Deeper Meditation

I've had a couple days to settle back into my normal routine, diet, media-scape, etc... and contemplate the seriousness of the brain-shift acquired while traveling abroad.

People asking me "how was my trip?" and "did you have a good time?" ... and my answers tend to be complex (as my uncle pointed out) just like India.

We were a group of seven. That was a couple, a couple, a couple, plus me. It was the odd-one-out quite often.

Seattle time was always "local-time minus 1.5 hours, and flop am/pm"... Noon in India is 10:30 PM Seattle Time... bed time in India at 9PM is 7:30AM Seattle Time. So many days, I woke up, read every email and tweet I was going to all day, put my phone in my pocket and spent he next 23.75 hours disconnected. It was some seriously cold-turkey shit compared to my normal life, on so many layers.

I had about a half a dozen skype calls, half a dozen phone calls, a handful full for SMS and google-talk interchanges. In Three Weeks... otherwise, I was with my family. I can't remember the last time I spent that much time with my Mom and Dad. I can't remember the last time I spent that much time away from whomever my closest friends were at the time. The communication I got from "the real" world while I was on the other side of it was deeply grounding to me.

I think a lot about culture, and power, and religion, and their pros and cons. And to visit a place with such deep history is just... unlike anything in the US of A.

The lows are so much lower, that three blocks-away, having such opulence becomes a serious juxtaposition in my western eyes.

Its weird enough looking at homeless crackheads in my neighborhood, and to know they have a place they can get fed and get shelter as messed up as our system is... as much poverty and squalor that i saw, I never saw an abundance of sick people, or dying people. I wonder if that was just kept from my sight. I never visited a hospital or one of Mother Teresa horrible death homes.

Dark thoughts aside, I think back to the slum tour I wasn't allowed to take pictures of (I want to blog about it as much as possible before I forget the details). My over-riding feeling of the slum tour was how hard they were all working, and how much good they were trying to do.

We saw a fabric wood-block-print workshop. They invited us inside. I accidentally kicked over a bucket of dye. I was so embarrassed. They told me it was fine and threw a paint-stained-tarp over the whole mess and kept telling me it was not a big deal. They gave me a stamp on the sleeve of my woot shirt I was wearing. But at some point, someone showed up and I could tell was asking "whats up with this mess!?" I noticed one of the guys held a finger to his lips, and waved his head in a "not now, the white-people-are-watching" kinda way... i felt extra bad about kicking over the bucket... was some random guy going to get a load of shit and lose his wages that day in exchange for that bucket of dye, or was it going to be not-a-problem because I graced their lowly existence with my magnificent presence... and was that bucket of crap I kicked over really worth a day's wages or was it just 5 minutes worth of mixing $0.50 worth of ingredients? talk about context-collapse... We're worried if our 4-star hotels are going to live up to their stars, and these people have running water three hours per day.

In India I watched people sweep piles of garbage into piles of garbage into piles of garbage... then sometimes, they just lit the big piles of garbage on fire. I've lived in Boise Idaho during a winter "inversion" where the smoke of the wood-fires doesn't escape the valley quite right and it smells kinda stale... but in India... most everywhere we went... the air was full of burning... burning wood, burning cow-shit, burning garbage... not to mention the million people's worth of cars and busses and auto-rickshaws. Varanasi and the Ganges River smelt of burning corpse once you knew what to smell for.

Suddenly, I'm back in Seattle, and I have the privilege of taking my glass recycling out, and separating it from my cardboard recycling. It all suddenly seems so bourgeois to be have the luxury to be required to sort my garbage. On the clean street behind my building... on yeah, the same alley a few weeks back I caught a heroin junkie with a needle in his arm. He'd said "Sorry man, just trying to get straight, I don't mean no harm, I'll be out of here in a minute." In a way I knew he'd be gone before the cops arrived if I'd bother to dial 911.

The difference in the "dirty" spins me about.

The I walk to my fancy job in the fancy building, and I look at the skyscrapers before me, and I think of multi-hundred year-old runes I touched... with my bare hands... and the petty dramatic distractions of who-said-what-about-whom just seems so... boring.