Mcleod Ganj, Sunday, January 11th

Vultures are holy creatures
Tending to the dead
Bowed low
Bared heads
Whispering to cold flesh
“Your old name is not your king, I rename you Everything” -Jarod K. Anderson

Rivers of experiencing shimmer through awareness, and every moment feels suffused with meaning and poignancy. My beloved, I have come to you empty- handed, needing nothing, expecting nothing, and you give me everything.

I am at a loss, dear reader, to provide you with any words, any images, that will suffice to capture the full-on 4D experience that this week has been. A week?! Impossible. Surely the month of our time here has already passed?

Finding time to write has been quite challenging. But today, steeped in a relapse of my bronchitis from 2 weeks ago, my body is forcing me to sit on my butt and enjoy the view from the balcony in front of my room. You can share a small slice of this view in the featured image above.

Having left my laptop at home, I’ll be writing through the tiny interface on my phone, and mostly using speech to text , which is a bit fussy and painstaking. So please forgive me if punctuation and spelling and justification of paragraphs seem odd. I think this will provide a fine accompaniment to the India that presents itself to me, stitched together by miles and miles of whatever works. And not just physically: spiritually, religiously, politically, socially, architecturally, aesthetically, linguistically…

I have been immersed in the traffic of Bogota, Tainan, Taipei, Buenos Aires, Singapore, Mexico, and a whole host of small and large European cities and of course all over America. But the tuk tuk ride from the railway station to our lodgings in Santiniketan was a whole new order of chaos.

Entire thoroughfares will spontaneously become one-way streets for a time, just because nobody happens to be going the other direction, so the entire traffic flow just fills the boulevard. Then suddenly a massive city bus will emerge out of nowhere, careening its way the other direction, and everybody just works it out. Pedestrians, motorcycles, bicycles, tuk-tuks, cows, random animals, buses, and trucks of all sizes share the same pathway, with no apparent divisions or rules governing their passage. The governing principle seems to be: stay alert, act with confidence, and commit, trusting that you and everyone else are on the same page about wanting to stay alive and intact.

To aid you at least a little bit, I’ve created a shared Google photos album, where you can view some of the videos and pictures that Kiran and I have been capturing.

You might want to bookmark that album and come back to it frequently, as we’re dropping media there daily. Please let me know if you have any trouble accessing that album.

Being the audio junkie that I am, I’ve also been recording ambient files from time to time. I can’t share those to the Google album, but I will occasionally post one here to this blog.

So get your headphones on and check out the file below. I made this recording at the Kolkata train station late one evening when we were all completely blotto from a day of travel. Fair warning, some may find this overstimulating 🙂:

Each one of the scenes I capture seem like bottled madness, but here’s the thing: every single one of them is thoroughly, relentlessly, unrepentantly alive, and in a way that I have never experienced before in any of the countries I’ve traveled. And perhaps it is this aliveness, this utter presence that meets you in the eyes of every passerby, that allows it all to move and flow and just work out. One way or the other.

I don’t want to live here, but I love it.

Traveling with Kiran and providing him space to just talk and talk and talk about everything that’s coming up for him has been an incredible gift, and joy to behold. He’s getting quite a lot out of this trip, and it has only begun. It was he who found the poem I included at the top of this post. I feel so very fortunate to have this time, this journey, together with this incredibly brilliant, special person.

From Kiran:

Paul may have no expectations for India, but I could not be more different.

Less expectations for India and more for myself, honestly.

If you are not mixed or are not an immigrant or are not adopted or anything in that vein I cannot fully describe the strange void many of us carry within us. There is a sadness in coming here and still feeling like an outsider. Especially when people also make me feel like an outsider back where I was born.

Everyone traveling with us has love for this place, but I am different, in that it is also a source of pain and bigotry for me. A reminder that I am exotic and strange no matter where I go.

But that’s the complicated hard stuff. This place is also beautiful. The mountains and pine forests of Himachal Pradesh are not only where my blood comes from, but are very similar to where I grew up.Being here in the northeast is wonderful because I can look at the beauty of the Himalayas and know that those are MY ancestors’ mountains. My ancestors’ home. And a place I have such affection for.

The color is beautiful and rich, and the clothes and food are the same. The people are beautiful and it is a feeling like no other finally seeing myself in the faces around me.