I'm going to Trivandrum in my Mind.
I think I could live forever in Bangalore and not really learn a thing about India. That being said, it’s my last night here. In a way, I’m going to take “one quick dip” into India—travelling to southern Kerala for a two week “Yoga Vacation” at the well known Sivananda Ashram near Trivandrum (I’ve taken to using the old word for the city, as I initially couldn’t remember the city’s proper/modern name: Trivananthpuram). In another way, I’ve already long since left the subcontinent. The more I learn about India, the more it becomes something very separate from yoga—two different kinds of communities, not that either could be grouped into a single community. So, as I go south, I realize that my time at Sivananda will be no more the “real India” than Rishikesh, the city of saints, or hiding away in any other ashram. The life of yoga ashrams is as much an escape from India as it is from city life in the West, and this realization is the hardest and heaviest-hitting one of my trip. To reiterate my post from a couple weeks ago, “Sacrilege and Sanctity”—there is no “Holy Land”, not in the bazaars of India, not in the war torn Middle East. It doesn’t exist, our Home, wherever it may be, cannot be approached with plane tickets or bus fare; it is not of this world… basic enough, right?
So, what do I mean that I’ve “left” India? I’m feeling more and more that India is a land, not better or worse than any other. It just is—all the political crud, all the social snafus, and all the inner beauty of the individuals who give life its beauty by the perseverance of their spirit through the day-to-day trials that make life what it is. India, I this way, is interchangeable with every other nation. Its ancient traditions and modern flare make it wonderful, even as they make it almost incomprehensible, and all in all, it doesn’t really mean a thing. I’m American—if I’ve learned nothing else on this trip, I’ve learned that I really am American, and I’ve learned the value of that in my own heart and mind. I still think guns are stupid. I still wouldn’t die for my country; I wouldn’t even kill for it. But when I yell at someone over ten or twenty rupees, I think, “Damn straight. Layin’ down the American concepts of justice and equity.”
On the way up to the Canadian Ashram just before coming to India, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s latest, “A Man with No Country.” Vonnegut was arguing that because of all the billion ways he disagrees with American politicians, he feels he isn’t a person of the land or nation himself. I couldn’t disagree more. Because of those disagreements, I believe he (and I) are all the more part of America, because being American has all of that wrapped up in it. I’m thinking now of an Ani song—“I love my country / by which I mean / I am indebted joyfully / to all the people throughout its history / who have fought the government to make right” (from Grand Canyon off of the album Educated Guess).
Anyhow, what I mean to say by this is not that being American and loving my country is some wishy-washy mindlessly submissive patriotism where whatever the guys in power says “goes.” Being American (I wrote a whole essay about this at the beginning of my trip that I can’t wait to revisit!) is, for me, something very powerful. Americans, with so many rich inputs from so many cultures, have a history (and a duty) to lend a compassionate and understanding eye to people in need everywhere. The same eye is a critical eye when it looks on corruption, transferring the same energy as Shiva’s third eye, burning up evil at its root. At least, as an American, I hope this is the role I can fulfill. To me, this seems to all be “American” because it is the concept I have of myself and my power and my attitude towards life that I have grown up with, all the time being American all the way. (Maybe “Being American” just means “Being Me”… every time I attempt to write about this, whether in the essay three months ago that I still haven’t edited and typed up, or in last week’s blog or right now, in writing about race and nationality and social dynamics, it’s so much easier to go to extremes of condemnation and praise than it is to talk about social elements as they are.)
Regardless, what I have just written about, the powers of compassion and understanding and the will to fight, for me, they are all American traits. Do not read: “Exclusively American”; do not read: “Originally American.” As an American, the lines dividing me from other cultures aren’t just blurry, they don’t actually exist. As an American, every part of my culture is part of an ocean fed by all the worlds’ cultural rivers. To be a US citizen is, for me, to inherit the whole world, for everyone to be my ancestor. Stepping back from my own little identity-crisis-in-the-making, being American means, at the very least, that I am not just Indian. I don’t need or desire to imbibe this culture any more than my broken Hindi or daily yoga practice necessitates. I am quite comfortable with being a “dinner-table multiculturalist” if that’s what this makes me.
So, in short, I’m ready to go home. There’s not a whole lot more that India holds for me at this point. In my search for peace and knowledge, I’d do anything to have the peace of my own bedroom—I’d do anything to track down the knowledge that’s in the last season of Six Feet Under, not to mention the fact that if I spent less time worrying about where to find good food and a place to rest, I could probably actually read a bit more.
