Coming Home Again
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Kolkata (Calcutta),
West Bengal,
India
Sunday, January 20, 2008
So much is happening inwardly for me now. I came to India to break from the past, to sever the patterns of mind and habit and furiously driven activity that kept me miserable and cut off from the sweet, numinous creativity and life of the deep self I had once known. So much felt lost to me, lost in me, for so very long.
I came with expectations. With intentions. With fantasies. I would put my feet in the Ganges every day. I would meditate, meditate, meditate. I would journal every day. I would find some place in the forest in Rishikesh and sit under a canopy of green leaves filled with light, lost in the magically renewing and restorative energies of the Ganges.
Reality never conforms to my expectations. I don't know why that should surprise for me after 61 years, but it invariably does. The Ganges in Kolkata was far too polluted to even consider putting my feet in more than once. It was too filthy, too depressing to even visit again. The first months were miserably hot and they were busy. I was editing, editing, editing, doing very little meditating. I was sick. The to dos seemed to pile up with the expanding pressure of writing blogs, dealing with a protracted banking crisis, and all of the LDLM projects for the poor that I wanted to visit and to write about. Every time I traveled, I would get ill again. I was thoroughly disgusted by the filth that is nearly everywhere once you step outside in almost every town in India.
Panic was never far away. If I could not find enduring peace of mind now, here, with twice daily visits with Baba, an enlightened saint, how could I possibly face the last decades of my life after I got home? My stubborn angst, of not being quite good enough, were torturously in the background, whatever moments of inspiration and healing came and went.
That is all changing now. Effortlessly changing. And so simply. I am coming home again. Though the journey here did not fit in any way what I had envisioned, the gift has been given, the gate has opened. I am journeying inward to the heartbreaking tenderness I have longed for within. I am finding rest. Finding peace. Quietly sitting at the source of life and light, bathing in soothing fountains of grace.
I have tasted the wonders of this inner life before, found it only to lose it again so many times. What is different this time? Dare I hope that this path will remain open to the center of my own heart and its capacity to sit in the presence of the ineffably subtle, pristine light and beauty of the Divine? Who knows? I can and do pray for that.
For now, I only have this day, this moment. These precious weeks of deepening ease seem quieter, more natural and grounded than any of the spiritual openings that I have so desperately milked and forced in the past. Hammering myself with the obligation to meditate, with the fear and self-doubt that I won't meditate, with the guilt and shame of not meditating, have fallen away. They have been replaced by a sweeter motivation, the joy and love of communion, the natural delight of a child skipping home to the warm embrace and always loving lap of her kind and generous mother.
I can only do my part by showing up at the table each day for whatever level of communion presents itself, being grateful for every moment washed in the grace that comes to me.
