Manny Muros:

I have always had a lot of faith and trust in the goodness of the Universe… A believe that things will always work out for the best. The desire to simply see clearly what is in front of me.

Traveling thru India we have had lots of practice on moving toward a general certain direction and allowing the experience to unfold as it wants to… We’ve been entering one unknown situation after another and yet always feeling a guiding wind move us to our destination. There is always the smiling face that directs us. The intuition to go right instead of left… sometimes it has been to turn back! 

Interesting to watch the broad movements of the brush, see what is being painted as we work our way across the country and through our allotted travel time. We began with the shock of arrival, followed that with the shock of the new, and the shock of being changed… then the shock of allowing change to happen. An intense half-month of deep work and high heights, with our consciousness being stretched every which way, from the sublime to the base, from the political to the social.

Dressed in her hospital uniform, Sonam insisted on calling in an autorickshaw for us, arguing with the driver (who wanted to keep his price open – to anything, apparently), riding us all the way to the bus station, and seeing us safely onto the Mangalore bus before bidding us farewell… we were not outside of anyone’s arms for our whole stay in Bylakuppe.

The road west climbed up into the mountains, where the ruts and curves increased in step with the altitude; beautiful heights, wild and wide vistas high above the local eagle’s lofts, and cool temperatures were payment for our travel. We began among coffee plantation on the eastern slopes, where drier weather presumably makes for better flavor and yield. Small villages and houses tucked along the roadside doubtless fed the labor required for these expanses of cultivated land, and estate villas swelled where the best lands were found. 

The external beauties and (as often as not) challenges are easy to write about, but the inner work is not. Still, I am rising at 5:30 for yoga, each day feeling stronger, more limber, and somehow “cleaner”; I am sitting when I can in meditation – really delighting in being close to the ground, and considering removing some upright furniture from a couple of my rooms; and I am reading and writing along this well-lit path we have taken.

Manny Muros:

I find myself at yet another internet cafe, grounding my energy as I connect with life back home…. Today, Mark and I are completely surrounded by Tibetan monks as we are within the monastery campus.

With the pace of our travels, every few days we seem to enter totally different realities. From the hustle of big cities to meditating in caves, the Matrimandir, and in Tibetan monasteries. We have stayed at fancy hotels and are presently staying at a Tibetan’s family farm house. We have eaten with our hands on an Ashram’s temple floor and had a beer on a rooftop cafe overlooking the lit-up Mysore Palace. Let’s just say we have had a full range of bathroom experiences!

Manny and I left Auroville yesterday with great good-byes, good feelings, and with an amazingly full experience drawn inside of us – only seven days in the place, but in terms of new thoughts, faces and experience…. timeless.

I rose every morning at 5:30 for yoga, 6:00 for meditation, 7:00 for an hour reading Savitri,Sri Aurobindo’s epic of personal and human evolution; then breakfast, and a day free to explore the indescribable wealth of endeavor that is Auroville. I guess, if I am able to continue such practice when I return home, the days will be long and full as well, particularly with such good tilling of the soil prior to planting my self in the day.

I feel a real sadness welling up inside of me as we leave Sri Ramanasramam. It was quite short, just a few days, but the spirit of the place and of the people was remarkable. And as is often the case when you are travelling (as opposed to tourism, where one often carries the bubble of home around them), we met a number of fascinating people, local Indians and visitors from abroad, who made the space and time here incredibly rich and amazingly warm. You never know if these instant connections will grow, should grow, or if they will simply fade into nice memories; still I hope to have the opportunity some day to visit Rama and Adelaida in their Costa Rican retreat, of host them, should they pass through New York and fancy a short side-trip to the north…

Manny asked: “What do you wish to gain from this travel?”

I struggled for a moment to find an answer – everywhere I looked inside of my heart I could find nothing that I wished to add to my life. How often do we fall into an old habit: the search for what is missing? When in fact, it is not something we hope to gain, but rather all that we hope to lose. All of the automatic and assumed attitudes, all of the activity, the movement without pause…

The traveler knows: departure is the front side of return. Those who stay behind see only the farewell; and hope for the wave hello.

For those who are here, on this side of the journey, I leave our travel information. My regrets to a couple of colleagues, to whom I gave an incorrect return date.

21 Oct - 21:05 British Airways BA 0214 from Boston to London 
22 Oct - 14:05 British Airways BA 0119 from London to Bangalore

Typhoid 0.5cc IM.
Tetanus 0.5cc IM.
Hepatitis A 1cc IM.
Polio 0.5cc IM.
Mefloquine Hydrochloride 1/1 week. 

When you travel from the United States to other areas of the world, you are strongly advised to renew your boosters: a couple of days of discomfort to stave off life-threatening or life-shorting diseases endemic to your destination. Mefloquine HCl is the latest in a long series of anti-malarial drugs, the evolution of which has closely followed evolution of the parasite itself, as it builds resistance to current treatments, rendering them useless. It has a number of potential side-effects, some of them rather nasty and potentially permanent, if you have a tendency toward the depressive or have struggled with psychological problems.