Wild Hereafter

The Hereafter portrayed on screen is awash in shades of grey.
If only a character as strong as the great necromancer himself, Jacob Marley, had been written into Clint Eastwood’s tepid film HEREAFTER, then perhaps we’d care about the characters who live on the fringes of death. Instead, we’re shown three interwoven stories, none of which can seem to take a stand about the afterlife, or at least allow the audience to emotionally invest in what happens to these people who are grieving their own losses.

George, the one who sees dead people, ably played by Matt Damon, is a reluctant psychic. Everyone who is a real psychic is a reluctant psychic. Eastwood says screenwriter Peter Morgan “doesn’t believe in an afterlife,” and in his lack of understanding of what it would be like to experience occult phenomena – initially it’s both decidedly normal and completely terrifying – what we’re left with is the vague George, a stoic construction worker with a love for Dickens. Nothing to help us learn who he is, and what his conflicts are.

Two of my family stories relate to coming back from the dead – my grandmother died in childbirth and returned to life; and my husband died in ICU in front of me, and returned minutes later in surgery, without his former personality or memories. I’ve had a swipe or two at seeing ghosts as a teenager, and once saw my mother-in-law after she passed (and that’s only slightly less frightening than Jane Fonda playing one on the big screen.) I have written about the effects of such reluctantly lived events on me and my family here, and I can tell you that just like any event in one’s memory, we grow to both question our perceptions and stake a claim to them. Sometimes in the same moment. The people I’ve talked to who have experienced this phenomena, (and yes, I now know a motley crew of psychics, shamans, poets and ne’er-do-wells,) aren’t making a fortune off their sudden mediumship, nor are they particularly confused about ‘what to do about it.’ They’re too busy being great parents and professionals. But if they were conflicted about this odd ‘gift’, they wouldn’t articulate that problem by running away from people who recognize them as psychic. Like this script has Matt Damon doing every fifteen minutes.

When I started writing, I was afraid to tell what I saw and heard in the imaginal realm -- that place from which characters and story arise. And with daily practice, I’ve come to know that the imagination is a real place. Where ghosts walk and spirits talk is the land of the instinctual, and it is neither hokum nor domesticated. As every child who has found a storyteller knows.

Almost every review I read of the film following my weekend trip to see HEREAFTER mentioned how fantastic it was that Eastwood didn’t descend into the wackiness of spiritualism. Roger Ebert says, “This is a subject that lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney. It's astonishing how many people believe New Age notions, which have the attraction of allowing believers to confer supernormal abilities on themselves and others without the bother of plausibility. Eastwood's film will leave such people vaguely uneasy. It believes most psychics are frauds.” You’d think the journalistic high-road involved everything that can be scientifically proven, and that film isn’t mastered by the wizards of magic and the surreal. From the radicalists Godard and Bertolucci, to Camus’ BLACK ORPHEUS, to Brooks’ DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, to Burton’s BEETLEJUICE, to Matheson’s WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, film is full of exploration of the thin line that divides life and death, and what those who have gone there envision our (non) existence to be.

If only the HEREAFTER storytellers had thrown their passion and belief behind their main characters, then we wouldn’t be left with a story that was so trivial and indistinct. {The opening scene's tsunami is the film's greatest moment, not only for its special effects but for allowing actors to register trauma and grief.} I don’t care whether you believe in the afterlife, but if your character experiences the effects of the dead in his own waking existence, you’ve got to imagine enough to specifically realize his visions and traumas and consequences. You can’t intellectually prove what’s uncanny in the human experience. But you can take what’s unknown to most people, and make something mesmerizing from it.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Film

Wild Lover

The past several summers I have been taking other lovers. Every August my husband says goodbye from our home in Seattle, and watches me drive north. I travel across the border into Canada, and then west to Banff National Park, eleven hours and entire world away from the city I usually inhabit. Banff is my soul home, and her vast dogtoothed, sawbacked, castellated, matterhorned mountain ranges are my lovers.

Making relationship with these mountains – Rundle, Cascade, Tunnel, Sulphur, Norquay in town, and the vast ranges that cross the continental divide, and the thrust faults of Yoho and Kootenay Parks, and the Waputik and Wapta icefields, and the glaciers of Peyto, Bow, Vulture, Crowfoot, Hector – has been much like learning to love another human. Anyone who is creative knows that one can be spiritually companioned by a being who is not necessarily human. The lover can be the spider, the tree, the raven, the rock. For me, to be with the mountain is to be ensouled.

