It’s been well over a month since the last post, and what a time it’s been. Mainly because I now know where I’m going to be living for the next good solid chunk of my life. My near-year of nomadic wandering is drawing to a close soon. I’ve bought a home. Everyone’s first reaction when I told them was “I didn’t expect you to find something that quickly!” And I didn’t either, actually. It all just sort of happened. After leaving Bowen Island at the end of April and just before heading back to another yoga/meditation workshop with Oda Lindner …
perspective
It seems really odd to be writing this blog now. It feels like adding one more scene after the movie credits have already rolled. I mean, I’m back in Canada. That’s like neutral territory. I’ve been keeping this travel blog and now I’m not really traveling, not the same way. Why am I writing? What do you want to hear about? Hi, um, I got my taxes done this week and I found a good price on avocados? Okay, I guess there’s a little more going on than that. I came over to Bowen Island last weekend to stay for …
What is happening to time?! I’ve got barely two weeks left in India, and still feeling like there’s not enough time to do all the things (including doing nothing). And including blogging – I’ve still got three of the five senses left to write about, dammit. I’ve got a followup post in mind about Missy and Rorschach that would read like a soap opera. And yet another week goes by, vroom. It’s been a weird few weeks, actually. I had some kind of unpleasant digestive stuff going on – not food poisoning, but obviously something had thrown my system out …
I’ve mainly been writing about the things that happen around here, the things I see and smell and hear and do. I haven’t been writing as much about the internal experience here, which is really the largest part of my focus. It’s a tricky thing to write about. For one, it’s so abstract, as I’ve written about before. Whatever words are used to describe the sort of personal explorations I have here are still just words. It doesn’t really capture it. A lot of it is about feelings and sensations; I’ve been doing hours of guided meditations that focus on …
You hear a lot about the intensity and vibrance of India in the West, and you see pretty colourful pictures and shocking filthy ones, and you watch some Bollywood movies and you read excellent novels. But it’s hard to convey what that intensity is actually like in person. In fact, once you come back to the West and India isn’t part of your present moment any more, it fades into memories that just look and sound a lot like the pictures and stories you’ve seen and read. In a series of five blog posts over the next few months, I’m …