I just saw Paul Mayeda Berges (Bend it like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice) new movie (has it been out in the States long? It’s just opening here…) Mistress of Spices. Though not absolutely perfect, it was wonderful in communicating its ideas. The crux of it, to me, seemed to echo Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, which I read as part of my acculturation just before flying to India. The idea is that for an Indian in America (and, in my reading/viewing, for an American in India) it’s impossible and impractical to live in the land without compromising to the culture, and yet, it’s also just as impossible and every bit as impractical to try and live a life without paying respects to and bringing in the important elements from your own mother culture. So, here’s me, running around India with my rough Indian head-wobble, which I seem to use at the wrong moment sometimes, and my broken Hindi, and my Hindu rosary, clinging on to all my American past that I see fit—clinging on to my values and my cosmology, and desperately insisting, “no, I’m not a Hindu.”
(Fun story: A Tibetan asked me the other day if I was a monk because I was buying some particularly pious things from his “Tibetan Store” [that’s the name of the store] I smiled wide at the question and said, “I’m a monk in disguise.” Which I thought was clever enough, but he insisted: “What monastery are you from?” “Umm, I’m with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.” “Hunh?” “Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.” “Oh. Ravi Shankar. Hindu.” He was disheartened. I defended, “No no, I’m not a Hindu…” and proceeded to try to define my religio-spiritual identifications.)
I was writing home to a friend yesterday, and came upon a really great thought— “it’s weird to leave India with so many dreams and fantasies of the Orient still unfulfilled.” I’ve been facing this a lot lately. I haven’t tracked down any Sufi pirs—I’ve thus not learned to spin in circles to achieve a drunken state of ecstatic union with “the Beloved.” I haven’t tracked down any wise Buddhist monks who thus haven’t taught me about the suffering in existence through the communion of their pregnant and knowing silence. I haven’t hiked up the Himalayas to stow away in a cave and learn lessons on yoga from an emaciated dread-locked Sadhu. Okay, so, whatever, I have done stuff really close to all of that, but still, as desires (that Buddhist monk I didn’t meet yet would be proud) they all remain unfulfilled and self-perpetuated, as desires generally do. Instead of ahimsa (non-violence), I find I generally slaughter mosquitoes en masse. Instead of acceptance and understanding, I find half the time I am thinking somewhat racist generalizations that end in the thought “Dumb Schmuck” that I don’t care to write more about on the blog. Instead of inner peace and equanimity, I find I am usually hung-over from the previous day’s coffee and tea consumption and unable to sit still during morning meditation. Virtually all of the Buddhist monks I’ve met in India are just the co-habitants of the Tibetan Hotel I’ve been staying at for the past week. They are hall-mates who pass by with a smile, not personal teachers who transmit ancient sutras to me. Okay, fine.
As I said earlier, I have done enough spiritual traveling while dragging my suitcases around India to be more than happy with the trip. I’ve had great moments with Sri Sri. (While explaining that I was studying Indian Spirituality to a Bangalorean in a coffee shop today, he asked, “Have you learned about Ravi Shankar?” Cha-ching. I felt really “on track.”) I’ve had wonderful, transcendent conversations with friends. I’ve experienced blissful, ecstatic moments of dissolution of my thoughts and worries that I can’t describe. I’ve been part of spiritual movements with Art of Living that I never thought would take place in my life anywhere in the world. So, it really is just the nature of desire to want to have all these other experiences. I still want them, for sure, but the desire is stronger now to reunite with American culture and its own spirituality. John Keay wrote in “Into India” about how the solemnity that sanctifies a Western religious experience has no place in the noisy, bustling temples of Hinduism, and from the realization that gave me, I have been longing for the quiet community of a Christian church and the individuality that is somehow more respected in Western religious communities. (I just killed a mosquito.)
Anyhow, compounding all these personal frustrations that have been producing the kinds of thoughts that I’ve been writing about now and last week, is the very real actuality of my leg. I had the cast taken off a couple days ago—now the 6 week mark from breaking my poor lil’ tibia. I initially tried to quite the crutches cold turkey, and found instantly that I had a mean limp and a swollen ankle. Rotating, stretching, and otherwise “working” the joint in the nights and morning gives way to sharp pains and ominous cracking. (Got another mosquito. Actually, make that two more.) Frustrated from pain and efforts, I am scared shitless that it won’t heal completely. The prospect of carrying with me a limp or random nerve pain is both sobering and fierce. I am both mourning the (hopefully ‘temporary’) loss of mobility and freedom, and also impressed with gratitude and wonder about how much of a miracle of health and ability I still have. Walking around Rishikesh without my glasses the day that I had my new pairs made gave me a lot of perspective about having my five senses working, and I think I’ve already written a lot about how being in India with a broken leg is quite a bit like being a constant by-stander. Only when absorbed in reading or writing or watching television can I really forget myself and my (again, hopefully temporary) handicap. Yet, this same “forgetting of myself” is what has grown to become my reminder of, “I am not this body.” A reminder which becomes transcendent at moments. Yet, whether I am my body or not, the thought of not being able to walk normally again does scare me shitless. So, in closing, yes, Mom, I did start using my crutches again.
