Transmigration

A year on in England, I wanted to post something I wrote after living here for only two months, while things have changed in my approach, I thought it important to capture this for what it was when and as it were happening...
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If I could take a moment to pause and linger over the complicated parts then I guess now is the time.

Life is racing at a pace I am struggling to meet.

For so long I feel like I've been running this race, forever playing catch-up with the next big thing, then the next, and the next after that. and now, I will step back, I will close my eyes and I will pause.

There are days when the sky is blue and a sea breeze lingers in the air that I close my eyes and I am back in Sydney, lying on golden sand and watching the ocean move. days when my thoughts drift asunder and return to me refreshed and renewed.

There are other days when I run miles to escape my mind. I clutter my life with appointments and activities so I don't have to think about that dark cloud hanging over my head ready to strike me dead. I hide beneath the facade of a busy life, trying not to face the fact that I have moved my body to another country, most of my mind, and yet, not entirely the whole of my heart.

Parts of remain etched in Sydney Harbour, Parramatta, the blue mountains.

Parts of me still live in villages in Rajasthan and Gujarat and Karnataka.

There are days I cannot face myself. I cannot look at myself or reconcile that I am who I am. That I have become someone so unlike who I thought I was.

Yet I hold out hope that I will know me once again, and maybe life will begin to make more sense.

Appreciation

I recently attended a memorial for a very special man in our circle of friends who passed away. He had been an instrumental force in encouraging and supporting many, many people in pursuing noble pursuits and providing them with the opportunity to do so.

And though i knew him not long, nor well, he left upon me an impression that will never fade.

Having suffered through a recent phase of hopelessness, those periods when life feels devoid of meaning and purpose, it was comforting to see someone's memory live on in such a positive way. And although I'm well aware of the romanticism of retrospect, I am grateful to him for being there to teach me a lesson, even in death.

I couldn't help but feel that people live, then fade away into the ether like a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again. and all that's left behind are moments and memories. Being all too aware of the grief and pain and self torture that accompanies losing someone close to you, it was reiterated to me once again, the one thing I say over and over and over: you never know. You don't know who will go and who you will outlive and what they mean to you. You never know who you will need someday to look after you or who will need to be looked after. So while you have that mental and physical capacity to show people love, do so without reservation and hesitation.

Too often we look to the sea and the stars and at nature and God and philosophy for inspiration and overlook eachother. I am all too guilty of this.

Isn't it about time we appreciated each other for our simple, homely ways than to look for the grand and glamorous aspect in everything as a yardstick for who is deserving of our love?

After all, we have the opportunity today to love eachother as we are, who knows what will come of tomorrow?

I am listless today. And keen for this month to come to an end. I have spent every day this month beyond exhausted, to a point where I've fallen ill from stress alone. We have had huge responsibilities thrust upon us unexpectedly, performed them at our best, performed them well but received very little in return. There are many days of my life where I've been blessed by things I didn't expect, praise I didn't earn and rewarded for things done half heartedly. But very few where I've worked harder than I've worked before, with the purest of intentions in heart and mind and received nothing for it. It has been a steep learning curve and a lesson or two for my ego. However, it has been a month in which I've felt more let down by humankind than usual. Very few people lent us a hand even when we asked, many more were keener to insult then give any words of sympathy and only one soul was kind enough to step in and see that it has been difficult and to offer us their solace and assistance.

I spent a lot of my youth wondering what it would be like to be a "grown up", but as I aged, I matured enough at each step not to feel any drastic surprise. And yet, this month alone has made me feel the weight of my age and the responsibilities that have come with it. I am a dreamer at the best of times, forever wistful, and I am sad to be trading in that quality for someone who needs to be alert and attentive and pensive about the future.

I have felt myself recede, to be overtaken by a Divya that I am still getting to know and understand. She is bolder and stronger but also far less the playful, mischievous character she was known for. I only hope that I can become accustomed to her.

Where have my head and heart been of late? I know its been a while since I've written, but my mind didn't seem that way inclined, and suddenly, on this sunny breezy afternoon, inspiration.
I reflect, as always, and have decided am prone to doing. Some write longingly of the future, others delicately about the present and others, muse over the past. I am most definitely of the third category.

I have lived here a year now, in sunny England. I am a nobody to the English, at least immigration wise, I am but a dependent of my husband, if that! I am ineligible for recourse to public funds, for any professional development or access to bursaries. I am an 'Australian non-resident currently residing in Britain' which means, 'until we can prove this isnt a marriage of convenience, we arent taking you in permanently missy!' fair enough I suppose. There are enough people trying to illegally make their way back to the Empire, they don't need a university educated, professionals from other Western countries trying to do the same...!;)

I cannot speak to you enough of what it was like to see Mum and Dad after a year, there are no words, certainly none that we could use except for 'its good to see you' which is, at its best, the understatement of my life. It was fantastic to see them. It was a feeling of being whole again, of belonging and snuggly tucking onself back into the bedcovers in your room after a long holiday away in hotels! It was a lot of emotion conveyed through gestures and a lot of unspoken conversation that took place with a glance. It was a healing moment, for me at least, to be with the two people who by very definition of their existence, constitute what home means to me. Seeing my brother, the four of us together again, a rarity these days, was clearly much needed for us all.