To become a lover with a mountain, reciprocity is required. I ask for peace, grandeur, timelessness, perspective and expansion; the mountains expect the same from me. I enter into our union knowing I’ll not urgently scamper to the top in some conquerer’s takeover, but instead gaze at the minutae. I’ll spend time in solitude, watching who this mountain being is. Reciprocity means that I work on behalf of the mountain – her streams, lakes, trails, flowers, boulders, animals – and that I will not disregard the sensibility of creatures whose language and role is different from my own.

I’ve become aware this trip, in a manner unlike any form I have ever known, how much the mountains have to teach me about expansive energy. I no longer end at my skin. Or even at the few feet around me, as I project my strong personality. Instead, in this grand Precambrian force, my sense of “I” is altered. In these wild places my being leaves my known self and moves outward, sometimes for an entire mountain pass, through dense forests and deep gorges, over meadows and montanes, around alpine lakes and glacial rivers, and within that breadth, I become as they. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” said Walt Whitman, and he spoke the lesser known too – “I… am not contained between my hat and boots." Like the poets, the wild can take us beyond a conventional knowing of self, to a transcendental identity. And when such wilderness traverses occur, unlike in the city, amongst noise and pollutants and urgencies, I don’ try to protect my heart or my mind or my body. I reel. In the wonder that is living large, my ‘self’ scatters beyond my cells, blood, organs, brain, and I receive the persistent mystery. “Who am I?” is the question my Zen master assigned as my koan some two decades ago in these Canadian Rockies. How strange that I stand alone and hear these very mountains echo – “All of us.”

On the day that I left Banff, there was new snow on the mountains. The rain clouds lifted revealing granite edges swathed in crystalline powder. Another season, another transformation that I would be absent for. These mountains are the beloved to me, in as tangible and erotic a manner as the dear man to whom I’ve been married for twenty-nine years. This isn’t an amusing metaphor. I have been taken by the mountain lover. We belong to each other. I must return.

Wild Tigress

On our recent pilgrimage to India, my husband chose an adventure that was one of his holy dreams – to go on a tiger safari in Rajasthan. He wanted to tour the national park, and sway his considerable luck toward sighting the near-extinct Bengal tiger. We had twenty-four hours to rollick about in a sunset and then a dawn safari, amidst bedding down in the luxurious Aman-I-Khas resort, served up with the most gracious hospitality we have ever experienced. (I’ll write about the joy and challenges of abundance in a future post.)

On the first safari, we met our knowledgeable guide, who had spent a lifetime in the Park, and who showed us how to spot crocodiles, nilgai, and sambar by the watering hole, lompar monkeys in the oldest banyan trees in the world, leopards in the dry grasses, and peacocks and parakeets by the walls of a tenth century fort. Ranthambhore is most famous for the tiger, which lives in the dense rocky bushland flowing with streams and lakes. But it is not a land separated from history – temples of Ganesh, Shiva and Ramlalaji are here, and as they have been doing for nine centuries, people bring their devotion to these stone faces.


A limited number of jeeps and guides are allowed into the park each day, and the visitor’s route is determined by lottery. Even though one’s assigned zone can’t ever predict a better chance at a sighting, the skill with which a guide spots a paw print in the sand, or the speed by which a driver bounces the jeep up a rock outcropping can determine the visitor’s fate. I laughed uproariously when my television-raised man shouted into the wind after a wild rip over a cliffside and down into a valley, “It’s just like an episode of Daktari!” We were thrilled to experience the chase that first sunset ride, and arrived back at our camp to warm cloths and cold limeade.


The next morning, with a hot water bottle on our laps, we left in the dark with hopes to meet the tiger on our final journey. A few minutes into the trip, I looked down and saw the imprint of a pad and claws in the dirt. A roar up a mountainside, and there appeared T 17, daughter of the famous Tigress, called “Lady of the Lake,” or Machchali, who survived despite her parents being taken by poachers.

T 17 is known as the most dominant tigress of the reserve, as evidenced by her stealth saunter in any direction she feels like moving, despite the tight territorial zones of the tigers of Ranthambhore. At first we thought she had moved past the jeep, and then our guide swung the wheels down the trail, and she came over the ridge directly toward us.

