Travels

‘I want to be generous’, ‘I want to be spiritual’, ‘I want to be good’, ‘I hate being a coward’ etc. All the epithets, all the descriptions that we can attribute to ourselves are caused by circumstances; they arise by alluding to an external point of reference. They are also limited to a certain moment or period in time and point in space. What do all these attributes and even the wanting of new attributes have in common? Who is the subject to which they apply? Who is ‘generous’ or ‘miser’, ‘authentic’ or ‘false’, who observes the wanting and liking or disliking? I am. I am the canvas onto which the colours of these attributes are painted on. I am always the same, though from time to time, depending on external factors, I put on the mantle of ‘generosity’ or ’miserliness’, the mantle of ‘authenticity’ or ‘falsity’. It’s literally like getting dressed: if I go play tennis, I will wear shorts and a t-shirt, if I have a business meeting, I wear a suit. I am the same, but I indulge the circumstances by adapting to them. It would not occur to us to identify with our clothes, would it? We don’t go around saying ‘Ah, there’s Pajama Man. How are you, man? I met the Mini Skirt Girl this morning and we talked about the Suit Guy’. It wouldn’t occur to us to identify with our clothes: ‘I am going to sleep in my suit, because I am the suit’. Why then should we identify with any other attribute? Why do we need to identify with something relative and dependant on outside circumstances? What is the need to have a limited, finite identity given by attributes (any attribute, feel free to replace ‘generous’ with absolutely anything that crosses your mind), when I am already the one through which these petty labels are manifested: myself?

‘I am’ never changes, but as a game, I may wear ‘generosity’ one day and ‘miserliness’ the next, I may cry one moment and laugh the next or be spiritual one week and very worldly indeed the following one. When we identify with the ‘I am’ rather than the stickers with which we label it, it is all a wonderful play of observing. When we don’t take these labels too seriously and we don’t turn them into absolutes, they no longer have a hold on us.

The funniest thing is saying: ‘I want to be myself’ or ‘I am looking for myself’. Who are you now? Are you something other than yourself? Maybe an alien being inhabits your body? Asking for this, says Mooji in an interview, is like being in bed and saying ‘Ah, I really want to be in bed’. It’s like being in my house and saying: ‘Ah, I really need to start looking for my house, I don’t know where it is’. I can’t find myself, because that is who I already am. It’s the identification with the labels that makes us think there is a distance to travel or something to do or some time to pass in order to find myself. If I consider myself to be the Pajama Man, I will always be the slave of pleasure when I see that someone is the Underwear Man or the slave of suffering when I see that another is the Cool Clothes Man. If however I feel myself as the wearer, I know I am more than the clothes I have on me, which myself or the circumstances can change at a moment’s notice. And I am free of their effect, I am free of their pull to this or that side. ‘I am’ in freedom.

So, I decided to go to a place I’d never been before. It’s Easter after all…Also decided not to book a hotel in advance; things will work out, I’ll just show up and surely find a place. So got on the bus and…hm…around 11 hours and 4 buses later I was in Ooty. The Queen of Hill Resorts, as it’s been called since colonial times, is 2400m or so above sea level, which failed to get my attention when I’d previously read about it (just as I missed the fact that the place was 11 hours away from Madurai and not 4 and a half, like I previously believed for some inexplicable reason). What 2400 m altitude usually means to any functional brain is that it’s bloody cold. And rainy. And all I had was 4 t-shirts and a shawl. Nevermind, methought, will soon dry up in a nice hotel room with hot water; mmm, maybe even a bath. Niiiice!

Hold that thought, I kept telling myself 2 hours later, still walking from hotel to hotel, only to be told ‘No vacancies!’. It’s Easter after all…and Ooty is obviously a very popular place. So, to conclusively solve the problem I promptly decided to forget about it and address a more pressing one: I was starving. Surely on a full stomach a hotel with free rooms will hurl itself in my way. It didn’t. Not half an hour later, at 11 pm, when I finished my dinner, and not an hour later, when everything around town was closing, hotels included.
Right! Let’s cheerfully embark on the exploration of a homeless person’s life then. First find a spot out of the rain. Check! The covered sort of terrace of a medical clinic seemed to do the trick. Next find out what resources I had at my disposal. 4 extra t-shirts, an extra pair of socks (I must say, I was pretty impressed with myself I’d decided to put on sneakers, and not sandals, as I’d originally intended), a shawl and…that’s about it. One could also creatively count the backpack, my trusty National Geographic camera bag. And yes, Greg, it was definitely worth its money the night in question. Why, you ask. Because its cover is like a flap and undone, it gave me together with its main compartment enough cushioning for my back and lower back, while I rested my head on the camera compartment. Next, I folded a t-shirt in 4 and put it on the concrete under my bum. 2-t-shirts I put on while the forth I wrapped around my neck as a scarf. I wrapped myself in the shawl, tucking it’s ends in my trousers, to keep body heat loss to a minimum. I put on the extra pair of socks and tucked the trousers in them for the previously mentioned reason. And went to sleep.

