home is where the heart is

I have been reading this blog occasionally but have recently been hitting on it more and more (I've blogrolled it.) I like to go back and read the very early posts of a newly discovered blog just to get an introduction to the blogger. When I read what I've quoted below I thought, oh my god, thank you, thank you, thank you...

The thing is, I belong here. It claimed me, India. The first time I smelled it in the Delhi airport at 1am on a cold January morning; the first time I slid into the back seat of an Ambassador taxi, booked into a true-blue Indian darmashala, sipped chai from a roadside stall, got gut-wrenching dysentry, cried in a temple because I found myself, laughed with a crazy local villager who insisted he was Krishna and dressed like him every day, put my back out on a rickshaw ride from hell, slid into the purifying waters of a holy pond at Govardhan Hill, and bent down and touched the soft, powder-like dust on the ground of the spiritual centre of the universe, Radha-kunda...all these things claimed me and made me their own. Those holy towns left images in my memory; as I paid my obeisance in temples, the ancient floors left impressions in my body that leaked into my heart and remain there still. Home is where the heart is? Yes...

I had never been overseas in my life until I went to India, alone, at age 51, to study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai. As soon as I stepped onto Indian soil as I walked out of the Chennai airport at 2 AM, it hit me: I had come home. The feeling was primal. Crying in temples because deja vu overwhelmed me? Oh, yeah.

Thank you, Braja, for bringing back my first night in India. There has not been one single day since September 2005 that I do not think about Ma India and count the days until I can run into her arms again.