“Stay quiet and do not move,” our guide said as he slowly reached for his camera. This glorious Tigressa, the largest of the species, moved within three feet of our bodies, and then sprayed a nearby tree with her urine, marking her territory. I later learned that she was pregnant, and that her cub would be taken to live in a nearby park, in a reintroduction effort. “You do not know how rare this moment,” said our guide, and I trusted his word, yet I wouldn’t understand how extraordinary such a visitation might be, especially to future generations, until we learned about the impact of the Chinese New Year.


The Year of the Tiger may usher in more devastation for the near-extinct species, whose decline continues because tigers raise significant amounts of money in China and Tibet, where it is believed that their bones and teeth can cure certain ailments. Despite claims by the Chinese government that it is discouraging such use, India’s Wildlife Protection Authority has evidence that trade is rampant. Recently, India discovered their tiger, the country’s national symbol, had dropped in population by more than 60% in five years, driven by poaching and human encroachment into tiger habitats. Today 1,400 tigers are left in the wilds of India, 3,500 internationally, compared to 100,000 one hundred years ago.

A villager in India can earn double their yearly wage by killing a tiger. In 2005, the Namdapha reserve in Arunachal Pradesh was swept clean of all 61 tigers by the Lisu tribe, who set up camp inside the reserve to hunt. The reserve continued reporting a large tiger population to its government, and to the World Wildlife Fund, whose support under Project Tiger has been one million U.S. dollars, a scandal that has been widely reported in India. Similar events happened in Sariska and Panna reserves.

Project Tiger in Ranthambhore was also in chaos just a few years ago, when villagers grazed their cattle too close to the reserve, and poachers laid siege to its animals, reducing the population to 26 tigers. These days the world is watching Ranthambore, whose camera traps, staff patrols, and savvy supervision --including tribal negotiations to offer jobs, education and housing in exchange for identifying poaching rings – has improved conservation management. Still, tribes whose own land has been encroached upon by big dams and large scale mining, and the rampant bribery amongst politicians in India makes it challenging to survive in these forest and farm dependent communities.

Because we have lived in Banff National Park, and those mountains remain our soul home, we are aware of the delicate balance between animals and humans in protected regions. Rather than become a hindrance, tourism can support conservation, through educating humans about fragile species, and about how one is expected to act in a wilderness environment, as well as support a growing economy.

India is the home of the tiger. The tiger leads all other species in its ecosystem. When it roars, the Bengal can be heard for three kilometers. In this Year of the Tiger, lets let this roar be heard around the world.

Stephen Jaffy/AFP/Getty

Wild Underbelly

Photo by Vandana Rajagopalan


Upon return from India, I discover a new poison for our children

The Stain -- On the morning of the first bath of the Maha Kumbh Mela, when we had returned from the ghats just as dawn was breaking, my husband and I ran up the stairs to our hotel, deliriously laughing, shocked that we had submerged ourselves in the Ganges with the other pilgrims, and relieved that we had made it to the crowded site with relative ease. As he peeled off his wet clothing, I moved into the small bathroom and started the shower. I unzipped my long wet skirt, and as I stepped out of the folds, I saw that the bottom of my feet were scarlet-colored. “Honey?” I said, “Please come quickly.” At that moment I thought that I had cut myself, and in the dark of four in the morning, and the delight of the journey, had simply ignored the sensation.

We ran our hands over my feet, their shade a distinct blood-red, and saw no cuts. Then we looked down and saw the stain spreading across the towel. Some substance I had stepped on had stained them so completely that I was to wear this color for days. After it happened I saw several other women on the street with the same red soles, usually the women who worked in the markets, out on the streets with bare feet or light sandals, as working women often seemed to be. I wondered if the powder placed on the agna or sixth chakra by marred women and temple-goers had somehow fallen into the street and had given me my Dorothy-like ruby slippers.

The Sell -- Later, traveling over dusty roads and through small villages, we observed hundreds of small street vendors in everything from wooden stalls, to rolling carts to umbrella-covered boxes. At every stall long silvery streams of small packets were lined up like prayer flags, flying in the sun. They looked just like condom packets sold in America in bathroom stalls and pharmacies. “Do you think it’s a sign of their great family planning education?” I hopefully asked my husband. “I think they’re candies,” he answered.

It wasn’t until several days into our long rural drive, as my husband heaved against thistle bushes – oh, the ravages of food poisoning, -- that I got up the nerve to ask our quiet, polite driver what the packets were. There, littered by the side of the road were hundreds of packets, scattered from the street to the farms. I pointed at one on the ground and he said, “Gutka. Terrible. Like cigarettes. Make people sick.”