About 5 minutes later (yes, I don’t take long to fall asleep), as I was almost gone to Dream Land, something made me open my eyes. Right in front of me, about a meter and a half away, on the railings of my terrace, was a rat the size of a healthy cat, nicely outlined in the moonlight. Ok, nice huge rat, just mind your railing strolling, ignore me. It must have heard me, as it ran away. Back to sleep then. I was just beginning to half-dreamily fantasize about becoming friends with a pack of rats who would come to sleep with me to keep me warm when I felt something moving under my ribs. I calmly got up. Ok, ok, I jumped up. I didn’t scream though, I really didn’t. I couldn’t see any living creature near my abode, so went right back to sleep. This time it worked. Until 3 am, when Mr. Freezing Cold decided to drop by and say Good Morning. And he proceeded to keep me company until about 6 am, when I decided there was no point trying any longer.
A wonderful opportunity to witness firsthand the waking up of a lovely Indian town. The scavengers checking out the piles of garbage, a couple of old women sweeping in front of their street stalls, the sleepy-eyed tea man who told me it would take about half an hour more to have the tea ready, some rickshaw drivers checking up on their vehicles. I don’t know what they thought of the crazy tourist strolling down the streets at 6 am wrapped in a bright green Indian ceremonial shawl, his teeth chattering. I also walked passed an ATM machine room, which I had considered the previous night as my abode. You’ll never guess why I didn’t go in there to sleep: because in the scorching Madurai these places always have AC and I’m always cold in them. For some reason, I had decided it would not be as cold outside! As I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t really know how to explain my rationale here.

So, I did have enough time to visit the famous Ooty Rose Garden and Sim’s Park and to almost buy a ticket for the (very) famous Ooty mountain train – which didn’t happen as the ticket counter was swamped by about 10 percent of India’s population – before I got on the first of the four buses and eleven hours back to Madurai.

I am the cup into which you pour
Continuously the nectar of the present moment,
Overflowing until I am bathed in cooling timelessness.
That’s when you drape Mother Nature around me as a vibrant mantle
And my heart beats with the rhythms of 7 billion hearts.

I am the flute
That spreads the music of your grace,
Filling all emptiness with self-knowledge
And the wisdom of stillness.

And when you so generously give me
Yourself as a gift, what is there that remains?
I am conscious nothingness.

I am at war in myself,
A different and subtle kind of war,
One of awareness, one of stillness. My own inner Jihad.

I am a seeker missile,
Hunting down fear and hate, anger and pain.
Wherever I find them,
They explode in the love of my awareness of them,
And they remember themselves in the ever joy of me.

Who is my enemy but a shade?
Who is my enemy but the feeble shade of thought, unaware of its own energy?
Who is my enemy but the vibration of love confusingly unaware of its own true nature?
Who is my enemy but my best friend suffering from amnesia?

And so I start on a search and rescue mission
Of shepherding my thoughts and wishes like a sheep dog seeking out stray ewes.
I can no longer be the fog of war of my illusory mind,
I can no longer be wounded by the stray shots of desire and its twin brother pain,
I no longer recognize the orders of these fearful foot soldiers.

I am the general in charge of my own war
And the lowliest soldier carrying out my own orders.
I am the rifle sending forth the countless bullets of awareness,
Seeking out and dissolving all there is
in the love of that that I am.

There are landscapes in me
The inner eye could never see
Swamped as it was
With greed and lust and fear as
Mud spots on a windshield.
All I needed do was yield
My thoughts and wishes to Her Love
To be washed clean from rains above
Of gentle peace and silent joy.

How can I sing my thanks at all
For the new vistas of my soul,
For having sampled, having felt
The inside Love in which I melt
And which I recognize to be
Not a new world, not a new me
But my true nature all the while?

I walk in peace along the aisle
Of timeless knowledge, ever new
That I am Her and She is you
And that She was and is, will ever be
Inside of all, outside of every
Atom or wave of energy.

