Water Lilies (Like to Travel)

AJWS World Partner Fellows Mid-Year Retreat
Mumbai, India and Bangkok, Thailand
January 17^th-27^th, 2008

In Motion

I love leaving, embarking, stepping out and feeling the surface of the street that is about to take me away. I love to travel. I love to lean against the window and watch the world flashing incomprehensibly by as the past few hours or weeks or days are slotted into sensible categories in my mind, as memories are chopped up and re-arranged, and competing stories of what-just-happened-to-me-? are narrated in the suddenly blank space behind my eyes. I love arrivals. I love the first impression, the details that stick for no apparent reason while the rest of the world blurs into a continuous wall of new images because you don’t yet understand enough to see the differences, the spaces in between.

The first thing I remember is the highway ramp leading to a raised road, our taxi speeding up the dark slope and along the broad, sinuous curves. The third and fourth (and fifth and sixth, and the shack on the roof, and the minaret next door) floors of hundreds of apartments flashed by, each screened porch’s laundry line partially blocking the too-private view of a bed with floral sheets, a dirty white door in a yellow wall, a dark wood cabinet lonely in the middle of a room, an immaculately clean kitchen counter. At five thirty in the Mumbai morning, the taxi had little competition on the road, and it flashed through the puddles of white cast by intermittent fluorescent street lamps at a speed that might have frightened us during daylight hours.

The first thing I remember is the water. Leaving the airport, it hung in the air in perfect curtains, effectively limiting our view of Thailand to green and white highway signs printed in (yet another) unfamiliar script. At the ashram, it greeted us by the road, and ferried us over to an Island-like paradise. It snaked around the dining hall, and led us from our dormitory to the meeting hall. And it was full, chock-full, of water lilies and their floating floral relatives.

In Millions

I love swimming in a sea of people. I love the fact that so many individuals can exist in such a small place, their lives stacked to overlapping. I love listening to the chatter of strangers, the clicking of soles on stone, the bumping of bags down a sidewalk.

Mumbai [19 million] tried to seduce me. She put on her softest ocean breeze, her clearest skies, her quietest hotel rooms. She whisked me down sidewalks past toweringly intricate colonial architecture mixed with mosques and temples and synagogues, through art galleries and cafes, to fresh baked bread and goat cheese that melted my heart on the spot. We spent an hour perched on the remains of a fort that must have once guarded the city from water-borne attacks but now provides a rambling collection of rough stone walls for groups of skinny young men, cuddling couples, and wandering chaat (snack) sellers. I’m pretty sure the ocean winked at me. The horizon certainly smiled.

Bangkok [9 million] is known as the sex capital of the world. We heard that people find it overwhelming, dirty, full. We found it stunningly clean, uncluttered, well-infrastructured. The taxis are hot pink. The traffic is no worse than Hyderabad (granted, not a difficult feat); while sitting in rush-hour gridlock in my Tuk-Tuk (a close cousin of the Indian auto-rickshaw), I met another American traveler, sitting along in his Tuk-Tuk in the next lane. We talked about our travels, and I tried a slice the apple-like fruit he was snacking on. The street food didn’t make anyone sick. The seafood was divine. Images of the King plastered every other surface. We visited compounds of endless temples and pagodas and tiny mirrored tiles and we watched the artists touching up the murals around the edge and we smiled at the care they took to fill in the peaks on the tiny golden crown of the adventuring prince.

In Mythology

I love stories. But if you’re still reading this, I think you know that by now.

And what part of this was a retreat – other than the retreat from our daily lives, of course? We traded tales and depicted details of our lives. There were sensitive sessions and terribly technical tools. There was talk of the vaguely frightening specter that is Next Year, and there was a visit with an American activist living and working abroad who knows half of the crazy characters I have planned and marched and spoken out with. But the important thing is that seventeen of us, seventeen of us who met for the first time in the heat of Delhi’s late summer, seventeen of us sat down and we told stories for a week.

The first time I went to Thailand, I was seven years old, and we crossed the border for a day trip from Malaysia. I remember three things: the rickety cycle rickshaw that we rode in, the pungent smell of the durian market that we passed, and the serene glory of the massive reclining Buddha that we saw. I remember one story: when Buddha was bit by a deadly poisonous snake, he refused treatment. It is my time to die, he said. And he was at peace. The reclining Buddha is Buddha when he is ready to slip out of this reality. The one thing I wanted to do in Bangkok was to find another reclining Buddha – preferably one at least as large as the one I remember (the size of a small concert hall), one that would overwhelm my ability to see it.

After visiting the Emerald Buddha (which is made of Jade), after posing with dancing mosaic monkeys and drinking down delectable details on a scale I could barely have imagined existed – and I do try to imagine the hours and the hands that went in to laying each tiny piece of tile and glass and gold leaf – I skipped the chance to eat lunch for a trip to visit Buddha on his death bed. His square pillow was twice my height. His peaceful face stared at a corner of the red and gold patterned ceiling, and I smiled at the familiarly soft curve of the back of his shoulders as they cast off their burdens.

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P.s. I’ve gotten into a habit of putting most of the necessary story line and facts in the captions to my photos – so for a differently full description of my mid-year retreat, try perusing those.

P.p.s. We had to leave the country due to visa ish (our visas are valid for the duration of our fellowships, but we can’t stay in the country for more than six months at a time) – so AJWS was forced to take us to Thailand.