Coming Home from India

This journey home is 36 hours, 3 flights, innumerable security checks and a pending "jet-lag-from-hell".

I like it.

I like the dream-like feeling of being outside of time. I mean, what time is it anyway when I get up in one country, layover in the next and land eventually at home? It’s “no time”, so I let go of time and time let’s go of me, not something I experience at home except when I’m sound asleep.

And I like the feeling of being outside of any particular country or culture. The airport is an in-between place, a crossing over place, (a tirtha*). It is neither one country nor another. It is a stopping over place for people from every country (especially at an airport like Heathrow where I enjoyed quite a bit of coffee and a 7-hour layover).

And I like feeling – for a short time - that I am “nothing to no one”. 

As I am typing this, we are flying above the polar cap and I am really outside of country and time zone, flying through space.

It’s so weird and magical.

As I arrive back into my life and its daily-ness, I know from experience that it will be both sweet and challenging. Challenging because I tend to hover above it, resisting for a bit the list of what must be done; clinging for a bit to being nothing to no one.

And then, slowly (I know from experience) I will settle down into my life. And all will be well, and not; good and not good; easy and hard; happy and sad. I will sit down in the middle of all those binaries because that is where my life is happening. A tirtha gives me perspective, an ability to step back and see more clearly. But the messy of life in the middle is where I live and love. 

I’m reminded of one of my favorite poems as I prepare to sit down into my life.

Enjoy! And thanks for reading.

The Duck by Donald Babcock

Now we're ready to look at something pretty special. It's a duck, riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf. No it isn't a gull. A gull always has a raucous touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.

He isn't cold, and he is thinking things over. There is a big heaving in the Atlantic, and he is a part of it.

He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.

But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher. He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic.

Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is. And neither do you. But he realizes it.

And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it! He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity — which it is. He has made himself a part of the boundless by easing himself into just where it touches him.

I like the duck. He doesn't know much, but he's got religion.

*Tirtha is a Sanskrit word which means “crossing over place” and is said to have a particular potency or magic because it is an opening to another dimension. Hospitals, airports and graveyards are all examples of “tirthas”.