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.

Incredible Journey

My journey to the USA took 40 hours. It started with a nine hour bus ride from Rishikesh to New Delhi where I took a cab directly to the airport arriving about 11 pm for my 3:25 am flight on British Airways to Philadelphia with a layover in Heathrow Airport, London for about 5 hours.

Waiting for the bus in Rishikesh before I left India, I stood with two Israeli travelers. An Indian passenger gleefully stepped up to us, like one foot in front of us, like right in our faces to practice his English. "Hello?" "Your country?"... the standard questions. After a thousand or more such approaches in the last 6 months, I was less than enthused about making another "friend" with whom I could barely communicate with on any tangible level. My compatriots reacted similarly. We forced a smile. After learning I was from the USA, the man went on to inquire of one of the Israelis, "Is that an American cigarette?" He obviously assumed we "Westerners" were traveling together and from the same place, though we had just met. The Israeli smoker said about his smoke, "No it's North Indian." The Indian man couldn't understand the accent. The Israeli man repeated himself several times. His message didn't get through to the Indian man who wanted to see some amazing cigarette full of "Western"... i.e. affluent tobacco. In reality it was a cheap hand rolled cigarette of Indian pouch tobacco.

Later on the bus, I exchanged warm smiles with the inquisitive Indian man's little children. I practiced my two lines of Hindi to their amusement. Sometimes the deepest communication is beyond our feeble minds and speech.

I turned my head towards the window and sunk into my solitude. I watched the dusty roadsides of shop stalls and markets drift by underneath the mayhem of humanity that is India. Cycle rickshaws. Noisy orange lorries. Men in lungis... a skirt like garment made by wrapping a piece of flat cloth around the waist. The lungi is disappearing as young men and boys take on casual trousers and jeans and button shirts. The local clothing is no longer local.

Dust floated in the window. The road was paved. The wide shoulders were dust. The bus oft kicked up dust as it swerved around slower vehicles in the game of chicken that is driving in India. An hour outside of Delhi, the smog grew thick from one of the most polluted cities in the world. I tried to prepare myself mentally for being on the opposite side of the world in 40 hours.

The Delhi airport brought that reality closer quickly. The food that costs 10 cents outside the airport, costs 2 dollars inside. The layer of dust that covers things in roadside stands disappeared into the climate controlled cleanliness of the airport. My dust covered backpacker's garb was suddenly out of place in a world of deodorized casual wear. I slipped out of my lungi and into pants. There were a few people that looked like they'd just stepped out of the village in their turbans. But most people looked like they were India's westernized classes. No wonder when you consider that a plane ticket is likely beyond 90 percent of India's people resources. I heard that less than 1 percent of India's population is computer literate.

I waited five hours in Delhi at the airport. I had panicked when I realized I miscounted my visa by a day and hoped to cross customs before midnight. My plan was stimied when I found that you cannot enter the terminal until three hours before your flight. I waited in the passenger waiting room across the road. It took a full three hours to get through security and customs to the gate for my flight. Luckily the immigration officer didn't notice or didn't care that I was one day over my visa stay. A couple months before a Frenchman had told me that they count your 180 days exactly and include the day of your arrival. Somehow in my careful counting and recounting of days I had continually not counted the day of my arrival. I was thankful I didn't have to pay the $30 fine I expected. And I chalked it up to typical advice in India which contradicts the next person's advice and so you just never know until you get there.

The lines for security were the worst I've seen since flying out of Baltimore a few weeks after 9/ll. The New Delhi airport has blossomed in the last three years with a booming economy. Rather the crowds have blossomed and outgrown the airport. I enjoyed a documentary on 4 extreme sportsmen who were setting records for skiing and snowboarding in Nepal; the scenery of the villages was very authentic to my own experiences in Nepal two years ago.

My 9 hour flight to London left me in a sleepy daze for my 5 hour layover at Heathrow. I found showers and washed the dust of the bus journey I'd began 20 hours earlier off. I enjoyed some yoga in the multi-use prayer room. I walked around like a zombie staring at the shopping mall that calls itself an airport there. Time bent and I suddenly realized my flight was in 30 minutes and I had strolled quite a ways from my departure gait. I did my best to keep upright and walk quickly to the gate in my sleep deprived state. Ready to collapse into my seat after finding no line at the gate, I discovered we were being bused to our plane on the runway. I prayed I didn't pass out. I didn't. Until I got to my seat where I feel into a deep sleep waiting for the plane to take off. I managed to stay awake enough to enjoy the two meals and watch some movies.

The Gift: Saving Face Til It Hurts

I had one of those funny traveler's experiences my last couple of days in India. I was fatigued from poor sleep. Busy trying to initiate my Indian Reiki disciple... which is a story in itself! And he asked if I could help his friend who ran a restaurant. I said "yes" expecting it was some sort of Reiki that was needed. His friend went into an explanation about a business deal with his relatives where they were making a partnership to build a hotel or something. But he wanted to ask one of the members to leave the partnership because he didn't fit in with their plans... I later learned this undesirable partner had allegedly raised money illegally. The business plan allowed for the process of terminating a partner. But the problem was it was family... a cousin. And in India, you can't ask a family member to leave a family business. I suggested he have his lawyer do it? No. What they needed was someone else to do the talking. Me! I accepted before I thought about it. I was told that me and this friend were the only ones that would be able to speak English, so I could say anything and he would translate it to suit his needs. Easy enough. He asked if I wanted a gift and I said that really the only suitable gift for me would be money. I have little materially and desire little materially.

The next day I arrived at the appointed time. Now you have to picture this. Here I am a white guy with facial piercings wearing backpacker attire. (I'd been told my attire didn't matter). I don't know what story about my persona was told to these business partners. And here were five Indian business men in suits and ties.