So, what do I mean that I’ve “left” India? I’m feeling more and more that India is a land, not better or worse than any other. It just is—all the political crud, all the social snafus, and all the inner beauty of the individuals who give life its beauty by the perseverance of their spirit through the day-to-day trials that make life what it is. India, I this way, is interchangeable with every other nation. Its ancient traditions and modern flare make it wonderful, even as they make it almost incomprehensible, and all in all, it doesn’t really mean a thing. I’m American—if I’ve learned nothing else on this trip, I’ve learned that I really am American, and I’ve learned the value of that in my own heart and mind. I still think guns are stupid. I still wouldn’t die for my country; I wouldn’t even kill for it. But when I yell at someone over ten or twenty rupees, I think, “Damn straight. Layin’ down the American concepts of justice and equity.”
On the way up to the Canadian Ashram just before coming to India, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s latest, “A Man with No Country.” Vonnegut was arguing that because of all the billion ways he disagrees with American politicians, he feels he isn’t a person of the land or nation himself. I couldn’t disagree more. Because of those disagreements, I believe he (and I) are all the more part of America, because being American has all of that wrapped up in it. I’m thinking now of an Ani song—“I love my country / by which I mean / I am indebted joyfully / to all the people throughout its history / who have fought the government to make right” (from Grand Canyon off of the album Educated Guess).
Anyhow, what I mean to say by this is not that being American and loving my country is some wishy-washy mindlessly submissive patriotism where whatever the guys in power says “goes.” Being American (I wrote a whole essay about this at the beginning of my trip that I can’t wait to revisit!) is, for me, something very powerful. Americans, with so many rich inputs from so many cultures, have a history (and a duty) to lend a compassionate and understanding eye to people in need everywhere. The same eye is a critical eye when it looks on corruption, transferring the same energy as Shiva’s third eye, burning up evil at its root. At least, as an American, I hope this is the role I can fulfill. To me, this seems to all be “American” because it is the concept I have of myself and my power and my attitude towards life that I have grown up with, all the time being American all the way. (Maybe “Being American” just means “Being Me”… every time I attempt to write about this, whether in the essay three months ago that I still haven’t edited and typed up, or in last week’s blog or right now, in writing about race and nationality and social dynamics, it’s so much easier to go to extremes of condemnation and praise than it is to talk about social elements as they are.)
Regardless, what I have just written about, the powers of compassion and understanding and the will to fight, for me, they are all American traits. Do not read: “Exclusively American”; do not read: “Originally American.” As an American, the lines dividing me from other cultures aren’t just blurry, they don’t actually exist. As an American, every part of my culture is part of an ocean fed by all the worlds’ cultural rivers. To be a US citizen is, for me, to inherit the whole world, for everyone to be my ancestor. Stepping back from my own little identity-crisis-in-the-making, being American means, at the very least, that I am not just Indian. I don’t need or desire to imbibe this culture any more than my broken Hindi or daily yoga practice necessitates. I am quite comfortable with being a “dinner-table multiculturalist” if that’s what this makes me.
So, in short, I’m ready to go home. There’s not a whole lot more that India holds for me at this point. In my search for peace and knowledge, I’d do anything to have the peace of my own bedroom—I’d do anything to track down the knowledge that’s in the last season of Six Feet Under, not to mention the fact that if I spent less time worrying about where to find good food and a place to rest, I could probably actually read a bit more.
I just saw Paul Mayeda Berges (Bend it like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice) new movie (has it been out in the States long? It’s just opening here…) Mistress of Spices. Though not absolutely perfect, it was wonderful in communicating its ideas. The crux of it, to me, seemed to echo Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, which I read as part of my acculturation just before flying to India. The idea is that for an Indian in America (and, in my reading/viewing, for an American in India) it’s impossible and impractical to live in the land without compromising to the culture, and yet, it’s also just as impossible and every bit as impractical to try and live a life without paying respects to and bringing in the important elements from your own mother culture. So, here’s me, running around India with my rough Indian head-wobble, which I seem to use at the wrong moment sometimes, and my broken Hindi, and my Hindu rosary, clinging on to all my American past that I see fit—clinging on to my values and my cosmology, and desperately insisting, “no, I’m not a Hindu.”
