2/11: Recollections

Every morning I watch monkeys playing on the roof top of my guest house. This morning I counted nine of them.

I ate puri masala at a street stand for breakfast, and was joined by a man from the Czech Republic. He tried to pay his bill with a 100 rupee note (about $2), but the shop couldn't provide change. It took him 10 minutes, going from shop to shop, to find someone who would break such a large denomination.

I wanted to eat idlis at my favorite restaurant at 7:30, but they said they wouldn't be open for a half hour, so I went for a walk. I passed a sign that said, "Dindigal 92 K," and I started walking. Ever since I can remember, I have been drawn by that fantasy to "just start walking." I used to walk on the train tracks near Shil Shol beach in Seattle, heading north, and would fantasize about just walking to Canada. I was always so resistant when it came time to turn around.

I remember when I was seventeen, my best friend Daryl and I graduated high school a half year early and went on a 5,000 mile road trip, "looking for colleges," we told our parents, though we packed all our ski gear. Early in the trip we took a beautiful road to the California coast line called, "King City to the coast." We first sighted the Pacific Ocean from a hill high above, with rolling green hills and farm land all the way to the sea. I remember telling Daryl that I had to walk it. I can't remember now if I did walk it, or if he talked me out of it, but I remember so clearly the feeling of seeing that vast landscape and having to be "in it."

I wrote in my blog on January 12th about the sense of connection to my environment. I wonder now if that "oneness" I sometimes feel, that sense of connection to everything around me, is somehow related to that feeling when I was 17 of having to be "in it" - feeling that connection to nature and not knowing how to relate to it, but wanting to be in it in some more intimate way. Not realizing at the time how intimately I am already connected to everything I sense; not realizing that it is all just as much in me as it is "out there;" not realizing that at some level, in those few moments of inspiration, the "in here" and the "out there" merge, and there is no differentiation.

When I wrote the word "inspiration" it brought back other memories. When I was in my teens I would have "moments of inspiration," I would call them, when I would become one with all that was around me. It was a driving force in my life at the time - to get back to those moments when I would "disappear." I don't know if I now have a better understanding of what those moments were, or if I now just have different words and a different understanding.