Delhi, India Dec 6, 2005

The first thing I noticed was the air--it's thick, like a forest fire buring right nearby, only it isn't. It's car exhaust, and it's inescapable. It hung like a haze in the baggage claim area, and thickened as we got out. Visible.

I'm in love. Falling in love softly with a place I can't understand. It defies my attempts to understand it in a gentle sort of way, like everytime I think I'm starting to get a grip on some part of the reality here, then another thing appears and again I'm free from grasping this ingraspable place.

How do I know this only after 6 hours here? It was the mob of taxi drivers with signs for people waiting at the airport, and my name appearing there against all odds. The soft dirt and rubble that was the airport parking lot, random placements of granite carved and drivers moved them around to mark out spaces for their vehicles. Make-your-own-parking space. Cars and pedestrians vying for the roadway as if they were equals, and as soon as I think, "ah, this is how it works, everyone is just comfortable mingling vehicle, car, no space, no fear" then I see two men standing right there in the middle of it all sharing a cup of hot tea, right in the parking lot of the airport, casual as if it were their living room, intimate and soft and the collision of all these elements all sharing this same space blows me out and I'm left just grinning at the whole picture, part of it but not part of it, observing it all for the first time. It escalates as we drive away in our taxi...extreme pollution, dirt, honking horns, and then a section of the highway is decorated with pink garland hanging from lightpost to lightpost. A tractor rolls down the road with a man and his wife wrapped in her beautiful head scarf -- 11pm on Airport Road--like this is their only mode of transport, so they use it. The big trucks all adorned with streamers, tinsel, garland, paintings even as they are tranporting enormous loads, cement sewer pipe (precariously untethered to the bed), and then the donkey and his rider prancing along midst it all.

There is a constant din out my hotel window, all night, with a lull at maybe 4 am for a short while but didn't last long before car horns start up and strange animal sounds make their way through these windows. How was it when Andrew Cohen (my spiritual teacher) came here over 25 years ago? Was the air pollution this bad (some 10,000 people die each year in Delhi from it)? How much more modern has this city become in the last quarter-century? To me it hardly matters. I've obviously dropped in from the extreme post post-modern context to this, a radically different time and era. Despite the cars, pollution, and other more "modern" elements, this society is NOT something I"ve ever experienced. This is the privilege of the post post modern woman, to have the luxury of being absurdly ignorant of where my own culture grew up from. And so it is, and I have to keep reminding myself to close my mouth as I stare out the window. But something about India does that for me, or seems to. It's like it is constantly surprising me and at the same time, as senseless as whatever it is may be, it seems to make perfect sense. Not your standard logical sort of sense, because it defies that. It's deeper. There is a deep ease that seems to pervade everything here, in a way I cannot explain. LIke part of me knows all this already, even though I don't. The paradox itself it glorious.