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Rewriting A Life: Leave Everything You Know Behind 9/23/2017 11:36:24 AM
When you're willing to leave everything you know behind, you can rewrite your life. It seems that every part of India is different from every other part of India - From footwear and beads to temperature and geographic influences. India can rattle, excite, sicken, delight, anger,sooth, frighten, or entice you - Sometimes all in one day! The reaction to this land has less to do with the country or culture than with the traveler.
My journey to India, which resulted in the writing of my India travel memoir, “Moonlight on the Ganga,” began when I agreed to travel there with a group of people who were students of American mystic Jacqueline T. Snyder and Zarathustra. A Hindu swami had offered to gift Jacque a section of his Rishikesh ashram (unusual enough given that she was a woman, a non-Hindu and an American), because her desire to “unite all the world’s religions as one” was one this Swami agreed with. As a result, a couple dozen people volunteered to travel to Rishikesh with her to begin preparing the grounds for a dedication ceremony. Though absolutely resisting the idea of going to India, a place about which I had many unfavorable beliefs and fears (sickness, disease, poverty, insect-ridden, crowds, etc.), long story short, I finally said “Yes” to the opportunity.
From that day on, a mantra-like phrase seemed to play deep inside my brain from morning till night no matter where I was or what I was doing: “Leave everything you know behind, Leave everything you know behind.” I did not know it’s meaning or it's deep impact until I stepped out of the Delhi Airport into crush of bodies, sounds and odors of the packed throngs crushing and moving all around me. From that instant on, the mantra was never heard again, and from that moment on I didn’t see anything in India to fear or turn from. I would walk into situations open to experience or know whatever would come to my attention.
However, this wasn’t the experience of many of the others I traveled with. After “Moonlight’s” first publication in the early 2000’s I would receive a call, or meet up with some of the fellow-travelers from that trip, and the initial greeting seemed fairly consistent. With a laugh they would say some variation of, “I can’t even believe we were on the same trip! I was so [pick one] miserable/sick/angry so much of the time. I can’t imagine being able to do what you did.”
Had I carried the weight of my personal fears, doubts, life’s misperceptions with me to India, if I had not “left everything I [thought I knew] behind” then my experiences would probably have remained in the material realm and “Moonlight on the Ganga” may never have been written. I am now, again, feeling the need “leave everything I [think I know] behind. You can rewrite a life that way, you know.