The Sickness – Back in America, I google ‘gutka’ and discover that it is the scarlet substance that stained women’s bare feet. Like chewing tobacco, gutka is a stimulant placed in the mouth, where it turns red, and then spit out after its effects have been ingested. Composed of crushed betel nut, tobacco, catechu, lime and sweet or savory flavorings, gutka is manufactured in India and exported to other countries. Costing a pittance --between 1 and 6 rupees apiece, -- even the poor can afford its high, and it is the working people who most prefer the buzz to keep them awake during long shifts.

Cheap, sweetened, and as portable as candy, the deadly substance has also found its way into the mouths of India’s children, sometimes even as far away as England’s South Asian population. The age for initiation to gutka is between eight and fourteen years. Now gutka is so popular amongst the young that doctors say it is causing an oral cancer epidemic.

Called the ‘Indian avatar of tobacco’ – even though the ingredient of tobacco is missing on some packets -- about 5 million children under 15 are addicted to gutka. India has the world's highest incidence of oral cancers, about 30%, compared to the West’s 5%, and over 2,000 deaths a day are tobacco related. A survey in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh yielded precursor of mouth cancers in 16 percent of the children.

Indians have long chewed paan, a betel leaf wrapped around a mixture of lime paste, spices, areca nut and sometimes tobacco. Convenience, in the form of shiny packaging available everywhere in India, has made gutka accessible to children and young people, for whom smoking is taboo. Sales of the deadly mix quadrupled in the 1990’s to over one billion dollars, causing Mumbai and other places to attempt a ban on the product, which the High Court later overturned on the grounds of unfair trade practice.

Gutka manufacturers say it was cigarette companies that wanted the ban on their product. Gutka marketing campaigns managed to erase the stigma tied to using tobacco by utilizing glamorous and socially acceptable situations. India's version of the Oscars is sponsored by one of the top-selling brands, and free samples are available at religious festivals, youth events, and some say even outside schools. In television commercials, gutka gives actors the power to perform superhuman feats.

With gutka’s use, tumors bulge from cheeks and jaws; there are holes where larynxes used to be. Dr. A. K. D'Cruz, the lead head-and-neck surgeon at Tata Memorial Hospital says, "most of our cancers come a decade earlier than the West." They’re often preceded by submucosal fibrosis, a hardening of the palate that can make it almost impossible to open the mouth. Gutka’s ‘glamorous’ effects.

The Switch – Enter the Marlboro Man. Philip Morris, who changed its name to Altria in a rebranding effort, is lobbying President Obama, under new FDA laws, to categorize smokeless products as less harmful than cigarettes. No contrite corporate citizen, it was reported yesterday that Altria seeks to add sweet flavorings to its smokeless products and market them in tiny packages. Smell like teen snuff?

“A series of letters that Altria submitted to the F.D.A. as part of that process argues that the government should, effectively, sign off on the notion that smokeless tobacco products are less harmful than cigarettes — and that Altria and other companies should be allowed to market them as such to consumers,” says The New York Times. Not only would indoor smoking laws be bypassed, but just as in India, smokeless ‘candy’ would become popular with children and adults for whom smoking has become stigmatized. With Altria’s control of 55% of the smokeless tobacco market, and its alignment with Kraft Foods, (not to mention its $11 million in bad debt,) it is counting on the ease of access to flavored smokeless products to improve its stagnant cigarette sales and bottom line.

In The New York Times, Christopher Growe, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, the investment bank, says smokeless could be a business with strong potential growth for Altria. “There’s an opportunity that, in the long run, the F.D.A. could treat smokeless tobacco differently than cigarettes,” he says. (1) Even without glitzy ads, sponsorships, shiny packaging and the sweetening up of the poison, in the U.S., smokeless tobacco use is growing amongst high school teens. For Altria, repackaging is only the beginning – in its appeal to the FDA, it is seeking to have its ‘American gutka’ designated as safe as smoking cessation products.

“They’re clearly trying to make the product more palatable and more appealing to a broad audience,” says James F. Pankow, a professor of chemistry and engineering at Portland State University in Oregon who was a researcher involved in preparing the journal report. (2)

That audience, public health experts say, includes children. “The flavors are designed to attract kids,” says Kenneth E. Warner, dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a founding director of its Tobacco Research Network. (3) The Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health states that use by immigrants is on the rise. “Smokeless tobacco prevention and cessation research and interventions have not yet addressed the unique sociocultural circumstances of this growing, at-risk community. The medical, dental, and public health communities need to join forces to combat this emerging threat.”

