All week, photos of my last India trip have been floating to the surface of my memory feeds. It’s been a decade since I’ve been out of the country, a couple of years now since I’ve taken a flight longer than an hour and change, so it’s almost hard to remember all the years where it seemed I was living to travel. If I had an addiction, it was to the feeling of possibility that comes with letting go of one place to get to the other. All that potential, for change, for adventure, for something else, period.
Escape. Getting away. If I could go somewhere different, perhaps I would be different, better somehow.
Curiosity is one thing, nameless aspiration another.
I lived in the same house for my first 18 years, with more than one unsatisfied resident, which encouraged my thinking that an improved version of life was somewhere else. Because we had a lot of room to roam around our house, outside became the first place to start that search. My siblings and I went on ‘expeditions’ up in the surrounding hills, or down at the creek. I began to study the comings and goings of birds. Now they were onto something.
If we weren’t outside, books and magazines, more than TV, became the portal to other worlds. I taped a National Geographic map of bird migration to the back of my bedroom door. I was getting ideas. There was something else, a lot of something else out there.
Once I learned to ride a bike, the road became the gateway, wheels my starter wings. An early car trip with my best friend and her mom across the Southwest widened the possibilities again. After my first plane flight, to Hawaii with another friend when we were in high school, I was hooked. An airline ticket felt like a magic key.
I sought out that key for decades, taking jobs that required travel, then happily taking music gigs out of town.
Leaving is easy. Coming back, landing, doing the work of maintaining a place and relationships, not so much. And the true price of leaving can’t be quantified, especially if you’re not staying for the duration.
The hard realizations of having left many things as much as losses I couldn’t control, ultimately led me to yoga practice. After cycling, and the work travel and road trips, I found I could have a world of experiences spending an hour and a half breathing and assuming different shapes. The yoga studio started to be one of the few places I felt good.
But not always.
There had to be more, right? Conveniently yoga was a practice from an exotic land on the other side of the globe.
Practicing and studying in India became another carrot. There had to be something extra, better, there.
Now it seems funny to think that the longest trips I’ve taken were instigated by a practice which allowed me to have so much experience in a small rectangle of space.
Yesterday, this picture from my last trip to India came up. I look at it and think of how the four trips I took to India over a span of eight years transformed me, broke me, inspired me, disillusioned me and ultimately made me embrace my life in a different way. I think of all the places my feet have been, how dirty they got, walking around on those dirty streets in flip flops! I think of refuge and how any refuge can become constrictive. And I think of a whole lot of other things about community and patriarchy and spiritual abuse that I’ll save for another time.
That last trip was difficult in many ways, but it helped me turn fully toward the life that was waiting for me in the US. Part of that was realizing there is no ultimate there out there. There’s no magic solution to the problems of one’s life or outside approval that will fix everything. There’s only showing up here, in your own skin, and doing your best, wherever here is at any moment.
Your heart has all the answers
Just like the earth has all the water it will ever need
The weight of it all can bring us down
Or give us the ground we need