Everything Changes

The last reel of photos from India are up.


My head is a lot more clear about the entire experience these days, but still not entirely clear. A few things are certain: I miss the chai masala and the street food and wandering the streets. I miss the colors and the feeling of being away from home and the busy chaos of being on the frontlines of the battle between new and old. That said, I'm really happy to be home.

Home has been a little more difficult than I imagined it to be, but maybe less difficult than my last post would have suggested it would be. Yoga school and even practicing at Samadhi has become almost meaningless to me. I'm not going to keep going to class, and I'm going to let my membership of 3 years lapse. It's not that it's not a great studio filled with wonderful, loving people. It's just that my trajectory has spun and now points elsewhere. So elsewhere I go.

I'm still trying to rediscover a meaningful meditation practice, and I'm still trying to build a reliable personal yoga practice, and I'm still teaching at my house. I'm not really sweating the details though, I think these things will just evolve and resolve themselves over time. I feel magnetically drawn to my guitar and the quiet it creates in my mind, and the longer days and the first sight of cherry blossoms pull my thoughts towards my garden.

My desire to go to India and have it be meaningful launched me away from my career towards some mysterious unknown future and the experience of India pulled me back towards my old self and my old ideas and old notions of the world. I'm looking forward to a more integrated, accepting, understanding, and rational me.

I am happy to again be looking for answers instead of assuming I've found them, and I'm happy to be properly humbled by the myriad modes of human existence. I find myself a bit more cynical than I prefer, but I think the cynicism will burn off with the gray Seattle skies, as winter turns to spring.

Today, as I finally decided to leave my yoga studio behind, I find myself less cynical and more hopeful than I've been in a while. I'm grateful for all my former teachers at Samadhi and their great spirit and for all I learned in my years there. I'm grateful as well for my wonderful friends and housemates, who's mere presence in my life is enough to stave off the blues.

To those who made it this far: thanks for reading and watching. I'll be blogging about various very nerdy things at my personal site (retford.us) and I'll leave this blog to rot in the ether until some fateful day years from now when some little thing makes me revisit this whole adventure again.