And as I might have expected, the meeting wasn't as expected! Another man spoke very good English. And it seemed that the three partners were together. It wasn't just one partner that needed to be expelled. I was thrown off. The script was gone! I started to panic wondering if this was some sort of scam. I heard the sob stories about the lives and families at stake if these men were thrown out. I tried to gain some feedback from the guy that had asked me to do this. But he was playing like he didn't know me and playing like he didn't want his family members kicked out. Finally, I heeded their pleas and said I would reconsider and we would meet at 4 pm. My contact said that was good and all that was needed. Apparently he didn't here the part about reconvening. He thanked me and said my job was done.

Later we received a call that I indeed needed to return at 4pm and say "Guruji has considered the matter. He wants all the partners removed. The matter is closed." So I again sat down. This time I was firm. I said I was sorry, but the matter was closed. The three men bowed their heads in an apparent state of distress. I sat, not really knowing what to do. When the last one finally got up and left he gave me a smile. I didn't know what to think. There are so many lies in India.. so much effort to save face. I didn't know if he knew I was just a puppet. I didn't know if his apparent distress was just an act. Was their entire behavior an act? did they know that it was their own family member who pushed them out? was it all just a game of saving face?

At any rate my role was done. I released my stress as I walked down the street of buzzing auto rickshaws and honking buses. I was told there would be a gift for me later that day. My disciple friend who had set it all up told me they planned to get me an expensive watch. I shared my lack of enthusiasm. I live like a sadhu. I imagined the fancy gold watch that would be a gift in the world of business. I am perfectly happy with my decade old waterproof sports watch. I told my friend I would really prefer some money. He had told me they'd pick out a 2-3000rs (50-70US$) watch. That would pay a good chunk of my 6 week, $150 hotel bill, which I was about to have to exchange money to pay. But he told me his friend could never do that because he would think it would be insulting to an American (presumably wealthy) to gift such a paltry amount of money. He suggested that perhaps I could sell the imported Indian watch for a great price in America. I didn't have the heart to tell him that Indian goods have a reputation for quality... poor quality... and that it likely wouldn't be a big money maker. Much less, it would just be silly busywork for me to do.

The next day the gift hadn't arrived and I called my friend about some other matters. He was at the watch shop trying to pick out a watch for me! I suggested if his friend had given him the money why didn't he just pass the money on to me. He said he didn't have the money, but was just researching for his friend. He suggested that maybe he could purchase the watch from me, but he couldn't afford to full price! He asked me what good name brands of watches were in the USA so maybe there was something better for me to resell here. The only name I recognized was Timex... which I knew wasn't going to be a great selling point... maybe a designer Swatch... but not Timex.

I hung up the phone. I became furious. This was silly. My friend knew me and my desires. So basically in the effort of saving my "face" he was saving his business man friends impression of saving my face and directly insulting my expressed wishes! I thought how absurd it was. I wished I didn't know the behind the scenes. I felt guilty for being ingratious. I tried to think of some reason why Spirit would want me to have a watch.. maybe it was for me to gift to someone else... down the line. I reflected on how the idea of selling it to make money was somewhat based in scarcity thinking.

Crazy! I suppose it makes sense to India culture. But not to me.

Then the total irony of the whole mess. My friend failed to meet me before I left for New Delhi and my flight to the USA. Maybe the whole gift thing was just a story to save face!

It made me happy to be taking a break from India and a culture I don't understand. I let me emotions and anger dissipate as I rode the bus to New Delhi. I tried to focus on being Present. On the meditative center in the eye of the storm that Osho talks about in his treatises on meditation. I watched myself watch the last visions of India from the bus window. I urged myself to think a bit and prepare myself mentally for stepping into suburbia in 40 hours.

Spiraling Spirituality and Consumerism

The world is one big circle, or, perhaps, spiral.

While Westerners flock to the Far East in search of spirituality, the Far East flocks to western science and consumerism. An Indian friend of mine is looking into coming to the USA to study at a Vedic university because there are none in India. Indian college students are immersed in science of the western world and discounting their own millennial old sciences.

It's ironic that tourists searching for spirituality in India are bombarded by money-grubbing touts. I didn't understand why people even went to India for spiritual reasons until this last trip. Yet there are still remnants there of reverence for the mystical. There are still guru's and mystics whose energy is palpable. A yogi in Rishikesh had visiting hours were people could sit outside his room and feel his energy! It was palpable. As strong as the Boddhi Tree! Ironically, most of the visitors were westerners.

In the USA, I don't believe I've ever run across such popular mystics. People maybe go to church. Occasionally you hear of a "healer" in the community with special healing powers. Science and the church long ago usurped the power of having one's own spiritual experiences. Funny, because slowly science is finding ways to measure subtle energies like Reiki. Because they couldn't measure it or explain it, such subtle energies were discounted as myth. And as Quantum Science becomes integrated into Newtonian Physics, Science is slowly coming full circle to what such ancient sciences as the Vedas have know for years. The American populace is leading the way in search of ways to find peace and God in their materialistic, hedonistic lives.

And, the spiritual/mystical movement is growing in the USA with such things as Reiki and Shamanic healing practitioners. There is a "new age" of rediscovering the ancient mystical traditions and incorporating them into our modern lives.

Meanwhile, once mystical cultures of the East are running from their traditions, chasing money and consumerism. They are on one side of the circle, and we on another in the ebb and flow of life.

The other day, I realized that this is happening on other levels. The masses of America flock to Target and Walmart for cheap Chinese jeans or the equivalent... why go to The Gap or Levi's when you can get cheap cheap cheap jeans! Meanwhile, in places like India and Thailand, people seek the name brands for quality!

It's a funny and interesting world!