelers who have already been to India and who have come back.  The annoying ones are the ones who don’t give you a word edgewise and berate you with how coming back to the corrupt, decadent west was so difficult, how they made new friends and forgot the old because they had evolved so much past these people who had merely stayed in the west doing the same thing and never having grown.  Maybe they lost their friends cause they wouldn’t shut up about India.

Please, I want you all to kick me if I ever become so annoying, recounting incessantly story after story about what I did, assuming your time spent in the west was time wasted.  Going to India is one of many experiences, one I’m extremely grateful to have had, but it’s certainly not the only key, and I maybe imagined it was.  But it is true that India is epic, larger than anything imaginable, a myriad of colors and smells and sensations and peoples.  What is India to me?

Synecdoches of India in order of association:

Cows
God
Gods
Trash
Smiles

Chai
Sympathetic vibrations
Urine
Drones
Density
Saris
LOUD annoying Bollywood music
Spice
Humidity
Turbans
Squating
Boys holding hands
Boys and girls not holding hands
Burning trash
Incense
Dead dogs in the streets
Indian English

So there’s obviously a lot you could say about India.  But the enormity of these associations, fragments of experiences might be better expressed as a list rather than some enclosing narrative.  So perhaps I’ll just speak in fragments.

Photos are also good lists.  They are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30498771@N02/

I guess the real test of some change will indeed be going back to America and reinvesting myself in everything I was doing there.  But I really hope that this won’t make me more exclusive (maybe some discrimination is good), but that it will make me more open to the depth and variety of experience, more compassionate, less elitist, etc.  Speaking of lists and experience, I’ve been thinking as the new year approaches about all that I’ve already done in my young life.  I’m pretty damn lucky I think despite a mishap here and there, ca et la.  My departure from childhood started when I was 15 and this is what I did.  This is really self-indulgent, but it’s my blog and it’s good for me to list my experience.

2000
Fell in love for the first time

2001
Got engaged
Went to Paris for two weeks as part of a foreign exchange with the great grand-daughter of Charles de Gaulle
Went to Japan with my highschool concert band
Dropped out of highschool and began homeschooling myself
Started hanging out with English grad school students

2002
Went to France with my girlfriend as part of the same exchange and then travelled in Italy with my dad, a total of 2 months
Began taking college courses at a liberal arts school as a junior in highschool
Broke up
Went back to Santa Fe and decided to leave Georgia for school

2003
Went to Bulgaria for a music tour
Went to St. John’s College to study the foundations of Western Civilization
Saw the Grand Canyon
Hung out with the son of country music star Michael Martin Murphy.  Learned about techno music, meditation and raves.

2004
Dated a successful painter who has a gallery in LA
Decided to leave St. John’s to follow what seemed to be more relevant passions

Went to Ireland with my mom

Accepted to Reed
Lived in the Mountains of Georgia in the summer, working on a farm that was also a music/dance community
Moved to Portland
Began Reed
Fell in love with Reed
Fell in love with Portland

2005
Accepted to study at the Sorbonne in France
Went to Mexico with my dad
Lived in the Republic of Georgia for 2 months for a music tour and to study the music, language and culture
Traveled from Georgia to London in 2 1/2 months
Began to live in Paris
Fell in love
Traveled in France with the aimee
Heart broken in Holland

2006
Went back to Reed
Lived off street earnings during the summer as a folk duo in Portland
Joined a professional choir
Began a thesis on Impressionist poetry and music
Performed in an international music festival with a renowned conductor, now three years running
Paid by Stanford music school to go to Prague for ten days and perform with their group
Saw New York

2007
Studied Debussy with the best mentor I’ve ever had
Fell in love with a mountain girl
Graduated from Reed, sat next to future girlfriend; we were the last to graduate in our class and we show up in our parents’ graduation photos
Offered by the Reed music department to complete the Reed music curriculum unofficially for free during the next year, one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever been given
Worked during the summer for the Friends of Chamber Music, learned I don’t like arts administration
Went to California several times to visit mountain girl, backpacked in yosemite
Began my unofficial year at Reed
Began performing and studying music ridiculously
Produced my first electronic music track
Went to academic music conference in quebec
Sang corny jazz chistmas carols for good money
Broke up with mountain girl

