MALLS ARE AMERICA'S CATHEDRALS

Yesterday, not wanting to fall into a funk at being back I impulsively got into the car and went to the mall -- wanted to get myself a sweat suit, comfort in clothing being far more important than looks and appearance now. My first drive in our ten year old Infinity after over 7 months felt so damn smooth! Our Indian Scorpio, though comfortable enough, felt like a bullock cart in comparison. I tuned the radio to my favorite Jazz station (Jazz 88) and pushed the peddle. I thought as I drove that malls are America's cathedrals, serving a highly, if I may say, spiritual function. They give one a place to go when the walls of your house feel like they are "eating" you (an expression from Panjabi: khar deeyaan diwaraan khaan noon andiyaan jai) and you need to get out, be engaged, be in that space where an activity leaves no room for thought. A meditation. The absolute concentration of hunting for that particular thing.

Undoubtedly I'm back in America: America that takes away family, connections, relatedness, and gives you shopping in its stead. It is no substitute, but for the nonce, it works.

JET LAG AND BRUSHING TEETH

Will begin gently, unobtrusively, to slide into my American skin that always feels a bit tight in the re-beginning. But begin I must, as always, to give structure to my days, gainful engagement, activity. Two nights ago in dream I go to a garage sale where the lady is selling all sorts of junky stuff including stained, old towels which the woman I go with (who?) buys; I only pick up a few wooden rulers with lovely patterns on them, some etched. I thought about them all day yesterday and wondered what they meant, but I think now that I have to begin to measure my time again. I have been back since the 31^st of Oct, had a weepy evening missing everything Indian, and then just allowed myself to rest and sleep. Felt the old depression surfacing yesterday evening after a walk to downtown Del Mar and a walk back along the cliffs, and it is very essential for me not to tire myself out beyond my endurance. I have not recovered from my lung infection. 

As always, before leaving and after returning from both India and the US, I feel the presence of death very strongly. Each time and each way it feels like a return to a different lifetime. Humans were not meant to live like this but like plants, in their respective pots. They cannot take too much uprooting, each one being a mini death. Each time I return to Southern California I am struck by its aridity, both physical and metaphysical. Because I am looking at it through the eyes of my jet lag, it looks tired and barren to me, if not dead. My moldy (living near the ocean has its drawbacks) clothes, shoes, handbags, books, disenchant me from possessions, but then it doesn’t take long for me to get into them. I ordered black gore-tex boots yesterday! I reprimanded myself for two hours for doing it, but then walking on the cliffs the tread from my old boots came off and I was amazed that ordering boots made absolute sense. Intuition applies as much to shopping as divine things! 

Walking about aimlessly, staring at things that need to be done, hoping something will draw and suck me in, something will make me forget that I am utterly aimless. It is the hardest thing to deal with – not being tired enough to sleep, nor tireless enough to do something – anything; when doing nothing doesn’t feel right and neither does doing.; when the thought of brushing one’s teeth presents itself like an absolutely ingenious idea and the ability to really get into brushing them, the way one can only do with a manual brush, is the greatest gift the universe can offer.

Yes, it is direction one loses above all during jet lag, having been spun around in space over different spaces and times. The body/mind doesn’t know where it is, and the soul has taken wings to some spaceless space where it can be at rest.

RETURN, TEARS, AND EXILE

The other life begins -- sort of -- after a long limbo. In fact, the limbo has just begun, the limbo of jet lag that only seems to attack me when I fly west. My first few days here are always rich with nostalgia for India. I say 'rich' because I am not prone to tears, and when they spring up it is an unexpected, deep plugging into my emotional self, which appears to have diminished as I age. I live with some other faculties. But I do love the feeling of tears, for they make me feel 'normal.' My mother and my sister, however, are full of them, and I am full of wonder at how the hell they can cry so much and so easily. The first day back my nostalgia touches the ridiculous: I find myself saving Indian recycled bags, useless old receipts, as if they were relics of a life from which I have been exiled. I call my mother, my sister and allow myself to say sentimental things. I can only do it with them, or my sweetheart, Ajuni, my six year old grand niece, with whom I have a tight connection. I find myself clinging to Payson as a life saver. In short, I experience an aspect of myself that I feel is dead for the most part.