I was back in Mumbai, certainly the city of my dreams. For a close family wedding. And you know that weddings mean reunions, and reunions mean tears of joy and sadness and hugs and kisses and gifts aplenty. You know they mean good wholesome, home cooked meals and long languid conversations laced with nostalgia. You know they mean so much more than how they actually play out. My heart sang to be with these people, and for two weeks I let it sing and dance and play, it was a love I drank up, a badly parched thirst being satiated and a feeling of gooey, honey love, that fills the emptiest parts of your soul and well-being with its goodness.

It was a beautiful wedding. Torquoise and beige in all its glory. Flowers and food, family and fighting, and lots of colour. I treasured the experience, every moment and minute.

This has been a year all about learning and experiencing, growing and progressing, serving and giving. I hope I haven't disappointed.

Conflict

An engagement, a baby shower and a death, all over the past two days. At times its as though I am watching a movie where all the characters are scrambling to reach the top of a mountain, but not everyone succeeds.

I cannot begin to explain the sheer volume of conflicting feelings and emotions swelling up within me. All I know is that a part of me is overjoyed, another part, devastated. I wish I wasn't the introspective type. And that I could just accept things as they unfold. But its as though the harder I try to quash what I feel, the more these feelings brim and bubble up from within.

And yet, life rolls on, oblivious as ever to birth, death, sorrow, pain and joy. Its as though they all come in waves, one of top of the other, just as one is about to draw you in, the other pushes you further ashore.

Speaking of which, I miss the ocean. I miss watching the soft pink light of dawn with hopeful eyes, I miss running on the sand and looking back as my shoes sink Nike labels into the earth, I miss the moonlight as it wisps and dances on the horizon where the sun stood that morning, and I miss watching milky white tendrils of light turning the ocean an inky murky, mysterious shade.

However, the ocean seems inaccessible here so I find myself settling for the odd lake or river to carry my worries adrift and as far from me as possible. I'm not sure why large bodies of water provide me with such solace, they just do and I am glad for it.

Often at junctures like this, I look back on my time in India and try and accept things as people there do. In the villages, where I lived, if a mother lost a child, she would cry, they would bury him or her and then she would return to the fields that very afternoon to support her other children. I wish I were that strong.

There is a favourite saying of mine, you only lose when you lose hope. It was something I would say to myself constantly at trying times. And yet, here I am...basking in the hopelessness of my situation.

New Year Musings

The dawn of another new year brings with it that typical sense of melancholy and nostalgia that is expected of me. Images run through my mind as I reflect upon an eventful year gone by...

Flashes of the wedding before my eyes, mine and others. Planes and sunny stretches of beach and sand in California and Disneyland at its mirthe and merriment best. Malta with its sweltering humidity and cool evening breezes, swinging and singing with Swamiji at the edge of the sea. I can taste the salt and smell the ocean and feel the pulse of the earth beating reverently below the chaos and noise. I see Chinmaya Kirti and all its members, the rainbow colours of Garba and Dandia at Navaratri. I see low hanging clouds and grey skies occassionally pierced by forgiving sunlight and green parks and countryside acres that stretch for miles and miles and miles. Orchards laden with pears longing to be picked at Waterperry, mulberries at Balliol and apples at Ramakrishna Mission. A year of taste testing and flavour sampling a cuisine new to my palette, then attempting to master cooking it!

A year of new languages, a new culture, new clothes and shoes, a sizeable winter wardrobe and endless scarves and shawls with their silk and chiffonery.

Love like I have never known it before. Sweet, and nectorious like honey one day, tangy and refereshing like berries the next. A new relationship with all its informalities and a homeliness I had only known...at home...

A year of meeting Saints and Sadhu's in all their shades of yellow and orange, great learnings, awakened wisdom, latent potential creeping up from beneath the surface and a sense of more arising from within.

A year of losing relations and gaining relationships. A sad farewell to a sibling and the two guardians of our flock, left to themselves in a corner of the world that seems too far away for my mind to reach.

A swift goodbye to a lifetime of friendships over dinner and hurried cups of coffee, a sense of tearing oneself away from the patchwork of life meticulously sewn through the years.

A dawn of new beginnings, new friendships and confidantes. Of lifting oneself up to face a new reality of being.

A new person, of new consciousness, ready to manifest in the new year ahead.

A New Future

Which magician conjured you up and brought you into my life so effortlessly? so delicately? Never in a million years will I ever be more grateful than I was on that day, that glorious day in which we were sworn to eachother, with fire as the witness, to be bound eternally.

I have been on many journeys, experienced many moments, but this and you, will be the most important, the most incredible.

Thank you for choosing me to share in your joys, sorrows and adventures. There is so much that could be said, but the words stem well beyond my limited vocabulary and reverberate into lights and sounds and images of the enlightening future awaiting us both. Unsullied by speech and text and noise.

I love you.