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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

another turn of the screw

G'day. It's raining! I kid you not! And the forecast is for scattered thundershowers over the next several successive days as well. Amazing. It's cooler now, which is a godsend; it's also much damper. So....I SURRENDER!!!!!!

And squish along down the red muddy lanes on my newly purchased bicycle, not a moment too soon. I think it's a much better ride through all the muck than the other would have been.

Some very simple and self-evident truths I'm really realising: like draws like. Hell, I've known this for years and even experienced it. But, as In Your Face as I relayed that India is, I'm being slammed with it to the proverbial hilt now (also because I'm willingly forcing myself to interact more with people and shit like that, that I love and I loathe alternately).

I'm looking at my living situation, which is so much the opposite of what I want in my life. The woman next door (RIGHT next door, and remember, there aren't many windows that really shut in buildings here and if they do it's more of a decoration than anything and don't mediate noise)...the woman next door blares her TV night and day. The dogs bark a LOT, and sometimes a pack of them will gang up and hang out and occasionally chase me down the lane at night on my bicycle, snarling and growling. They don't back down even if I growl and yell back. There is construction going on across the way. The people in the 'community', as far as I can tell, don't really visit one another...very little interaction. And, it's been dubbed a 'former slum' and efforts to educate the local Indian folk who populate this community about recycling has been largely fruitless and a failure. So it's kind of....slummy.

The toilet doesn't really drain shit well either, so there's that.

Okay. So along with this is my ongoing fear of scarcity, and constant budgeting and penny-pinching (some of that is good, right? I saved enough money to travel after all). Fear that I don't belong. Fear that I won't have enough. Doubt that I deserve or can manage to find community and connection despite my aforementioned ability and evidence to the contrary. All of this energy.....draws to me like energy and situations!

I was riding my (old) bicycle down the road yesterday and a couple hailed me so I stopped and they asked about where I rented the cycle. We started chatting about this and that, and they're originally from Northern California but have owned places in Bangkok and Bali and live in Tokyo. They ask where I'm staying and I describe it in all its glory and all its squalor (it is a sweet little guest house after all - truly). And they ask what I'm up to traveling and how long and all that, and I tell them, with all my attendant observations about the situations and locations and experiences I keep encountering.

They articulated exactly what I've been thinking about but not yet able to fully realize or articulate myself: that it's probably better to travel for fewer months or less time and stay in places that aren't slummy; staying at ground-level, so to speak, you only see the ground. It's kind of like I'm inviting this element into my life over and over again, or I consent to it in a way.

Enough with the joylessness!

I quit the Solar Kitchen, by the way.

The couple, Marissa and David, are world travelers and said that I picked a doozy of a place to start with (the Doozy being India of course)...they'd recommend it only for graduate travelers.

At first I thought why not just take the lid all the way off my own Pandora's box and go to India, really fry my synapses. Turn it upside down. And, I didn't really know where I wanted to go...nothing really resonated...nothing has been resonating in my life for awhile. So, okay, India.

Lately I've been thinking why in hell would I want to make it more difficult for myself? I already feel emotionally/physically/mentally and even spiritually exhausted, confused and depleted. India is a hard place to travel in, especially if you're feeling any of the above.

(let me break to add that I've also thought that if I was wildly, madly in love or in lust with someone, it would definitely take the edge off all this, but I'm not, so it's altogether edgy)

I was thinking homeopathically: treating like with like so as to produce some sort of healing. But, in the words of my new English friend Peter, "This is not my place. These are not my gods." Sometimes that's okay. But right now for me, it's not what I want to be around. I want some good vibrations, man! What I need is not a dose of homeopathy - the cacophony and contradiction and madness of India that could be for some or maybe for me someday a sort of revivifying concoction...all of that matches what is going on internally for me in great part. I need a dose of happy, of reveling in life, and I think that what I'm experiencing in India is just toooooo weird and not grounding at all.

So, anyone wanna meet me in Bali?

2 comments:

Jacquelyn Smith said...

awe, I sure wish I could! Heave ho and away you go!! Off with you then to Bali it is!
Love you,
Jacque

Victoria Koldewyn said...

me tooooooooo!!!!

I hope folks in Bali smile more than they do here. It's rather grim and way too serious around this joint :)

love you too G!