Getting Started

How do you turn desires into actions, dreams into realities? This is the story, mostly a travel story, of how Susan and I finally made it to India, Bhutan and Nepal. All it took was the right opportunity and a little willingness on our parts along with financial and temporal resources.

The prospect of India.
Why now comes down to three elements, preparation, an appropriate guide and the opportunity to experience the spiritual pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela. We have been to fairly exotic places: Rarotonga and remote South Pacific islands, Fiji, Bali, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Burning Man, all of these we see as just preparations for India; the most other of  civilizations to our own life in Pasadena California. India: spiritual, poor, ancient, dangerous and yet welcoming. There is something that calls us to experience the 'other', other ways of being in our world that are not necessarily better or worse, just different; to be able to see the world through another's eyes. The easiest version of this would be just being in the UK and other places that drive on the left side of the road. The social edict to 'keep right' starts to feel organic to us in our society but it is only a social convention. How much of our life follows conventional thinking and starts to feel like it is the only natural way? Or the experience in Bali and other places of only using the right hand for eating and social interactions. Or wadding into traffic in Viet Nam, trusting that the cars and scooters will magically go around me. Or having kava with the chief of a small village on an off island of Fiji, following their custom, suddenly being part of the village, no longer a stranger. And music, all of these places with their own sound tracks. Dancing in Fiji, church music in Rarotonga, the Barong in Bali and everywhere chanting always going on. These places have their own sounds, singing, music, chanting; dancing and pulsing with life. India alone offers more universes than all the places we have been. And we want to experience them, to sing and chant and dance together, no longer strangers.

Like most miracles our guide arrived inadvertently when a friend of a friend was visiting our church. Shanti was pleasant enough and said she and her Indian husband, Javit, lead trips to India. Fair enough, we exchange pleasantries and email addresses and went on with our lives not thinking much about it. Some days later an email arrives with some travel information and a web link. Susan and I look over the itinerary, look at each other and simultaneously say 'this is it'. Going in the right season to most of the places we want to go. More a spiritual than a recreational tour. We would go to some common places like New Delhi and the Taj Mahal but more importantly Amritsar (the Skihs temple), Sarnath (the Buddhas first lecture), Vernasari, Mother Theresa's place in Kolkata. and most importantly the Kumbh Mela, the ancient and contemporary Hindu pilgrimage which occurs only ever twelve years and will  gather 50 million souls to the shores of the Ganges.  What an opportunity. A western guide and an Indian guide, about a dozen people in the group, going to where we want to go. We call my sister Sybil and her husband Henry who live in Jerome Arizona and tell them of this opportunity and they are in too. They talk to friends of theirs and we have another couple. It all just comes together.

Bhutan. In some kind of mystical way I have wanted to go to Bhutan for at least as long as I have heard about it. A remote, mountainous, cold Buddhist kingdom. They were not open to any visitors until the 1960s , they did not even have a currency. Half the country still does not have electricity. Yet it has a reputation from those few who have visited there as actually being 'the happiest place on earth' and it is not an amusement park. They have developed the concept of GNH Gross National Happiness to focus on rather then GNP, Gross National Product, a purely financial measurement. I meditate in various Buddhist traditions, mostly Japanese Zen and Siri Lankan vipassana as well as modern western versions. Bhutan has a very pure form of Buddhism similar to Tibetan which calls to me.  Amazingly, to me, our older son had been there 20 years ago. He knew I wanted to go and one day I get a call he is going on a tour there with some friends of his, before me! Combination of ecstatic for him and a bit of jealousy too. He comes back with stories, pictures and a mandala which is promptly hung on the wall of our dining room. Someday I WILL get there. And now that we are planning to visit India it is time.

Nepal. Nepal never called to my but it did for Susan and since I added Bhutan she added Nepal. A mountainous Hindu country. Sybil had be there a couple times in her climbing days and wants to see how it has changed twenty years on. A pristine version of India, so I'm told.

Ganesha, the remover of obstacles. Like any great project one sets out to do the first thing one encounters is obstacles. In my case it is medical. I have a fairly common heart condition atrial fibrillation (a-fib). An episode arrives quite randomly, generally not very strong or long I had a major episode in 2007 which helped me decide to retire in 2008. Not much to do about it just taking a couple mild medications but now events are more frequent and stronger. The cardiologist puts me on a stronger medication and has me wear a heart monitor for a month and just two weeks before trip is to leave she calls and says to cancel the trip and come in for a heart proceedure. She is concerned that my pulse had hit 250+ at one point and this should be treated now. I am totally crestfallen. I explain to her that I am planning a spiritual trip to an event that only happens ever twelve years and I would already be on the Ganges if anything fatal occurred. Surprised, she goes over my records with the electro physiologist and they decide that since I went through such an a-fib event without fainting I must have a basically strong heart from many years of running. I can go with the instruction to take extra meds if my heart should speed up and when I get back the surgery will be scheduled.