Follow the Journey

There is no way I will ever be able to use words to accurately describe what India was like for me, so I wont even try to give you the whole picture, so instead, I’ll just leave you with a few snapshots that India has left for me. Most of these snapshots could be described as exotic, filthy, ancient, spontaneous, bizarre and sometimes comical, from taking a different route back to Mcleod Ganj after meditation in a nearby town and finding myself not only lost, but on a completely different mountain, to witnessing a child’s body being eaten by dogs near the burning ghats in Varanasi, to living in an ashram on the bank of the Ganges, spending my days doing yoga, chanting, and meditating, every memory I have of India contains some indescribable beauty and a permeating essence or aura of life itself. I know, this sounds like I’m trying way too hard to sound poetic or something, but it’s something that you can only understand if you experience it for yourself. there is life everywhere, and I don’t just mean the people and animals that are seemingly omnipresent everywhere you go. Even exploring ancient ruins of a fort, palace or temple, you can feel the life in the very stones and earth itself.
Moving on from India itself, I’ll go into what I’ll be taking home from it. first off, a sweet beard and mustache, which I hope to have for a good while to come. India also gave me a sense of confidence in my ability to be independent. If I can live in India for 3 months, Indiana cant be much harder. My time in India even imparted a few practical skills for my resume when I return home, these include but are not limited to: giving injections to dogs, hand and forearm massages, very basic Hindi, stone carving, chanting in sanskrit, the ability to turn myself into a human pretzel, and the most important of all, how to tie a turban (something I now realize I’ve always secretly wanted to be able to do).
I’ve always considered myself to have a large and far flung family, with two sisters in California and one in New York, but the most meaningful thing that India had left me with, is one sister in Boston, one sister Portland, one more sister in New York, one more sister in the bay area (so many of those), and even a brother in Kansas City.