2008
Went to New Orleans with dad, fell in love with jazz and gumbo and finally the south of America
Started my own jazz/funk band called Aporia which grew to six members, ended up performing with a variety of groups all around Portland
Fell in love with a pink haired hippy
Performed the Eroica on violin
Graduated again, no diploma but much more fulfilled than the first time
Girlfriend hit by car
Began working at a sketchy internet book dealer
Got hit by car
Suffering
Fired from book dealer
More suffering
Left for India
Hiked in the Himalayas for 8 days in Nepal
Studied sitar and yoga in Varanasi
Traveled independently from the Northeast to the beautiful beaches of Goa in the southwest
Now about to flip over to the next…

So I’m pretty damn lucky, right? Privileged definitely, spoiled probably…but wow, i’m really lucky and fortunate and grateful, and I’m excited to take the next steps and add to lists and be more independent and be constantly in love.  And I hope to learn humility at some point.

This all I am thinking about as I laze on the incredibly beautiful beaches of Goa.  I feel like I’m not in India any more.  In Pushkar I met up with some super cool French kids who were all on their way to Goa.  Tropical beaches without beggars and poverty with decadent French kids really did sound better than an ashram up in the cold north.  I had plans of going to Rishikesh but I had to go south to meet my dad anyway and those plans didn’t make sense.

I’ve made my way through Arabic deserty Rajastan with the Frenchies and after 3 days of sleeper bus (definitely an oxymoron) out of four, crossing thousands of kilometers, we arrived in the overwhelmingly beautiful SW region of Goa.  An old Portuguese outpost, Goa is now home to hippies escaping India and the western world, with trance parties, liberal atmosphere for everything, cheap scooters and awesome food.  At the moment I have never lived so well.  But I feel like I’ve earned this decadence.  India was hard and never ever relaxing.  I shouldn’t talk in the past tense about India, but I just don’t feel like I’m there any more.  It’s waiting for me though.  I know it.

Goa’s a perfect place to spend Christmas and the Holidays, nowhere near as depressing as Kipling’s poem (below).  I’ve never been more relaxed as I am now.  I’ve been hanging out exclusively with my Frenchy friends and we have set up camp 2 minutes from the beach.  I’ve rented a very cheap scooter and we’ve been scooting around from beach to beach.  Terrorism has decreased tourism to the point at which we have the beaches to ourselves even during this, the highest tourist season (western holidays).  I havevn’t had a prolonged conversation in English for a week and a half.  I’m making more progress in French than I ever did in France because I’m constantly surrounded by Frenchies and I realize that I understand basically everything and I’m really actually quite fluent in French.  Not sure how or why I got to that point, but I like it.  Someone will have to pry my fingers from a coconut tree to get me out of here, but my dad and I will then go to Kerala, which I hear is just as, if not more, beautiful.

So I’m happy.  In less than 2 months, I’ll be in America.

This is where I make my list of resolutions.  It’s hard when life is so up in the air.  But here are some vague attempts.

Resolutions
Love
Listen
Practice patience
Meditate
Play music
Actively create with others
Read more fiction
Go on some long bike trip somewhere with my sweet new touring bike
Write more
Climb a mountain, maybe Mount Hood
Read more in French
Work

Here are some fragments, memories, ideas.  Don’t try to connect them.  It won’t work.

New Happy Your!

My wish for New Year’s: that India and Paksitan not go to war.

“Christmas in India” – Rudyard Kipling

Dim dawn behind the tamerisks—the sky is saffron-yellow—
As the women in the village grind the corn,
And the parrots seek the riverside, each calling to his fellow
That the Day, the staring Easter Day is born.
Oh the white dust on the highway! Oh the stenches in the byway!
Oh the clammy fog that hovers
And at Home they’re making merry ‘neath the white and scarlet berry—
What part have India’s exiles in their mirth?

