As a driver, you choose where you are going (usually within the confines of paved roadways), when to get there (depending on traffic), and how stressed you wish to be over the process (all options available). But as a driver, your field of vision is drawn in: to a narrow strip of pavement ahead, to one or more sets of tail-lights, and to a small mirrored square of your traveled past.

It is not the Sun that turns around us: the Sun doesn’t come to shine down upon us. In fact, it is we who turn our faces toward the Sun.

An important distinction. The sun was not made for us. We were made, and the Sun exists.

From a birthright to a gift. From a spoiled child expecting plenty, to a child grateful for what is received, acknowledging that we are part of something Greater, we are not here to be served, but to participate.

It is interesting that, in a country whose infrastructure is far less consistently developed than that of our own digital nation, I had far greater success in posting thoughts and impressions to this journal than I do now that I am home.

Part of it is, of course, that the sheer volume of experiences, their water filling me to overflowing, demanded that some channeling be done and some sense be made of them; and I prefer to make sense in words. The ability to catch hold of a virtual mooring, whose anchor was just inland of the Plum Island Sound, also supported daily journaling.

A counselor was speaking to a small gathering of people, those who had just recently been informed of a diagnosis of cancer. It was a mixed group, some were patients with treatable forms, others were less certain of the prognosis, and a few advised that the time left to them in this life was quite short – the time to see the colors and feel the textures that the body had allowed, to taste the richness of foods or the salt of a lover’s lips, hear the song of a flock of migrating birds perched in the trees outside the house, or that of the soprano who had spent years perfecting her angels’ art. Knowledge that the morning’s printed news, both good and bad, would be an echo far away, like voices in another tongue and another land, voices whispered into the wind, would no longer reach their ears. That the endless daily striving after endless daily goals was vanity; that there was little time left to dance that dance.

I find in my readings that many of the experiences I have had, many of the thoughts to which I have been exposed – to which I have exposed myself – along my seeking path, have been spoken before. Some of them in ancient texts, whose context and imagery demand a certain patience and quiet of mind to embrace; others whose proponents are recent, almost contemporaries. These voices have of course fed many seekers and writers, and the most current theories and practices usually owe a great debt to a long lineage of similar travelers, each one standing on the well-lit path of someone who had spoken before.

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…

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.

If you haven’t been amazed at least once today, you haven’t been paying attention.

Meaning, there are so many mundane tasks begging this moment of your life, and the next and the next, that quite easily – predictably, I would say – an entire day slips along on that bubbling and familiar current, sunrise to its setting, and nothing remarkable seems to have come of it. Yes: the employee or employer or colleague at work who never fails to get under your skin. Or: the story about someone that someone you know knows, who won some money, lost some money, recovered or lost health. All of it swirls along the surface, most comfortably, as one day becomes the next, the wheel of a month becomes the wheel of a year…

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.

Early yogic and other Asian traditions gave great attention to inner space. It was the science of that day, and like the science of any other day, it was a human attempt to understand the nature of existence, employing the clearest and most powerful tools available. The closest subject, and the one which yielded the greatest wealth of insight, was one’s own physical and psychic being; the experiments, rather than being humbled by what we might imagine a lack of powerful technology, resulted in empirical knowledge, which developed over time into philosophical and physical traditions which have lasted millennia.