Last month I got a phone call, supposedly from GoDaddy, telling me my TravelIndia07.com webpage was expiring in July 2017. “You can put it on auto-renew if you like–or renew it for another year– just gives us your new credit card number.”

I decided not to renew but rather to think about it for a few days. Maybe there was no reason to keep the website: I decided to transfer the website content–already curated and with stories– to my blog.  Then just yesterday I called GoDaddy to check on when exactly the domain name was expiring. How many days left to extract the info? The rep told me: “You have until September 2018.”

Well…we determined I was almost scammed by someone posing as GoDaddy in the early July phone call.

Nonetheless, despite now knowing I have a year instead of a few weeks,  I am chin-deep in India and can’t turn back.  I have fallen in love, again, with the country, the people, the images, the sensual and the sacred that oozes out of every sidewalk crack and cloud.  So during the next two months, following the initial plan,  I will be posting stories about India.

 

A group of vibrant, strong, colorful Himalayan mothers.

As it is for so many people, a trip to India in life-altering. When I returned to the States (2007),  I sidelined my linguistic capital  (well, not completely or I wouldn’t be writing this!) and focused on uplifting the visual. After the phantasmagoric shake-up of seeing and feeling in India,  the visual was just more accessible than words. I gave up my position at Boston University, where I had been teaching writing for nearly two decades, and shifted my teaching focus to Yoga, which I had been practicing since the 80s. I have not once regretted the shifts.

A family of four lives on the side of the road and sleeps together under the plastic garbage bag tent ( BTW the cars don’t belong to them but probably to theme who stopped for a shave  and haircut under the bigger tarp across the street).
In a middle-class boom town, there was a McDonalds and I was so looking forward to good ol’ American french fries….but the French fries were the same color as Ronald McDonald’s jumpsuit: heavily seasoned with Turmeric ( which I was hoping to avoid since everything I ate in India, including sweets, was seasoned with turmeric)

In India I had seen every possible variation of being human and of humanity–good and bad–and it was unrelenting.  For me, it became important to look inside myself and others and recognize the Divine. To do little things that I was capable of doing to recognize and express the physicality of our lives, to celebrate the body that holds our souls.

I am hoping my blog readers enjoy the trips much as I did!

Riding an elephant in Jaipur.

 

 

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