We don’t enjoy people anymore. We are too busy. We are too busy to enjoy ourselves too. There’s an endless chase going on. We want something and we don’t know what. Even so, we don’t recognize the fact that we don’t know what we want. We have to be in control, so we tell everybody who would listen, even ourselves, that we do know what we want. We want power, we want money, we want sex, fame, a nice car, a good job. We convince ourselves that these are our needs. And in pursuing them, we forget to enjoy ourselves and others. We take advantage of those who love us and we love to achieve those petty needs. And still they do not satisfy us. We are never content in the here and now. The moment we achieve one such need, the moment we satisfy it, the thought pops up: ‘Actually, this is not that good at all, not like I thought it would be’. We are with ourselves and we are always away from ourselves. And so, we never have time. Not for our friends, not for our family, no time to say a nice word to someone we love, give them a hug or a present. Even if we do force ourselves to do it we do it absentmindedly, quickly and half-heartedly, finishing in our minds the email that is waiting in the inbox, already reading the important text message on our phone, already watching the beginning of our favourite TV show. We are always on the phone or on our computers, watching ghastly news on our TV’s, chasing around for those selfish needs, trying to run away from the feeling of discontent we feel inside. We will not win this race.

Have you ever played with a kid and felt their joy? Have you ever sat under a tree in the mountains and enjoyed the piece inside? Have you ever hugged a loved one and forgot time? Have you ever laughed with a friend until you felt you were going to burst, without a single thought of the shame of something that you did in the past or the next thing that you need to do in the future? Have you ever been so engrossed in your work that you forgot yourself in the joy of doing and had no idea when time passed? That special feeling inside is not caused by the person we live it with or by the circumstance. These just happen to resonate to it or – granted – they help us resonate with it. It is always there. It is who we are, free and aware and living. It is not tied to external factors. It is in there, waiting for us to become aware of it. All our worries, our plans and past pains are veils, shadows that hide it from ourselves. What is more profoundly real? Lying down under a tree, catching the apple that falls and eating it or sitting locked up in a room at home, reading about the law of gravity and memorizing the formula? What is more real: feeling the vibration and the connection that somehow expands us inside when we hug someone we love, or reading 1000 books about love, explaining in great detail the chemical, neurological or the physical aspect of that feeling? What is more real: feeling love or imagining in our minds what love must be based on the books we’ve read or the movies we’ve seen?

What our minds produce are dry and complicated images (like the shadows on Plato’s cave) of simple and spontaneous life experiences. Fortunately, living – really living – is infectious. If I walk into a room smiling, really smiling, from inside, most people in that room will smile. It also expands like a mathematical progression. Have you ever started laughing with a friend in a church or somewhere you were not supposed to laugh? You started, tried to suppress it, then he started, you laughed harder, they laughed even harder and so on. It’s like that. Life is like that. Spontaneous and free and simple. There is only one insurmountable condition: let it. Give up control. You cannot order it to happen, just as you cannot order a seed to sprout. Allow yourself to feel the joy I am feeling writing this, the feeling of expansion I have in my chest and my head, the vibration of this awareness that cleans everything inside. And now you are ready to love yourself, really love and accept yourself. As you are you are perfect right now. But allow yourself to live it. There is no love without surrender.

And now – feeling this feeling – meet or phone or email someone you love and tell them about it, without expecting anything from them. Describe it, living it. Let your words or your gestures be the vessels of this awareness, not the other way around. And then let it grow as it starts to resonate with the same feeling in the other person then comes back to you tenfold, then it goes back to them and back to you and so on until there is no difference between you and them, there is no ‘I’ and ‘another’. It is simple. It is already there, waiting for you to become aware of it. And once you’ve done this, answer this question for yourself: what is more real, living this feeling, being this energy of life and sharing it or trying to be what your thoughts and your society and your books and your TV shows tell you that you are supposed to be?

‘Happy Birthday!’, Ana says on the phone, and this is the little snowball that soon turns into an avalanche. My dear friend Ana, former highschool colleague and the director of The Village/Satul magazine (the Projects Abroad journalism placement in Romania), goes on to say that as a present she has arranged a public exhibition of some of my photos from India, Nepal, Ghana, Jamaica and Thailand. Further more, she says, it will be a charitable event, as we will sell the photos and donate the proceeds to some needy institution. Do I know of one, she asks? I ask around: orphanages will get a lot of attention for Christmas, lots of interest and donations. We need somewhere more obscure, more overlooked. My mom has the solution: the ‘Mina 1 Mai’ Hospital for Patients with Chronic Mental Illnesses.

