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She said … “you don’t just go to India, India calls you.” Waiting for the midnight plane, I knew she was right.
India is calling and I am coming.
Somehow, after 35 years of travel, this is the first trip I have ever taken.. There have been other journeys for pleasure and self-discovery. They seemed like the first time, too..
You don’t really go on an adventure. If you’re lucky, the adventure takes you. It tells you the story,
There is a very old man on the trip with us, a Tibetan monk called a lama (teacher, I think). A month ago, he was pronounced dead in the ICU. The community came in. The funeral planning began. No one wanted to sign the authorization. Doing so constituted a commitment to pay his enormous medical bills.
No breath, no pulse, no eye movement. After three weeks of continual care, he slipped into the next life.
Except he decided not to go, He started to breathe again. His eyes opened. He came back.. And now, a month later, he’s on this 22 hour plane ride. He’s headed back to Dharamsala.
The flight attendants have no idea that they’re handling a miracle. He’s another old dude in a wheelchair.. While they treat him more gently than a sack of potatoes, there are no exceptions for an ancient miracle. In economy class’. Like the rest of us commodities in the cavernous airplane, he is jostled and hustled into his 1.2 square meters of space.
I accept this sort of treatment as a matter of course. Travel is dehumanizing. I notice it as if it it’s the first time when I see the way he is managed by the airline.
In most places, the only sort of celebrity that matters is the kind that can be traced to money. A simple old man who has lived a simple old life doesn‘t quite qualify. We only believe in the kind of people who come back from the dead on Oprah..
Flying through the night, over the Pacific Ocean, I am surrounded by hints and nuances from other adventures. In the early 1990s, I drove a 30 year old British ragtop across the USA on Route 66. With an early Mac laptop and a bare bones budget, I explored the way that technology ages. A decade before that, I lived in the desert in the Middle East for six months.
Each of those adventures punctuated and illuminated my life. This one begins with that same taste in my mouth.
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October 29th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
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