God is in the Etcetera... (back-dated to March 11, 2012)

"Lewis said to Delia:
That's the sad thing with life
There's people always leaving
Just as other folks arrive."

- Folk Bloodbath, Josh Ritter

Awake with readiness and poignancy. It is Tyler's last day in Udaipur. His three and a half month stay has spanned the three weeks of mine, and I can only try to imagine what it is like for him to be leaving this place that has become a pieced-together home.

I am finding how much of an accelerated and focused microcosm traveling is of the "regular" pace of life. People appear and leave in a matter of days or weeks, sometimes just hours. Sometimes it might just be a head nod of recognition from the last city where you both caught a glimpse of each other.

I'm caught with the wonder of what our interactions with each other would be like if we treated each other the way we'd treat travel relationships: instate engagement (or disengagement, if it's not working for you), assume fleetingness; that you have no idea how long you will be in each other's lives, be joyful of whatever connection arises, and always operate with the knowledge that the other person is here for their own reasons - ones they might explain, but that you could never really understand, except for what you understand of yourself.

Assume that sooner or later you and this person will part ways, and suddenly gratitude and spontaneity, and an instant honesty emerge from encounters, rather than an expectation that this person is here to fulfill any particular role to you.

And, as with life, you can't take part in everyone's adventures, or you'll never live your own.

***

Here, on the top floor of Millets, cherishing a piece of privacy to be with myself. Looking out the glassless windows fringed with green curtains fluttering in the morning breeze out at the steadily leafing trees beside Lake Pichola, I am suddenly keenly aware that these passages of precious presence are all that we have. In the words of Dan Millman, there are no ordinary moments.

***

For Tyler's last night here, we creep into Millets after hours and watch Seven Years in Tibet on the computer to speed him towards Nepal. So much time has been spent here that it has become our home away from Dream Heaven home.

The film strikes chords in me much more deeply now that I know more about the plight of the Tibetans, that I've lived amongst them and seen how their struggle for freedom is a daily reality. More self-immolations have happened in the past week in Tibet to protest Chinese oppression.

We chat into the later late hours, about all measure of things. It is this kind of space that gives the leeway to explore all the nooks and crannies that conversation rarely has the leisure to poke its head into, and it is in this space that the feeling of God makes itself just a little bit known. Conversations never really end - they just find resting places until they are picked up again.