Dear Friends, Yogis and Yoginis,

Dehli: Tea Rituals and Rishikesh: Toe Nails
My friend Catherine Ingram had warned me about Dehli. “It smells terrible,” she said. “It will burn the inside of your nose. Everyone gets sick there”

After our train arrived and taxied forever, we disembarked to get on a shuttle bus, to taxi forever again over to the airport. (We must have parked the plane a good mile from the airport entrance.) Indeed this place stunk worse than Mumbai and the inside of my nose was burning. I wished for a face mask!

We retrieved our luggage and easily discovered our driver, who was the only one holding a yellow sign amidst a sea of white signs. Genius!

We walked through the noisiest, smelliest, most rambunctious traffic yet. People, carts, automobiles, taxis and buses. Everyone was honking. The road being unfinished, bumpy and filthy, we found it challenging to pull our wheeled suitcases to the van. We were definitely traffic stoppers!

Once on our way, the situation only got more frenzied and hilarious. It was at least 10 pm and our 45 minute commute included cars, buses, vans, mopeds, rickshaws, horses, bicycles, pedestrians and even a wedding parade, (right there on the freeway!), sharing 4 lanes of freeway, but creating at least 8 lanes in the process. Everyone straddled the lines. Horns honked everywhere. We drove by buses of commuters packed so full people were hanging on to the doors and each other to keep from falling out. Mopeds, of course, carried entire families. And the bicyclists were riding without lights, helmets or reflective gear (something I’m really keen on in Portland!). The closer we got to Dehli the more raucous the scene. There were parties and weddings everywhere. Full on marching bands and men walking with chandeliers on their heads. More horses and carriages along side of beggars and sadhus carrying metal pails with candles burning and photos of their gurus.

While none of this noise subsided in the night, I managed to rest overnight in our hotel. And was awakened by our 5 am wake up call, a rap at the door, with tea and toast.

We scurried through the same mayhem, now littered with the morning traffic, people sleeping all over the sidewalks, chai wallahs heating chai on portable stoves in the street, and men squatting by huge piles of newspapers with the day’s news. I thought about the civil way in which many Americans have their newspapers delivered and walk into the pristine environment of Starbucks to order unique and often complicated signature caffeine drinks. But I was also struck that, again, in spite of the mayhem, everyone seemed to know what they were doing and where they were going!

Through a maze of people and vehicles we arrived at the train station. Another maze…we walked up and down many flights of stairs with our bags, over train tracks, to our destination (thank goodness for the recovery my hip has had thus far!).

Once on the train, we were served tea and toast, my second of the day. Each of us received our own private thermos, tea bag, sugar and creamer.

Such hospitality!

The bookseller came by balancing a huge stack of compelling books and magazines (Eat, Pray, Love; A Thousand Splendid Suns; The Five People You Meet in Heaven, etc.). He had at least 30 titles in his arms.

I relished the chance to sip tea and read a book, which I often enjoy back home. The feeling was worlds apart however, since at home I sit on my comfortable couch with my ceramic mug of my favorite green tea with cream and organic sugar, an array of books to choose from for random selections and personally selected music in the background.

This was a seat on a rocky train, probably years older than me, with plastic cups and thermoses, Tetlely black tea, fake creamer and highly refined sugar. Over one passenger’s cell phone I could hear music playing, which I recognized as the chant that was sung on the Salt March when Gandhi was marching in protest.

Ragupati Ragava Raja Ram Patita Parvana Sita Ram
Sita Ram Jaya Sita Ram
Bhaje Pare Tu Sita Ram
Isvara Allah Tero Namah
Sabako Sanmati Jai Bhagavan

(please excuse me if I have misspelled any of these, I’m doing it by sound!)

All in all, it was close enough to home, the home in my heart. I realized how attached we can become to our comfortable little rituals for creating our comfortable little world inside. Indeed, I often have a delightful sense of connection to myself blended with a feeling of a mini-vacation in my tea-sipping poetry-reading ritual in the mornings. But, again and again, we find that home is where the heart is (as Hallmark card-ish as that can sound!), in this Now.

Later in the day as we were commuting from Haridwar to Rishikesh, I had an opportunity to note another favorite “I feel at home in the world rituals” dissolve. I really prefer to have a pedicure when I’m going to be barefoot or in sandals for long periods. I decided not to have one before the trip aware that my feet would probably get dirty and any pedicure would wear off in days here. On this journey, we passed through several frenzied villages and “cities” where people were walking barefoot or with useless sandals that were falling off of their feet. There were countless filthy feet with blackened toe nails (lord knows what was growing under them!). In comparison, my feet didn’t look so bad!

Often, unless challenged by life events such as travel, pain, co-habitating with others, or world events, we become entranced by our own life rituals and schedules. We have our preferred wake up time and the way we like to spend the initial moments of alertness in the day. We enjoy the way we go about making our tea, doing our exercises, the route we like to drive, the way we prefer our work schedule to be organized, how we like our computer set up and so on. Travel is an opportunity to toss all of that up in the air. In the tossing, we get to re-examine ourselves. And as things land, we get to decide which ones to pick back up and which ones to let lie.

But this can be done not just by the decision to travel, but also the decision to meditate, or study yourself, or consciously choose a different route to work, or a new morning rhythm, or to try on someone else’s rhythm, or to give up your preferred rhythm entirely for a day, two days, then maybe three, until the initial discomfort fades and your eyes are cleared. The point is to explore whether or not these preferences have become trances, or little places of self-soothing, that we still benefit from, or not. Perhaps it’s time for a wider circle of comfort in the world?

Namaste,
Sarahjoy