Let India’s lessons teach America. Before our children’s mouths, jaws and lives are destroyed by a deadly toxin masquerading as candy, write the President, your Senator, and please write the FDA at http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/ContactFDA/default.htm.





Material from this piece also came from The New York Times, August 13, 2002 “Sweet But Deadly Addiction Is Seizing Young In India” and February 2, 2010 “Where There’s No Smoke, Altria Hopes There’s Fire

Wild Death

The Buddhist’s Kashi. The Hindu’s Holy City. The citizen’s Banaras. Varanasi: the oldest city in the world, from the first millennium BCE. Named for the confluence of the Ganges with the old rivers, Varana and Assi, now the ghats known as the beginning and the end.

At midnight we are led from the airport to our hotel, Palace on Ganges, at Assi ghat, one of the main spiritual sites of the city, the place where one bath can eliminate 100,000 births, according to Hindu belief. Patrons and pilgrims, religious thinkers of all kinds flock here still, as they have for centuries.

We wake before dawn with smoke already filling our throats in the Himalaya-inspired room, tucked into the earth near the banks of the river. My beloved selected this room with a double bed (over the river-view twin) because he draws sustenance through touch. In the night I have dreamed of a baby newly walking who beckons me to leave the room, and I wake with a moan, the baby’s childlike fierceness as real as my own skin.

Before light our guide ushers us through the weave of tuk tuk drivers and beggars, and leads us through narrow alleyways to a waiting boatman, stopping to buy two lamps, candles nestled in leaves, marigolds around the wicks. We will light these as the sun comes up, and place them in the water, making our secret wishes for our loved ones.

We enter the long, wooden boat, and we are taken further into the fog, the lights from the distant ghats a misty gold, the ring of bells and throaty chants and the dip of the oars in the water both strange and familiar. In a few moments tourists will descend upon the river, along with boatmen hawking every manner of souvenirs, as they grab the sides of boats to place brass bracelets and rough-carved figurines in front of faces. For now, as we stream toward the Shiva side of the city (the other being the ‘karn’ or bardo side) we’re greeted by a sadhu on the shore, naked except for a loin cloth and gold-rimmed glasses. He raises a stream of smoke to the sky. Upon the platform that the sadhu stands, a street dog is humping a bitch whose teats haven’t yet receded. Nearby at a table, a couple prepares the flame for morning puja, and then with a stick broom, sweeps the dogs from their perch, but the pack barks and growls, their tantric practice a different sort.

Less than a hundred steps away a body is burning in a funeral pyre and the mourners move through the smoke -- talking, touching, singing. We find it difficult to offer them their privacy, for it is so unusual to witness the death of the body in this direct and oddly gentle manner. I think of my father cremated sixteen months ago, and I wonder what it would have been like to watch his body burn, to smell his flesh in the flames, to stand watch until the bones could be collected and taken to the Mother River.

When we’re back in the boat, rowing toward Manikarnika, the ghat that cremates 270 people each day, our guide tells us that some souls are considered so pure they are taken to the water directly – pregnant women, children, sadhus, and those who have died through snake bite, the mark of Lord Shiva. He looks in my eyes to ensure that I understand – a body or a limb can float by if the fishes haven’t consumed it completely.

On the excruciating twenty-two hour train trip to Varanasi (another story entirely) we have read the extraordinary contemporary novelist Geoff Dyer’s, “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” and so we are somewhat prepared for the insanity of the driving conditions, the seeming chaos of the alleys, the ever presence of death through all the senses. Still, we do not know the ferocity of Varanasi’s grip, we are not aware of what is ingested with the taste of ashes. We are not familiar with the devotion that will cause pilgrims to run to 98 temples (56 of Ganesha!) within twenty-four hours, to run from the first ghat to the Assi ghat, to run in the knowing that the soul is being released from 8.4 million rebirths (the math counts layers of atmosphere multiplied by a ghat’s particular power.)

When we leave our boatman and head toward the old city, we’re greeted by masala merchants, bony cows, armed soldiers. Near the Hindu Golden temple, is a Muslim mosque, and since this is a site of violence, before we enter we must deposit everything in a keyed locker, and then be searched. A woman soldier reaches under my bra, feels along my pubis. Later, I ask the guide if there have been terrorist threats in the news. “This is the way we do things since 9-11,” he says, “If they can do that to your people, what can they do to us?”

