Surprise in the USA!

I arrived in Delaware a few days ago after my 40 hour journey from Rishikesh, India.

My sister picked me up from the airport with my 8 yo nephew who didn't know about my arrival. He stoically said, "It's Uncle Rob!"

Later that night we visited my parents and I hid in a big cardboard box for my Mother to open. She was truly surprised! And truly happy to see me! It was the best gift I could have given her for her upcoming 80th birthday!

My niece arrived for her Thanksgiving college break the same day. And we've been enjoying family time for the last 5 days or so.

The culture shock has not been as bad as I expected. I try to see it as just being in yet another different place and surroundings. Let it just BE how it is. Oddly I have found rubbish bins to be strange. I was chewing gum the other day and I kept wanting to just throw it on the ground or someplace, which is the appropriate action in India where rubbish bins are few and far between. It strikes me how clean it is here in the suburbs. I went bouldering with my nephew and brother in law yesterday and though there were a few bottles and litter around the park which my brother-in-law found incomprehensible, it seemed immaculate to me.

I feel a bit claustrophobic since so much of my life in Asia is more outdoors. The places I have stayed have no central heating, and so the outdoors seems closer... seeping in through the less tightly constructed walls. In Asia I notice the bad air from pollution of burning rubbish and less stringent vehicle emissions regulation. Here I notice the bad air of wall to wall carpets and tightly constructed buildings. Her in the suburbs I am surrounded by trees, but the focus is inside the house.

The jet lag hits me about supper time everyday and I find I can barely keep my eyes open after that. I stand bemused in front of the refrigerator trying to find breakfast or lunch. It's been 8 months since I did any food preparation with the cheap availability of food on the travel circuit in India and Thailand.

Being in the USA brings up the consciousness of "what am I doing with my Life?"... expectations, judgments... that don't come up on the travel circuit where people just BE and DO outside the peer pressure and cultural expectations of their own country. The issue of abundance comes up more quickly here in the USA considering in India I could easily live on $5-10/day. I try to live my life as one of complete trust that doing what is in my heart will always be supported by God/Universe. And really when I reflect on my life, that has always been true, and yet I fall into the fear based paradigms of our culture easily.

On the flight over here, I considered really living on the edge and just returning to Asia and trusting that things would work out even though I would arrive with barely enough money for a return ticket to the US. In the travel books about vagabonding, people have different approaches to world travel. Some work and save up in their home country. Others arrive penniless in some foreign destination and find work/living situations on the fly. Some develop work opportunities that can travel like journalism, blogging, photography, tour guiding, etc.

I've been researching selling my photos and writing to stock photo companies and/or magazines, self publishing on the internet, and other ways to generate income. I've been looking into internet possibilities to generate passive income. The site http://workingnomad.com intrigues me. I was really excited about the possibility of publishing on demand (P.O.D.) like on lulu.com until I found negative reviews on that sort of thing on the self publishing websites. A previous Reiki client emailed me and I managed to provide her with a distance Reiki session that she was quite happy with. It was a nice reminder of the "mystical" experience.

I find it best not to think too much... not to think about "here" and "there". Such thoughts boggle my mind. No sense of home or place leaving me feeling homeless or at home wherever I am. Too many familiar things around the world for me. If I think about it I can miss something from India or Thailand or San Francisco or here. If I think about it I can see the absurd differences in the way people live. The streets here in suburbia so quiet and orderly and clean. The streets I traveled a few days ago over there full of dust and noise and masses of humanity. Here a honk is a relatively rare blast of anger. There it's an ever present announcement of presence.

I perused a copy of Rolf Pott's Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel in the bookstore the other day. Two things in the book jumped out at me. One was Pott's most traumatic experience... too many choices! He describes how looking in the ads for air travel in Bangkok provided him with so many cheap options to travel to so many places that he went into shock! I feel that way often as I realize that really I could do anything. I could settle down. I could travel by the seat of my pants. The more I trust in God and Universe, the more options are possible. And the harder it is to choose. The more I learn how to meditate and generate my own inner peace, the more I realize that my choices don't matter. And the harder it is to choose. The second gleaning from Pott's book was that much of culture shock is the impossibility of relating to and communicating experiences from across the world to those that haven't experienced it.