It doesn't last long, and perhaps that is why I cherish it. I have become -- other than this brief lapse during jet lag -- accustomed to exile. Exile is my essential condition not only in the US where my six-month visit has sifted down my friendships and connections, but in India also, living up in the Himalayas where there is no social life to speak of, but where nature and my dogs provide me with a deep sense of connectedness. As time passes -- generally about two weeks -- and my body/brain become used to another place, another way of being -- I will get over it -- and not merely. I will love my life here, at a level of solitude unimaginable in India. But after so many years of commuting between the continents, and observing myself in my life, I am wise enough to know that those aspects of myself that I do not normally experience (tears, nostalgia, sentimentality) exist in my deep substratum and only await an opportunity to surface.

DEATH OPENS A DOOR THAT NOTHING ELSE CAN. IT IS THE DOOR TO LOVE

I'll write about this briefly, though it is such a long, tragic story. Payson's sister, Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, died yesterday. She had a tragic life but her death was redeemed. She had been estranged from her whole family, including her children, being a difficult person, living from the center of her ego (very accomplished and educated; a writer, singer, feminist: the list is long and I have many chores to do today). Great good fortune and the help of friends and of course, Papa Payson, reunited her with her children before her death. Her son was astounded by two facts: "All her ego is gone!" he wrote before her death; and "she keeps saying, Love is the only thing that matters."

This is a great legacy from someone whose life had been one long travail due to her ego (wanting everything her own way) and the inability to love. May we all remember to keep our ego, that puts grids on Reality, in check, and learn to love openly before we die.

A GOODBYE FOR OVER A MONTH

No more posts for now -- I still have a few more left in me before I leave, if time allows. Will resume here in the middle of Nov when I have internet. Will try to write posts anyway which will be published later -- with a time lapse.

THE BARS OF THE PRISON ARE CLOSING IN, IT'S TIME TO FLY AWAY!

Before we leave our India home for the season, we puts grills on all the windows -- this house is a house of windows to let the outside in. We have to do this several days before we leave as they take time to install. It always makes me feel like a prisoner inside my own home: the river, the trees, the hills and rocks are all seen through a grid of squares. It strikes me as I write this that when we are imprisoned inside ourselves this is how we see all of life -- broken up into bits and pieces, not as the whole it is. I know this of myself, for lately I have molted out of a tight skin and being new, am seeing the world in a light far, far larger than the tight and constricted eyes of my ego.

But I had meant to write of literal, time-bound events -- our leaving here tomorrow to go down to the city, cities, and then after a nice holiday, fly back to our other home. Payson had been distraught lately because he hadn't heard our blue whistling thrush  -- with the most lovely, liquid and lyrical of songs -- sing for several months. I heard about it practically every day but he wasn't consoled by my explanation that the bird had a singing block. But this morning he heard it! I didn't, being half deaf without my hearing aids in the morning, but seeing his joy was enough for me. We can leave happily!

YOU LOVE IT MOST AT THE POINT OF LOSING IT, OR PERHAPS DEATH DOES NOT EXIST

I'm thinking here about leaving my little big jungle -- little, because I have personalized it as somehow belonging to me even though I know it never, ever can; belonging to my eyes for the moment, perhaps; and big, no, huge, because it it is so impenetrable and vast. This October light, too, melancholy at the edges, in which the green is so very translucent, thin, on the verge of changing color and falling to the ground to fertilize its Mother Tree for spring next year, helps you want to get attached to it. It's all mulch for life -- death is mulch for life. Perhaps there isn't any death at all, for us humans, too -- why should we be so very different from every other particle of creation, every one of which, science tells us, remains from the very beginning of time, recycling in different forms, different colors and sizes and shapes in different parts of the universe's geography?