WOW!
It's been quite some time since I created these rants and musings. In the meantime I returned to India a second time in March 2006 -- same city, same school, different adventures. This time I was able to travel south India a little more, which made this second trip more delicious than the first. And I cried the night I had to fly home....
Got lazy the first time and never posted anything about my first trip, but I can assure you it was life-changing. I have to say that the minute my feet hit the ground in India, I felt like I had come home. Yup, the adepts who told me that I would feel that way were right...about everything.
Once I stepped outside the airport into the very early morning Chennai air, I knew I would never be the same. I stopped for a few minutes and my senses took everything in, as an animal would when you open the door and give it the chance to escape. I had no fear, no trepidation whatsoever to be in a foreign country for the first time in my life, alone, not knowing anyone. I took a deep breath and stepped forward into a place that somehow I knew I had lived in before. Don't ask me how I knew, I just knew, as well as I know my own name. Say what you want about a sixth sense or deja vu or wacky new-age beliefs, but the feelings that would overcome me in certain places in south India during that first month were too strong to be denied.
Give me time and I will re-create some India experiences for you -- the temple touts, the beggars, the giggling school children who would run up to me to touch me and then run away, the train rides and the bus rides, and the journey to the heart of yoga.
Since I returned from my first trip there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about India, the way you think about a lover who you know you never should have left....you think about the good and the bad and the things you would have done differently or not at all, but you savor every moment and remember all of it, as if it just happened yesterday....
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