I don’t have time to follow his thought because we are soon pressed against the stone wall, chanting in the distance becoming louder as men move toward the Mother Ganga. “Ram nom seta he,” the voices chant, and I ask what these words mean.

“The name of God is the last truth,” our guide speaks.

Then the men are beside us, holding a body on a palanquin, a dead body covered in a gold cloth, with gold ribbons tied around the head and feet. After the mourners pass, an old man with a plastic box of cards thrusts a picture in front of my face. “Want memory card?” he asks, and I shake my head, a habit already, to decline the offering of things placed in front of us at every moment we are in the street.

“Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card? Want memory card?” he says over and over, his chant cutting into my consciousness. Every cell of my body is a memory card, a body whose remembering I can scarcely realize at times, for whose is this body, remembering? This body is the vehicle, the Varana and the Assi, my self, and yet not mine at all.

Wild Mother

Photos by BBC

On the day before we are to take the bath at the Kumbh Mela, we discover that the town’s security situation has changed. Our guide, Mr. Parikshit Joshi drives us around the site so we can see what we are in for. The main ghat, Har Ki Pauri, will be inundated with sadhus and temple leaders, who bring their devotees by the thousands. We will be hiking toward Ashti Parvath ghat, directly south and across the Ganges River from where the sadhus will immerse themselves before dawn the morning of January 14th, the first bath of the months-long festival. Because of the need for high security in the region, 20,000 Indian military, state police, and the RAF, a rapid action force, has been brought in to deal with suppressing potential riots and terrorist threats. We soon learn that plans may change hour to hour, and that we will not know until the day of events what our approach to the site might be.

Mr. Joshi points to the long, fenced, narrow bridges and tells me that if the procession became too crowded they herd people onto the bridges and then lock the gates, sometimes for hours, until the bathers at the ghats move toward their homes and tents. My husband takes my hand. I have been claustrophobic for years. I avoid elevators, crowds and locked rooms. I close my eyes and listen for an inner voice I have learned to trust. Could I overcome my fear if this situation emerges? I look to the man sitting next to me, who I have been loving for three decades. Something beyond our intellectual understanding has brought us to the Khumbh Mela, and we want to complete the ritual, to understand something about why we have come. “Think you can do it?” my husband asks, and I nod, feeling safe knowing that neither of these men would allow us into a foolhardy situation. The holy bath calls to me beyond my fears.

Life sometimes sounds nonsensical when lived by instinct, those moments before too many thoughts arise. First impulse is the way we had children, and chose homes and healed cancer. As I come into the wisdom of an (ahem) older woman, I want more body-centered instinct and less mental chatter. I realize my inspirations are no Jesus on a naan, however, I consistently find direction from what arises in my imagination, and sometimes just by leaning into things. First impulse tells us to get to the Kumbh Mela at the beginning. Thus, even though we’d had rather a full day of Shakti Peethas and Shri Swaminarayan, we ask to leave the hotel at four in the morning, to be at the ghats when the sadhus are in attendance.

Pilgrims walk here for many days, often families carry one shared bag, wearing bare feet, or worn sandals. The weather is unseasonably cold in Haridwar, 4 degrees C at night, and so this is not an easy journey. The families save resources so they might come for a bath in their beloved Mother Ganga.

In the hours before dawn, we walk through the dark. Past the checkpoints no vehicles or bicycles are allowed, only those travelers on foot, and we walk down alleys so dark I cannot see the ground. People emerge from alleys and buildings, people come from everywhere, chanting, moving quickly in the blackness, no lamps or lanterns. Although I had prepared myself for what it might be like to be noticed as westerners -- we had a few days of acclimating to being the new ones in town -- I have no idea of the degree to which those effects are amplified at the Kumbh Mela. According to our guide, people coming from rural areas may have seen a western person in the media, and some have not yet seen one up close. And it is mostly the locals who have witnessed westerners bathe in the Ganga.

As we take off our jackets and Richard removes his pants and shirt, I become aware of the people around us, watching us while they make their own preparations. I walk down the steps into the freezing river just as I see my husband’s body fall below the churning waters. He holds onto the iron rail to keep his torso still for the current is strong. I lift my hands into the Mother Ganga and pour the stream over my head, my skirt flowing around me like a blood-red pool in the steel grey water. A glowing statue in the distance lights the heads of other bathers -- falling, rising, jumping, bowing, shivering, stilling.