The little snowball soon gathers momentum: my sister sends a press release to the media, two tv stations interview me, I send emails to friends. Stefi, another highschool colleague, joins in: he is part of the Association of Christian Students in Brasov, so he will bring a group of carolers. Another friend, Damien, from White Mountain Property, phones to tell me he wants to donate 334 EUR as well. Plus a Christmas tree and trims. We raise 300 RON at the opening of the exhibit. My mom still has 300 RON from a former Projects Abroad volunteer, Dagmar, and another Projects Abroad volunteer, Paul, has just sent 100 GBP for the hospital. It takes a whole afternoon to buy oranges, bananas, cheese, chicken legs, hats, socks, chocolates and waffles for all 145 patients of the hospital; it takes four more hours to make the individual packages for 68 women and 77 men. And then the whole thing happens on Saturday, the 18th of December.

How we fit a Christmas tree, all of the presents and 20 people with two guitars in five cars eludes me. But we do and we’re off; the only one who knows what to expect is my mom, who’s done this before many times. As soon as we arrive, my mom gets swamped with patients, all trying to talk to her at the same time, some kissing her, some trying to kiss her hands. We’re the only donors they’ve seen for a long time and probably the only ones they’ll see this Christmas. After all, the hospitals for mentally ill patients, especially irrecuperable, get only the dregs of the funds from Healthcare, and the public thinks they’re one anyway, so why care. These people are not even wanted by their families anymore. One woman has 7 children, but none has ever visited her since she arrived at the hospital. She is part of a huge majority. The lucky ones get to go home for a weekend sometimes. Regardless, almost the only thing ALL of them talk about the whole time is their families: their children, their parents, their brothers or sisters. Insanity – it becomes instantly obvious – doesn’t replace memory or the need to love and be loved. The system doesn’t help either: these people receive indemnizations from the state for their illness, but the money doesn’t go to them or the hospital that looks after them; it goes to their next of kin.

As carols ring out from the hall where we set up the tree, I look around and I see happy faces among the patients (attached to clumsily dancing bodies) and teary eyes among our group. And I remember what my mom told me on the way: ’We have to be strong in there, and laugh and be happy. This is what these people need. They have enough tears and misery themselves’. Extremely hard to do when we realize how fortunate we are, and how dismissive of our good fortune. Even harder when we realize how little people need in order to feel a drop of happiness and how inured and ungrateful we’ve become to simple things.
I want to thank everybody who got involved in this spontaneous project: Ana and her husband Adi, Stefi and his carolers, Damien and his future wife Andra, Dagmar and Paul, everybody who donated at the opening of the photo exhibition and not east, my mom, who is and always will be a model of selflessness. But most of all, thank you to the patients of the Mina 1 Mai hospital, who have given us much more than we could ever have given them.

I jump in the mud, from here to there, like an inept ballerina. Mud gooooood, cement baaaaad! Even though the mud might have some cow dung thrown in the mix as well, besides the customary dirt and water, I’m afraid that if I walk on the asphalt, the soles of my feet will get stuck to it. I’ve never been good at guessing temperatures, but it must be satanically hot, as I never knew there were so many parts of my body through which I could sweat. I look on the left and the right, at Ponraj and Pandi; they hunt the puddles with the same despair.
- Firewalking festival, Pandi had told me while we were stuffing our faces with the goodies his mother had nicely arranged for us on banana leaves, on the floor of the little hut inhabited by the whole extended family, about 10 people.
- Mmmm, was the only answer I could give, while pushing the food in my mouth with my right hand. About 2 or 3 brahmans (I was thinking), specially trained, will walk on the burning coal path, the villagers will watch the show, they will eat well, they will listen to the music blaring out from the gigantic speakers and then they will retire, half deaf but with their bellies full, to their abodes. Big deal, I‘ve seen a fire walking show before, in Sri Lanka. On stage!
The little square in the middle of the Naduvapatti village is an ocean of colourful saris and men dressed in lungis and Western-style shirts: over 3000 people from 18 villages have descended upon Naduvapatii to celebrate thimidi, a festival specific to the South of India, more precisely to the state of Tamil Nadu. 3000 people churning the mud on the alleys with their bare feet, churning in huge pots the food for which everybody donated as much as they could, placing the little benches under the banana leaf roof, preparing for ceremony and show. Sliding through the multicoloured saris and lungis and through the brilliant smiles Indian seem to take out of Amalthea’s abundance horn, I am the only spot of white in a sea of pigment. I am also probably the only one who hasn’t much of a clue about what is going to happen here.
I make my way through bodies, looks, smiles and Hello’s and I squeeze in front, at one end of the ‘runway’ of gleaming coals. Where, promptly, I manage to find a few more of my body parts that could sweat. At the other end of the coal path, a group of priests dressed in yellow lungis gesticulate at one another and rearrange their ceremonial apparel. ‘Aha’, goes through my mind, ‘the protagonists!’. One of them, hair and beard white and curly like a sun-burned, gap-toothed Zeus, goes around the ‘runway’ in a ritual dance. Without forgetting to smile at me as he goes past. The moment he gets back near the others is the signal for them to proceed, more or less boldly, on the infernal pathway. ‘Hm, yes, interesting’, I tell myself as the priests reach my end, ‘much more realistic than on the stage, but this must be al…’. I don’t have the chance to finish my inner dialogue: all the villagers that had been loitering behind the priests, and who had not seemed any different to me from the other spectators apart from the fact that they were wearing yellow clothes, get going on the burning coals. One by one, big or small, children, parents and grandparents. Well, this is indeed more impressive than a show on stage, I must admit. My respect for the villagers’ bravery and faith grows in inverse proportion to my body mass, which continues to diminish in fluvial torrents.
I soon lose track of how many litres of my body humidity have streamed out and also of how many villagers have walked the path of burning coals. I begin telling myself that certainly it’s not so difficult. I mean, I’ve just seen a few 6-7 year-olds doing it, damn it! I start fantasizing. What if I tried and I would be the only Western person these villagers have ever seen participating successfully in their ceremony? My brave reverie is sharply interrupted by the sensation that my foot is on fire. I squeak discretely and hop aside: a small piece of coal about the size of my fingernail had almost touched the sole of my foot. Hm, maybe I should be content to test my religious fervour by lighting an Eastern candle back home in Romania!
Pandi and Ponraj have somehow managed to find me and we hop again from puddle to puddle back towards the house and the banana leaves still full of goodies.
- Pandi, have you ever walked on burning coals? , I ask him on the way.
- Yes, last year, he tells me, but for today I have not prepared. For 16 days, I should have fasted on only one vegetarian meal a day, I should have slept on the floor on a rug, wrapped in a towel soaked in water and turmeric (a yellow condiment!) and should have not left the house. But my sister and my nephew have walked today.
Argh, I tell myself, stuffing food in my mouth again, it’s all good and dandy: maybe with some practice I could in the end manage to sleep on a rug, stay indoors, walk on burning coals, become half deaf (a speaker the size of a wardrobe is conveniently located right by the house’s window), even eat one meal a day for 16 days…But not living in the same house with a cook like Pandi’s mother.