Full day begind the tamarisks—the sky is blue and staring—
As the cattle crawl afield beneath the yoke,
And they bear One o’er the field-path, who is past all hope or caring,
To the ghat below the curling wreaths of smoke.
Call on Rama, going slowly, as ye bear a brother lowly—
Call on Rama—he may hear, perhaps, your voice!
With our hymn-books and our psalters we appeal to other altars,
And to-day we bid “good Christian men rejoice!”

High noon behind the tamarisks—the sun is hot above us—
As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan.
They will drink our healths at dinner—those who tell us how they love us,
And forget us till another year be gone!
Oh the toil that knows no breaking! Oh the Heimweh, ceaseless, aching!
Oh the black dividing Sea and alien Plain!
Youth was cheap—wherefore we sold it.
Gold was good—we hoped to hold it,
And to-day we know the fulness of our gain.

Grey dusk behind the tamarisks—the parrots fly together—
As the sun is sinking slowly over Home;
And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether.
That drags us back how’er so far we roam.
Hard her service, poor her payment—she is ancient, tattered raiment—
India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.
If a year of life be lent her, if her temple’s shrine we enter,
The door is hut—we may not look behind.

Black night behind the tamarisks—the owls begin their chorus—
As the conches from the temple scream and bray.
With the fruitless years behind us, and the hopeless years before us,
Let us honor, O my brother, Christmas Day!
Call a truce, then, to our labors—let us feast with friends and neighbors,
And be merry as the custom of our caste;
For if “faint and forced the laughter,” and if sadness follow after,
We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

Varanasi was hard, one of the more difficult but extraordinary experiences of my life.  It is the Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem of the Hindu world, and to have experienced a place bathed in such holiness is an experience I’ll never forget.  I made musical progress too.  My teacher told me that I learned a year’s worth of material in a month, which is probably an unfair comparison since I have previous musical experience, especially on fretted string instruments.  I learned a raga composition, the evening raga yaman (ragas in N. India were always played at a particular time of the day.  But those were courtly days of leisure and as the music has developed into a concert music in a modern society, such concerns for the time of day are disappearing.)  This raga is beautiful, based off of what we know as the lydian mode (sharp fourth in an otherwise major scale).  Maybe one day I will play it well.  I have plenty to practice at home, and if I don’t get back to lessons in India before I leave, I think I will still feel that I accomplished the main thing that I came for, which was a somewhat in-depth experience of a completely different and developed musical culture.

But Varanasi was getting me sick and I had to leave.  I had been told that it was the dirtiest city in India, but having nothing to compare it to, I didn’t really know what to make of it.  As I left on December 5th, probably way gladder than I should have been to get out, I heard an English guy refer to it as “vary nasty”, and I had to laugh.

I have come now to Rajastan in almost two weeks, the eastern desert veering on the Pakistani border.  On my westward journey, I stopped first in Khajuraho, home to medieval temples beautifully preserved with the kama sutra in stone.  Pretty damn graphic!  Certainly not the only the theme carved, but a prominent one admist many other manifestations of life.  I came to India with the impression that it was perhaps a sexually free culture because of this heritage.  Actually, it’s the most sexually repressed culture I’ve ever seen.  It’s interesting that western society born of a heritage of sexual repression, what with Christianity, has become so oversexed, while Kamasutra-laden Hinduism has produced the very regressive sexual culture of India.  I can’t tell you how many people have asked if I’m married and stare at me dumbly when I tell them that in my country I’m too young.  “No you’re not” is their indignant reply.  The fact that almost all of my interactions with Indians are with men reflects the sorry state of gender inequality.  Then again, so much of everything in India is inconsistent and diverse.  I mean, Sonia Gandhi is the leader of the ruling Congress Party.  And Indira Gandhi ruled India with an iron fist during the 70s and again in the 80s until her assassination.  I’ve heard much of the mysoginism is not really a part of the Hindu tradition but comes from Mughal rule which lasted from the 1500s until the British Raj (Mughals are the non-magical people, or Muslims who ruled N. India).