(Fun story: A Tibetan asked me the other day if I was a monk because I was buying some particularly pious things from his “Tibetan Store” [that’s the name of the store] I smiled wide at the question and said, “I’m a monk in disguise.” Which I thought was clever enough, but he insisted: “What monastery are you from?” “Umm, I’m with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.” “Hunh?” “Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.” “Oh. Ravi Shankar. Hindu.” He was disheartened. I defended, “No no, I’m not a Hindu…” and proceeded to try to define my religio-spiritual identifications.)
I was writing home to a friend yesterday, and came upon a really great thought— “it’s weird to leave India with so many dreams and fantasies of the Orient still unfulfilled.” I’ve been facing this a lot lately. I haven’t tracked down any Sufi pirs—I’ve thus not learned to spin in circles to achieve a drunken state of ecstatic union with “the Beloved.” I haven’t tracked down any wise Buddhist monks who thus haven’t taught me about the suffering in existence through the communion of their pregnant and knowing silence. I haven’t hiked up the Himalayas to stow away in a cave and learn lessons on yoga from an emaciated dread-locked Sadhu. Okay, so, whatever, I have done stuff really close to all of that, but still, as desires (that Buddhist monk I didn’t meet yet would be proud) they all remain unfulfilled and self-perpetuated, as desires generally do. Instead of ahimsa (non-violence), I find I generally slaughter mosquitoes en masse. Instead of acceptance and understanding, I find half the time I am thinking somewhat racist generalizations that end in the thought “Dumb Schmuck” that I don’t care to write more about on the blog. Instead of inner peace and equanimity, I find I am usually hung-over from the previous day’s coffee and tea consumption and unable to sit still during morning meditation. Virtually all of the Buddhist monks I’ve met in India are just the co-habitants of the Tibetan Hotel I’ve been staying at for the past week. They are hall-mates who pass by with a smile, not personal teachers who transmit ancient sutras to me. Okay, fine.
As I said earlier, I have done enough spiritual traveling while dragging my suitcases around India to be more than happy with the trip. I’ve had great moments with Sri Sri. (While explaining that I was studying Indian Spirituality to a Bangalorean in a coffee shop today, he asked, “Have you learned about Ravi Shankar?” Cha-ching. I felt really “on track.”) I’ve had wonderful, transcendent conversations with friends. I’ve experienced blissful, ecstatic moments of dissolution of my thoughts and worries that I can’t describe. I’ve been part of spiritual movements with Art of Living that I never thought would take place in my life anywhere in the world. So, it really is just the nature of desire to want to have all these other experiences. I still want them, for sure, but the desire is stronger now to reunite with American culture and its own spirituality. John Keay wrote in “Into India” about how the solemnity that sanctifies a Western religious experience has no place in the noisy, bustling temples of Hinduism, and from the realization that gave me, I have been longing for the quiet community of a Christian church and the individuality that is somehow more respected in Western religious communities. (I just killed a mosquito.)
Anyhow, compounding all these personal frustrations that have been producing the kinds of thoughts that I’ve been writing about now and last week, is the very real actuality of my leg. I had the cast taken off a couple days ago—now the 6 week mark from breaking my poor lil’ tibia. I initially tried to quite the crutches cold turkey, and found instantly that I had a mean limp and a swollen ankle. Rotating, stretching, and otherwise “working” the joint in the nights and morning gives way to sharp pains and ominous cracking. (Got another mosquito. Actually, make that two more.) Frustrated from pain and efforts, I am scared shitless that it won’t heal completely. The prospect of carrying with me a limp or random nerve pain is both sobering and fierce. I am both mourning the (hopefully ‘temporary’) loss of mobility and freedom, and also impressed with gratitude and wonder about how much of a miracle of health and ability I still have. Walking around Rishikesh without my glasses the day that I had my new pairs made gave me a lot of perspective about having my five senses working, and I think I’ve already written a lot about how being in India with a broken leg is quite a bit like being a constant by-stander. Only when absorbed in reading or writing or watching television can I really forget myself and my (again, hopefully temporary) handicap. Yet, this same “forgetting of myself” is what has grown to become my reminder of, “I am not this body.” A reminder which becomes transcendent at moments. Yet, whether I am my body or not, the thought of not being able to walk normally again does scare me shitless. So, in closing, yes, Mom, I did start using my crutches again.
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