I splash a river salutation. In my mind: Ganges! Ganges! as the loudspeaker blares instructions in Hindi. Over my body is flowing the ashes of the dead. Where we are standing in the River is the place of last night's puja, the ceremony we witnessed, with fire and flowers, and chanted by a son and a priest as they performed the last rites. I am swimming through souls. Something deep inside realizes a belonging I have never registered, like what Marabai has written:
“I came for the sake of love-devotion;
seeing the world, I wept.”

Before we leave the ghats, I ask for a moment to offer my gratitude at the place we took our bath, and as I bow and lift the water to my head, my lips, my heart, I become aware that a group watches my movements. My hair and skirt is wet from the dip an hour earlier, and my feet are bright red from the cold, and around my shoulders I clench a saffron shawl for warmth. I am aware of an elder man to my left, watching as I pray, and as I turn to follow my men back down the road we arrived upon, this old one meets my eyes and we nod to each other. What passes between us is something beyond language and culture. This poem of India: a Mother river, a long pilgrimage, a seeing in the dark.

Wild Pilgrimage

Tomorrow morning I board a plane for Mother India. The notion of traveling to this exotic country began ten years ago when my Zen master, Shifu, also known as Dr. Kim Han Suk, suggested that India was one of those places I could clear my familial karma. Not just my own lifetime, but those of my ancestors and children, and perhaps even their children. Damn that proclamation. In classic student fashion, I rebelled, argued, dismantled (all inside my own mind,) knowing that I had received wisdom in the form of what my friends, the Dakini Sisters, called The Big Hit. Like the Zen stick that could come down upon our shoulders when we slumped in meditation, The Big Hit was a way Shifu could shred my psychic comfort by making me rethink everything I think I know about who I am.

An eldest child who was invested in being a good student, loving mother and conscious citizen, while underneath simmered that wild girl, I spent the last decade resenting the possibility that I could be responsible for others, all while nursing my husband through a rare cancer, and going to my father’s bedside after his brain tumor, and helping my mother, son and myself through our family disease. All experiences that led me to ask – Who is it that needs healing? I no longer believed that karma had created my family’s fate – karma was one more concept, one more identity that I would cling to. Still, I was afraid. Would I lose my mind in India? And would I want to live in that emptiness?

It wasn’t until one of the Dakini Sisters said, “Well, aside from all that rebelling, what if you went to India to see what was there?” that I allowed the place to lure me. A year later, when we received a financial reward, we thought about the lands we could travel to celebrate: Spain, Italy, Ireland and Wales all captivated. Instead, when my beloved asked me where I wanted to be for my fiftieth birthday, my eyes teared, because I knew I was compelled to go to the mythical land of Kali and Lakshmi and Saraswati. A few Google searches later, we discovered that the world’s largest act of faith, the Kumbha Mela, was happening within two days of my birthday, and then a few moments later, that we couldn’t find any compelling reason to stop ourselves from attending this magnificent event.


The Kumbha Mela will begin this week, in Haridwar, where the river Ganga enters the plains from Himalayas. Organized in the holy cities of Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik, the Kumbh Mela (Festival of the Pot of Nectar) features the largest human gathering in the world. We’ve heard estimates of eighty million people, with half that number present at its pinnacle. The religious festival invites devotees, sadhus, rishiks, yogis and tourists from almost every corner of the world. We will be present for the opening baths or snans, January 14th and 15th, the latter a solar eclipse.

Hindus believe that the waters of the Ganges turn into nectar on the auspicious occasion of Kumbh Mela. And that a holy dip in the divine waters of Ganga eliminates all the evil and past sins from an individual's life. Astrologers believe that bathing at Har ki Pauri ghat during the festival purifies the inner-self of an individual. I don’t know if any of those things are true. Self realization seems possible in any moment. Yet what is compelling for me is the chance to become a pilgrim, to be in the sensation of the heightened moment, to be embodied by the strange journey, to be unafraid of this ‘I’ dissolving, to give up thinking and instead experience being thought. The Big Hit reverberates still.

You can follow our journey to Delhi, Haridwar, Varanasi, and in Rajhasthan -- Jaipur, Shahpura Bagh, Ranthambore, Udaipur – then on to Kovalam beach in Kerala via facebook and http://workingwild.blogspot.com (as long as I can get wireless where we are roaming.)