The Muslim influence in North India reminds you that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were once all the same country.  An unclean partition dividing peoples along religious lines makes you wonder where all the Muslims are with so many Mosques around.  Orchha, on the road from Khajuraho, is a town of Mughal forts and Mosques, a beautiful collection of Indo-Islamic architecture.  Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, was the Mughal capital, and the Taj Mahal was the Muslim emperor’s homage of love to his wife who died after giving birth to their 14th (!) child.  The Taj is every bit as beautiful and inspiring as you’ve heard.  The light catches diverse gleams on the elegantly carved marble all reflected in the pools lying around the monument.  I thought to myself, “Damn, I will never ever be this romantic” (or this rich; it did take 20,000 people to build it).  Though there are people that rich today.  Amusingly, I randomly read on the BBC right before I visited the Taj, that a Bangladeshi businessman wants to replicate the building in Dhaka for the Bangladeshis who, he argues, are generally too poor to travel all the way to Agra.  The Indian High Commission is challenging this course of action, claiming it’s copywrited.   Puleezzz.  It is a Muslim monument after all; it just happens to be in Hindustan.

Agra was amazing but kind of a pain in the ass as a tourist ghetto.  I had to get to Jaipur, the capital of Rajastan and home to many study abroad students including my friends from Varanasi.  When I got to Jaipur, I understood why they stick so many western students here.  Coming from Varanasi to Jaipur was like coming from the 3rd world to the 1st.  So this is where all that Indian prosperity is that I had read about.  Jaipur is the best planned city in Asia, beautiful parks (one called Central Park, the nerve), wide roads cutting through.  It’s probably the most livable city I’ve seen.  It has the prosperity with only 3 million people, much better than overpopulated Delhi or Mumbai.  Its buildings gleam pink as they were all painted pink for the arrival of some diplomat.  The tradition continued and colorful Rajastani aristocrats bathed their cities in different colors (Jodhpur is blue for examle).  It was a strange feeling for me to feel at home with the signs of prosperity, the cars, the yuppie coffee shops that make you feel like you’re in Seattle, the first rate malls.  I had come to India to bathe in all that was other than 1st world prosperity.  But that made me sick, and 23 years in the 1st world isn’t going to make a month in the 3rd world come as easy or comforting.  I guess I’m being put in my place.  My airs of romanticizing the lives of the poor have disappeared.  The life of the poor in India fucking sucks.  I am very grateful for what I have.

Jaipur was great in other ways.  I met up with my American friends and sightseed the city, beautiful desert palaces (check), admist elephants (check), camels (check) and beauty (triple check) all around.  I climbed to the top of a hill to a temple to Surya, the Vedic sun god, to view the city glowing pink.  I saw one of the most beautiful museums I’ve ever seen, a tribute to the British empire, housing their findings (stealings) from all over the world.  I saw a quirky medieval observatory which accurately tells time within 2 seconds.  And I read books in real coffee shops with real coffee (thank god, I’m so sick of the super sugary and milky chai for which I longed in coming here).  I was happy to meet up with the Americans again.  I like Americans, at least half of them.  I guess they are kind of my people and I seem to feel at home with them.  Of course, the ones who come to study in India are a self selecting bunch.  But it reminds me that I want to live in America; I fucking don’t want to live in India, that fo damn sho.