I find people ask me simple questions, for which there are no simple answers. "What do people do for fun there?" It's a 10 minute answer. There is less separation between work and play in India. Children work younger, more responsibility at a younger age. Adults play later. Work is communal. Fun. Kids have fun kicking plastic bottles like soccer balls. Or sometimes play cricket or badminton in the street. Discos aren't big, but people sing their prayers together on the Holy Ganges.

So often trying to converse about my experiences is a non sequitor. It's like a bird asking a fish what kind of worms they eat. Maybe the fish eats worms. But it's an entirely different experience in an entirely different context.

In India there isn't the judgment that manual labor is "bad" and better replaced with a machine. Wait a minute, there is the caste system so there is a judgment. But machines are infinitely expensive. People make gravel by hand. With a hammer. Some even happily. Shovels usually have a rope for two- person operation: one works the handle and the other assists with the rope. Western values of Human Rights are legislating human-powered/walking rickshaw wallahs out of business, but not human-powered/tri-cycle rickshaws.

Meanwhile Americans suffer from carpal tunnel, back problems, and obesity sitting in climate controlled offices staring at computers. To the Western mind anything is better than digging a ditch by hand. And then comes the new generations sitting at a desk all day and paying to go workout in a gym later. And the Third World chases the "West". In Sikkim and Laos I saw TV satellite dishes on most every bungalow. Cell phones interrupt meals in the dung strewn alleys of Varanasi. And the barber in Rishikesh appears to live with his family under a sheet of poly plastic next to the barber booth/stall. Cows milked by hand in a manger along a back alley in the city of Varanasi give creamy unprocessed milk and curd that seems so wholesome from street fed cows. Unlike the watery processed milk products in the US. But then I read in the news about an investigation that has found Varanasi milk from some sources full of toxic chemicals from illegal drugs to increase milk production in these medieval mangers.

I watch the people Christmas shopping at the Mall. For the price of a large TV or a fancy computer, a family in India could live for a year. A room in a suburban house here has more stuff in it than a whole farm village in Sikkim. I remember the village family that put me up one rainy evening in Sikkim. They had a few clothes, a pot or two to cook on, some tick mattresses. Some livestock. Maybe a couple of shovels. There was no clutter in that house! The price of my sleeping bag and specialty outdoors clothes could easily pay for all their material possessions and probably buy a goat as well.

I saw a man using a leaf blower to blow fallen leaves towards his lawn tractor to suck them up. In India I've seen lawns in botanical parks cut to a 1 inch height with a machete. On the hill farms I've seen people use nothing more than a hand sickle for cutting and gathering fodder. Not even a rake or pitch fork. The money from the suburban man's lawn equipment could likely support a family for a year in India.

I watch my niece and nephew eat meals carefully and politely with silverware. In India they "play" with their food and eat it with their hands. The dahl (lentil stew) is mixed with the rice with the hand and scooped up into the mouth. Like many things in India, it's the opposite of suburban USA.

I wish I had more pictures of simple local scenes and culture in India. Just a simple street is such a different experience.

My brother-in-law asks why I go there? why do I want to go back? The answer is I don't know. I feel called to go there. It's not easy. It's full of crazy experiences. And somehow all that craziness is a gift. I guess part of that gift is learning to surrender and keep your center. There are also things you can do there that you just can't do here, like walking barefoot in the mountains from village to village and not seeing a car for days. There is a gift of experiencing another culture and gaining perspective on your own. There is a gift in experiencing ways of life that are centuries and millenia old before they disappear in the abyss of modern technology and "development". There is a freedom gained by being outside of your culture and your preconditioned cultural thinking.

Speaking of perspective, I saw an episode of Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series, a DVD series by the BBC, the other day and it had some of the most amazing photography I have ever seen. There is also an interesting DVD called Riding Solo To The Top Of The World about an Indian man's solo journey and film of himself motorcycling to Ladakh; you can see the trailer at http://www.dirttrackproductions.com/trailers/ridingsolo/index.html.