The thing about circling the globe is you may start out running away, but end up running toward.
I guess I’ve come to accept that cliches can be ok sometimes. Or maybe I just don’t care. Both part of the wisdom that’s supposed to come with getting older?
Anyway, I went to the east, deep in the Himalayas, and by the time I circled my way back home I’d found I was no longer running away with this time coming in Paris, but running toward what and where and who I’m supposed to be.
I can thank the early morning silver moon in Nepal illuminating the sacred mountains, the flickering gold of butter lamps across Nepal and Bhutan, the ancient wisdom permeating every mysterious corner like so much incense wreathing the stone carvings of temples and stupas. And the bright, crisp cold of the dewy morning grass on my bare feet in the meditation maze at a soul’s green sanctuary outside of Kathmandu called Dwarika’s where the neon fire of the sunrise surprised me slipping out of the pools of clouds.
And the otherworldly resonance of the healing bowls at Om in Kathmandu that sang and boomed and echoed throughout the room and my very blood and bones.
And the acrid smoke of earthly bodies with flames dancing their souls away along the Bagmati River where the indigo sky reverberated with bells and chanting and songs and the occasional distant mooing of a wandering cow.
And the immediate and unconditional love of a pair of street dogs in Kathmandu, dogs who adopted me as much as I adopted them for the few days we shared their world, who’d leave their slumber in the sun to leap on me and shower me with the affection I missed from my own sweet boy back home.
And the purest childlike glee of opening the window each morning to see what marvel awaits today - is it a rollicking band of merry urban otters, a pack of scampering monkeys, a horse swishing his tail as he stands, unperturbed in a mountain road while the rising sun burns away the mist of the Bhutan mountains?
And the mountains, oh my God the mountains piercing the clouds as we drift by at twenty-some thousand feet, that stretch on and on and on past the mother of them all, Everest.
I circled the globe, running away when I left. By the time I returned, a stillness had settled in my soul, my heart, which both know I’m heading in the right direction when I go to Paris. It’s written in the stars that I would always do this, and I’ve always known without knowing. Another cliche, bien sûr, but like I scrawled in a notebook sitting in a cafe in Paris two and a half times around the sun ago:
life is here. It’s surprising there’s not an audible click as I shift back into place. Maybe the sound of a skeleton key, its slender frame tumbling aimlessly until it slides into the lock it’s fitted so precisely for. It turns and with respirere, a sigh of relief and release, everything falls into place.
I ran away until I wasn’t running anymore, and it’s time now to move with purpose.
