Manny Muros:

Our journey is becoming real after many months of planning and preparations. Tickets bought, visas received, shots taken, and the empty back-pack is sitting in my room. My time has become measured as every minute here has increased in value.

The time spent with my sons this weekend has had an extra sweetness in its quality… I know I will spend 6 weeks without seeing them and its a long time….

One aspect of travel I greatly enjoy is the rush of colors and smells and sounds, the intense (and sometimes forced) awakening of what may have become complacent senses. The teaching of Buddhist Tantra is a realization that you are not an isolated chuck of matter, not part of a duality (you vs everything else), but in fact an integral part of the world around you, both seen and unseen. When I find myself dropped into an ocean of new sensations, I feel my Self stretched, while parts of me which I had never before experienced surface and float along on the waves.

Some months ago, for reasons which have become obscure to me, I purchased a 1Gb SanDisk U3 Cruzer Memory Stick: enough juicy words in that title to grab techies, musicians, dudes, the aging, and sportsmen by the collar, and haul them to the counter, cash in hand. If the words weren’t enough, the price of the ‘stick – $69 at the time – was neatly offset by not one, but two $20 rebates. You do the math.

“The gross body which is composed of the seven humours (dhatus), I am not; the five cognitive sense organs, viz. the senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell, which apprehend their respective objects, viz. sound, touch, colour, taste, and odour, I am not; the five cognitive sense-organs, viz. the organs of speech, locomotion, grasping, excretion, and procreation, which have as their respective functions speaking, moving, grasping, excreting, and enjoying, I am not; the five vital airs, prana, etc., which perform respectively the five functions of in-breathing, etc., I am not; even the mind which thinks, I am not; the nescience too, which is endowed only with the residual impressions of objects, and in which there are no objects and no functionings, I am not.”

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I?

I imagine the feeling that swells in the heart of the traveler, mid-18th century, whose morning walk has taken him over the threshold of his cottage, past the weather-grayed wood of the gate, past the age-smeared walls of the neighboring houses, along down the cobbled road – hear the wooden heels’ hollow knocking along the paving-stones, something in the rhythm slightly quicker than usual, slightly more determined – over the bridge that is the heart of the town, then following the straightening line of the river toward the harbor. It is the dawn before the dawn, and each breath springs out like a hand of his spirit reaching out or offering, each small cloud emerges and slips off behind him, moves over his left shoulder as he turns his head to the ships at anchor; the clouds are touched with the slightest color.