Traveling in India is in some ways not as hard as I imagined, at least as a man (I marvel at young women who travel here, the victims of constant harrassment and sexual abuse).  It takes patience and an attitude that does not get annoyed at the constant annoyances of being a white person in India.  The trains run, though not on time, and they can take you where you want to go.  In some respects, traveling in India is easier, as the things that in Europe are prohibitively expensive are dirt cheap here.  You don’t need to figure out the public transportation in every city because a cycle rickshaw costs 40 cents for a ride.  The annoyances of sleeping in dorms in nullified by affordable rooms 5 times less than a dorm bed in Europe.  Food is good, diverse and cheap and eating out at 1-2 dollars makes me not feel guilty to eat, the main reason I lost weight when traveling in Europe.  Travelers range from fascinating to banal, usually a result of whether they came to India because it’s India or because they are outsourcing their vacations.   You know, the dope is cheap, beaches, cheap food, hippies, all the things you got at home, but you can do them for less in India, just like call centers.

I arrived in the small desert lake town of Pushkar.  Man it’s so beautiful here.  I was so sick of cities so this town of 15,000 seems a perfect place to rest from the craziness of Varanasi and traveling and, well, India.  I’m staying at the Pink Floyd hotel for 3 bucks a night.  Seriously.  It’s an awesome spot with awesome people where every room is named after a different Pink Floyd song, and they have a beautiful cafe facing the lake with a bunch of “special drinks”, and, well, I promise I won’t waste too much time.  Maybe a little desert camel trek, but I want to get to Rishikesh to live in an ashram and Bodhgaya to meditate and Goa beaches in the south to be a hippy on the beach before my dad gets here, and I’m kinda running out of time.

I’m happy, but I’m also happy this will be over and that the light at the end of the tunnel is faintly penetrating my vision.  Now I realize that I will do a fraction of all the things that sound amazing to do here.  But that’s okay.  I’m not sure if I want India to call me back.  I had such a passion to come and I’m so grateful, but man I am so tired of being a foreigner here.  This place is SO foreign.  It’s good to see though.  India is a sixth of the world, and Asia is half of the world.  To have experienced only the west is, well, a smaller fraction of the world.  I realize though that I don’t have a traveler’s mindset.  I don’t really want to spend all my time going from place to place, touring this and that.  I want to be an artist and so I should get started ASAP.  Right now, I am deferring my dreams.  But it’s good to have a break; I just spent 5 years in college!  I need to remember to breathe.  The appeal of a Ph d is starting to fly out the window, especially as I am rediscovering my love of fiction.  Giving up the freedom to read whatever I want to read badly written academic papers on things no one cares about and even worse written papers by students on things no one cares about seems increasingly less appealing.  I don’t think I want to sacrifice my twenties for that kind of knowledge.  I don’t want to sacrifice my choice of a place to live.  I want to live in Portland cause I love Portland and all you Portlanders.  Even if you’re not a Portlander, I still love you.  Well that was long but I hope not boring.  Love is beaming towards you westward (and eastward, and northward and southward-the world is round after all) from Pushkar, India.

Props to the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at the dog.

So I hope to rebuild some of the serenity I’ve lost in Varanasi in Rishikesh.  It’s funny, I always romanticize big cities as capitals of culture, but when I spend prolonged time in them I miss trees and gardens and mountains and a cultural scene small enough where I can actually be a player.  But I’m really glad to have been in Varanasi, and learning sitar has given me a whole new bag of tricks.  I just think that I’ve probably attained knowledge saturation and that it will be good for me to take a break.  Soon I will start an exciting travelogue rather than the repetitive same-old same-old of the past month.

I will be so proud to have done this.  The having done this will probably be better than the doing this really.  But the biggest thing I’m learning or relearning or constantly in the process of learning is how to be by myself, how to keep myself entertained in uncomfortable circumstances, which I think is probably a brilliant skill to cultivate.  I hope to be surrounded by community and loved ones my entire life, but to have a solid center into which I can retreat when the realities of impermanence tear away the stability of the outside world is a vastly important skill to have.  And to be immersed in practices and music and books rather than the distractions of television, intoxication, and friendships of convenience and habit (not to imply anything, faithful readers!) is wonderful.  Though for someone vaguely anti-internet I sure seem to be addicted to the internet!

Be well…