Post St. Patrick's Day Stretch

Well, this is the last I'll be posting for a while from my computer, folks. I'm about to start a three week trip South from the Punjab. In fact, if you're looking at a globe, I'm pretty much going to cross the country of India from North to South by train in the next ten days, then fly back up to the North. The exciting news is that I'm meeting up with my sister Christi in Mumbai, as well as her friends Kath and Kirsten. It'll be so nice to have some travel buddies with whom to share my experiences, good and bad. Just that moment of being able to turn to someone who understands and say, "See, that's what I've been talking about".

Oh, and the number of things that stick out to me about Indian culture grow as the days pass, both good and bad lists growing longer. Of course, it's too simplistic to say things are good and bad - to be a true scholar or sensitive human being, I must break down the gradations further. There are things which, objectively, make no sense whatsoever! There are those that, subjectively, are far outside my comfort zone, things which I wish I understood better, and basic human acts and feelings that either attract or repulse me. All of which is rather vague to you, I'm sure, reader of my blog.

What I'm trying to say is that getting ready to leave on this trip has been a good point to check-in on my experience so far. First, to the music. This has been the most rewarding part of being here by far. Though I could have actually seen quite a bit of Indian classical music between Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and there certainly are people who teach the music in the States, Indians and Non-Indians, I feel justified in saying that there's just no way I would have absorbed the amount that I do being here. As I wrote before, music is quite literally in the air here - and getting away from the saturation of Western music in our culture, as well as in my life by design, has actually provided a nice respite to open up to this new cultural avenue.

It would be next to impossible to describe how this music has affected me in prose, and in the short-form of a blog post, but luckily I won't have to. I'm bringing it back with me! In the form of a sizable, and growing, CD library of Indian music (how nice when CD's are only $5), and in my harmonium, of which I took delivery only yesterday through my ragi. I doubt that Indian music will have replaced all other music in my life on return to the US, in fact that's simply not possible, but it will have made a home for itself in me, and perhaps precisely in the nexus of spirituality and musical interest that first drew me here. This is not to say I will become a Sikh kirtaniya, or regale you all constantly with bhajans of your favorite deity. It seems to be much more personal than that, and in some ways has linked up (at least in my morning routine) with the meditation and sitting practice I picked up in Kullu.

Now to the other things that, I recognize, are equally part of India, but have proven thus far unable to compute with my version of the world I live in. One is simply the crowds. Someone said, You are never alone in India. If you've been here, you have to laugh at this for how true it is. Any scene, no matter how rustic, will have some person in it. Any line at a shop, bathroom, corner, you simply cannot escape the fact of people. Sometimes it is infuriating and overwhelming, like any train station, but other times it can even have an awesome majesty, like the way the langar hall at the Golden Temple feeds twice the population of Helena everyday for free.

Another is the West meets East divide that occurs everytime I walk down the street. My friend Matt, who is currently in Indonesia, had a post I found very amusing and accurate on this point. He wrote an open letter to the people of Indonesia inviting them to stop laughing/spying on him anytime he sat down somewhere. I applaud him, and reading his post was almost enough to pacify me completely. But I would add, to the people at large who see me in India, that there's no reason to assume I'm eager to talk to you when I go to every effort of body language to indicate that I'm busy or otherwise occupied - yes, I mean you, who pulled my earphones off and stuck your face around the shield of my writing notebook chirping out the ubiquitous "hello? what country?" If I am interested in talking with you, I'm sure I can take my pick from any number of thousands of people who pass by in a minute. Please wait your turn.

So that's all I have for now - have to head off to the train station. Look for text updates from me and the girls starting at the end of the week!