How do you walk?
Do you hurry, are you slow?
Do you measure the weight of time by your steps?
Do you take big steps, small steps, tiny steps like rain drops on a leaf?
Do you run, skip, shuffle along?
Do you carry your pains and fears on your ankles, do you stumble on the past?
Do you walk chasing your desires’ fulfillment?
Are you a free walker? Am I?

I used to love steps as a child. I listened.
There were my steps: small round sounds, delicate like the coloured dust on a butterfly’s wings.
My father’s determined and unstoppable like the rumbling of storms.
I can’t remember my mother’s;
is it because she’d given her own steps to me and they exactly matched my own?
Steps plopping hard on cement,
crunching on rocks,
hissing in sand,
squeezing in snow,
rustling in dry leaves.
Steps on soft rubber soles or on hard army boots,
On painfully sharp stiletto’s or on flopping chapals,
I listened to them all with wonder, reverence, respect;
Little acts of creation: all so similar, yet so different
Each with its own flavor, with its own music and colour in
The magic of it all:
Never even once did I wonder where they were headed.

This morning I remembered. I walked again. I listened.
On sand, in puddles, on dead autumn leaves and the inevitable cement of the sidewalks.
I found beauty again: a leaf in a puddle. So sharp and alive,
Its beauty awakened by my being aware of it,
Like when you wet a colourful stone.
Beauty as a state of consciousness, not as thought or emotion.
Being on the road,
Not behind and not ahead either,
No burdens on my ankles,
No aims and no desires to fulfill
In step after step,
Each with its own flavor, with its own music and colour in
The magic of it all:
The end of the road in every step I take.

Happiness makes us complacent. It is in the hell of our deepest despair – after having blamed God and everyone else for our own weaknesses and mistakes – that we finally accept and forgive and the real search for our Self begins. In the end, there can be only one conclusion: all that we need, all that we are is inside. This is self-sustainable happiness. Until we’ve learned this, until we are sufficient in ourselves, what can we give others? We can only give illusion; we can only give the mask of who we THINK or BELIEVE we are, of what we believe the others want us to be. We rest our desires, our needs, and our expectations on them. We pour our weaknesses, mistakes and insecurities on them. We become a burden, because we do not know that it is within us that the solution to everything lies. In the end, self-sustainable happiness is the complete acceptance of oneself in the here and now. There is nothing that cannot be dissolved in acceptance and forgiveness. It is only when we’ve reached this point that we can truly enjoy others and share ourselves with them.