Nineteen eighty-four.

What was at one time a distant dream, the darkness of a book, an election year, a future, became the present. We didn’t have to do anything; we didn’t lift a finger, but gradually the date overtook us and passed us by, leaving us stationary at the roadside, the dusty wind of its passage playing and tugging at our hair and our clothes, the sun baking the asphalt underfoot and burning our faces to leather.

In 1985, I spent several months living on the island of Java, in Yogyakarta, having traveled there with a partner in the evening of our intimacy. I sat out nights with our mutual friend Muller, a Sumatran who was studying at the University, on the grass mats of Jalan Malioboro, smoking Kretek cigarettes and drinking sugary tea, and spooning up repeat servings of gudeg, a simple local dish perhaps, but with friendship and smoke and inconsequential conversations – I can’t recall even how much was spoken in Indonesian, or English, or not spoken at all – the long evenings were excellent.

Ai, que dificuldade.

Sabe, gente, que só nos terrenos brasileiros é possível viver como brasileiro. Não importa a vontade, não importa a ídioma empregada, não importa o abraço, não importa a comida… se torna brasileiro quem pisa na terra brasileira. Abra a porta carioca, deite na cama paulista, seja tocado pelo vento porto-alegrense… aí gente, o coração cai e quebra, e nos espaços assim criados se insinua o pulso do sul…

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
-- For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

I took some time to gear myself up a bit, and swam out to the lava point at White Rock Beach. I had been practicing snorkeling in the shallows – never having been a water person, further and deeper can bring me closer to the edge of comfort, and unfamiliarity with the techniques and the gear kept me diving, rising, being pushed in by the waves, and drawn back out by the wave-return.

Some two thousand five hundred miles from the coast of California, a “hot spot” in the floor of the Pacific ocean has jetted matter from the heart of earth toward the sky. It passes through cooling waters, and becomes a cone that, over the millennia, breaks the waves and rises thousands of feet above the surface. Unstable, it erupts, explodes, sloughs new earth down the slopes to consolidate, hissing in the sea.

“I’ve never considered myself a spiritual person, but the first time I stopped the boat above a singing male, and dropped the hydrophone in the water…”

Then there is a pause for words, which are not available. This is the well from which the poets draw water, the place beyond words, where words alone are required but will never be adequate. The guest at my cousin’s party spoke of arriving here a few years ago, and beginning a water tour company with her husband. Maui, as it happens, is something of a sacred site for the whales – what else but a sacred site when such large populations congregate here, as compared to other Hawaiian islands?

For those of you who have been following Manny and my trajectory from Massachusetts to India and back again, and are not rooted somewhere half-way ‘round the world, I’d like to invite you to join us for an evening of pictures and stories.

This Saturday, January 20th, at 7:15pm at the Yoga Center of Newburyport, we will offer a warm cup of Masala chai accompanied by some good travel, laughter and stillness and smells and sights and sounds of another land… and perhaps a whiff of another way of being.

Manny and I received a kind note from Sonum, our hostess and guide during our stay at the Tibetan Settlements in Bylakuppe. At the time of our departure, we had spent much of several days in her company, given a walking tour of the monasteries and the farmlands in the area. We left a little money – the only thing we had to offer as a gift, a kindness for her kindnesses – and hoped that it was received in the spirit it was given. 

I met Manny last night – the first time we have really sat down together since our return to the States. After 30 days of intense travel, having shared the floor of the experience, as it were, as well as visited the sky, it was an easy hour which stretched to two, speaking about nothing much.

But the current which flows under words makes the words redundant, or perhaps they are a small harmony in a greater music, so what is shared and what was shared is finer than the inaccurate sounds we make around this topic or that topic. To share the experience of anything with anyone means that you each carry those days within you, a living memory which is reactivated when you meet, whenever you meet.