There was a time when I was young, I must have been 3 or 4 years old, when my parents would take us to the inland sea.

We lived in Michigan, on the Upper Peninsula, a short detour north, as it happened, in the long run of our lives; we lived in a rambler whose color I can’t recall, with a field out back that was huge to young eyes, and a cherry tree that bloomed in the Spring and gave fruit in the summer. The snow was deeper than I was tall. The drifts of snow collected by the trucks were small mountains which tried their best to hold out til the next winter season – like snails caught on the flats between tides – and some times they thought they would succeed, and sometimes we did, too. The entire world smelled of pine, or a certain kind of grass, or a temperature of air. And my parents, who were struggling to raise four children, to keep a house in the high north, and be part of a community whose first language was Finnish – they went in search of a vista, of wind from elsewhere, of open space.

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. 

The beauty of the subtropics – as I experienced them for years in Brazil, and on other journeys far and away…

… and now I understand that I was making a home of the Earth, not a home of 

- Spencer, New York, where I was born at the foot of a minor tree-crowned mountain; 
- or Ironwood, Michigan, where the winter snows drifted to the eaves of our house; 
- or friendly Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose lakes were diamonds in the summer sun; 
- or tiny Souris, North Dakota, an islet adrift in a sea of green; 
- or jazzy Chicago, Illinois, its colors and its black and its white; 
- or halus Yogayakarta, Java, its ancient gods and modern desires; 
- or Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, where my adulthood was born; 
- or Boston or Byfield, Massachusetts, where my affluence came and went; 
- or Auroville, Tamil Nadu, whose galaxy of energies called as if by gravity…

A litany of grounds that received my footprint, but were places on a larger map, one with fewer constraints on patterns of thought, and which tries to cover a globe of human understanding, human reaching, and human almost-attaining…

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.

The grace of going away is that your eyes are refreshed for when you return. What you see once in your daily, then see again and again, gains a transparency, loses its edges, so that after a time it is no longer visible at all. This is to be expected: our senses are used to protect us and to bring us to food, and stimuli which have been identified, processed and cataloged need no longer occupy the mind, and are let go. Background noise that needn’t be listened to.

The weather having softened somewhat today, I fired up the R100 and took it out on the road to make sure my driving skills hadn’t deteriorated. I pulled out into the correct lane – that would be the right one this side of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth, I think. The shift from a 225cc buzzing insect to a 1 liter airplane also didn’t throw me.

The lack of horns was a little unnerving, however. How are you supposed to know where people are, if they are not constantly honking their location? After a few miles I realized that there were no other cars – or trucks or bicycles or motorcycles or mopeds or ox-carts or pedestrians or anything whatsoever on this excellently paved road – so I settled down into a pleasant late-season cruise.

Manny Muros:

I had been looking forward to my time alone but I’ve had quite a bit of apprehension about it. I have never spent this much time on my own. The four weeks journeying with Mark have been amazingly special. It was great to share the intensity of the travel and the constant humorous unknowns. We were always there to cover each other and a good complement for one another….. Now I have begun another more inner journey….

We are northwest of Shiraz and east of Abadan, flying high above impressive and desolate mountains. There is the long wall of a range to the west, separating this mountainous land from the plains and the deserts of what I believe to be either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Everything appears to be dry as dust, with only one or two minor roads plying their way among ridges – some capped with snow and presenting what seem to be small patches of scrub trees. We are above Pakistan, I think, and I can’t imagine it would be a welcoming place to travel, especially as an American.

Just before dawn only a few roosters have roused themselves – or never went to bed – and with most humans still in bed, I can hear the falling of the surf away here inland. Yoga is sweet and quiet, Manny still in bed; then a quiet seat in the restaurant gazebo and time to write. Sometimes day dawns with all the same elements as the day before, still something undefinable has changed, and today is feels as though loops of effort that were binding me to some way of being have dropped away. I walk to the beach, where the waves roll in at their same slow pace, one breaking every ten seconds, just about the length of a person’s deep breath. Almost no one is on the sand, the beach chairs empty, so I take up a seat and settle in for the morning meditation.