After India

September 14th, 2007 at 07:29pm Barbara Floria Orcutt 332

Two days back from India and it's happening again - tears at the slightest provocation. I could chalk it up to jet lag, but it didn't happen after Thailand, or even the emotional jolt of Vietnam. Georgia says I cried for three months after my first trip. Not every day, or all the time, mind you, but enough.

No, it's India again. And it's one reason I am drawn back to its painful beauty. And why I suppose, even though as my latest trip drew to a close I thought this would be the last, I will be back.

These tears in response to memories of conversations, a musical strain, pictures I took in Delhi and a Mary Oliver poem that ends

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

are testimony to the lessons of India that continue long after I am home.

Its as if I am handed the exam while I am there, but must write the essay in the weeks and months after my I am home.

It's as ee comings wrote:

“(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”

Two years may be the optimum cycle for passages to India. It takes that long for me to process the experience; to ready myself for the next course and to recover from the last. Any sooner and I wouldn't be ready, the circuits would overload.

So I sit in my office in my home in the exquisite quiet of West Glenwood. On a cool, dry morning. The sun rises slowly on Red Mountain across the valley. The aspen trees still green, yet on the verge of changing to pure gold.

And the tears come. And the unknowing. And a remembrance of Rilke's admonition to:

“be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue.
The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way some distant day into the answer.”

I apologize. At the moment I don't know any other way to share what I am talking about or feeling except through poems which seem to point the way.

Entry Filed under: Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Travel, Garfield County, Women, United Post