Sanskrit Syllables

There are few love songs that stay with me. Driving through back roads between Illinois and Wisconsin in my early twenties, passing local bars that we could finally, legally enter, my gaze held steady to the road, in love with seed syllables, Sanskrit vowels, resonating from my car stereo:

Just back from India, what could I say to anyone back home? So I drove and once outside of town, I returned to a place with a cave, where the day started any time after midnight, that by sunrise you'd have already missed some major teaching or practice. Sometimes alone in the night or the cave or in the shrine, or alone in the hills where so many ancient teachers walked, I was frighteningly, wonderfully alive. Sometimes, by 11am, ten thousand pilgrims had gathered to chant and worship, and by 2pm all were fed and blessed.

I had the great good fortune to live in the house of an awakened teacher, one who was recognized when she was four years old as an avadhut, the one in whose glance and grace I found (or returned to) my place. The teachings were everything I asked for....but how could I possibly hold onto them then?

One early morning in particular, in the middle of a week-long meditation intensive, I sat in the dark cave. Four hours of silent meditation, an hour of chanting the mantra, returning to silence for an hour. On and on like this. Far into reaches of consciousness that I never knew existed - or I did, but never had the context or the map, a guide, or a vision of the meaning of that landscape, until I was made to sit and go there by one who had gone way before me. And then there was a speaker, one of the foremost American scholars of Indian philosophy, who took the mic in the dark glow of that space and spoke in a tone that soothed all the restless molecules in my body. He had studied the complexities of ancient scripture and texts for so long, but never had a teacher until he met my teacher that winter. And he was being transformed - it was in his voice, in his eyes. You would change simply from the bare impact of his words. I did.

I went on to study Sanskrit for five years. I drove from Boulder, CO to Denver every Thursday to meet with an old professor. What could I really do with that? In my way of trying to find normal happiness, all that stuff just drifted and fell away.

Almost twenty years out now, River sleeps in back yard, and I'm trying to figure how to write.

Last week I went Peet's in between packing and ran into a new acquaintance who mentioned that a great scholar, Paul Muller Ortega, was coming to speak at his yoga center that weekend. I went home and registered. Calling out to Steve from the other room, "Hey, would you please come to a lecture with me on Saturday?" And so we went.

To say that I was ecstatic is not exactly true. Longingly disoriented is more accurate. In the room full of young, aspiring yogis, I felt so middle-aged, so suburban, so fat. As soon as I saw him I felt all those things, but also present and ancient and completely at home. Before he spoke he sat with a quality of silence that makes people uncomfortable. No striving, nowhere to be, nothing to prove. I could finally breathe, so content in that kind of calm.

Skillfully and beautifully and so normally, he led us into a realm of the highest mysteries, translating in the most accurate, understandable, attainable way. Down the rabbit hole with an exquisite guide, passionate in his way of seeing and naming all the subtle layers and hidden doors and stunning plateaus on the path of yoga.

My husband chanted a Sanskrit mantra next to me (with gusto). It's the first time since knowing him that we have sat with the teachings that shaped me. I go to church with him, I listen to all his thoughts about Christian doctrine. I nod my head yes as my toddler talks about baby Jesus. And yet.....in my mind I am looking to the horizon, nodding to those dedicated ones so dear and true to me - the monks and sadhus and nuns who mapped out the journey in the Rig Veda or the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I looked over at Steve a few times and in his eyes, a fire. I smiled. Go deep enough in the well and the ancient teachings begin to sound the same. Ideas and experiences that he had read from his theological books were being unfolded almost identically from the Indian perspective.

Finally, from two sides of a river, we came upon a bridge.

On Sunday I went alone. Paul started the day by talking about one particular morning in India, 1989, when he sat for four hours in meditation, chanted for one hour, returned to silence, over and over. While in that silence he was shown a pattern of light, a matrix, the true nature of a sutra he had been studying for years. It was revealed to him, hour after hour. He looked over at his teacher and in her eyes he saw that she knew exactly what was being given, in her reflection he experienced a glimpse of her state, and he fell back into silence with closed eyes, deeply grateful, forever changed. And then he got up and took the microphone in the dark glow of that space and began to speak about this most amazing territory.

I wept and leaned over the woman next to me whom I didn't know, and said, "I was in that room with him. I was in that room." I had to tell someone.

At the end of the day I walked up to Paul and shared that I was there in 1989 on that morning. He said, "Oh my god, you were there. I thought I saw recognition a few times in your eyes as I spoke today. You were there..."

During question and answers, following a string of questions about meditation and philosophy, I shared that I felt my greatest 'forgetting' happens in my role in marriage and motherhood. He laughed, everyone laughed, except the young, single, childless, aspiring yogis.

Driving home, I put on a chant, in love with the Sanskrit vowels, and wondered why I have wandered so far from home. Home being teachings that I know are truly my path. Why did I want a relationship and child over my own happiness? Why did I think the two had to be separate? Why do I watch night time TV and eat too many oreos when I really want to be doing yoga?

The heroine's journey never really ends. We hear a calling and we leave a first home, we journey out, get caught up, find some teachings, slay the dragon, return home. But the wheel keeps turning. And sometimes we are on more than one track at a time - the wheel has dimensions, depth, the whole space/time thing not so relevant. Coming and going, and then standing still, we're also coming and going. And then in motion, we're going nowhere. It's all just now.

I've been walking around for a few days in a sort of high. My vision is different, slightly askew. I'm changed again. Just a few hours of what I totally love and I'm different. And I don't know how exactly to walk, what to say, what to write.

In respone to my question, Paul reminds me, "Every sunrise in the Indian tradition marks a new beginning, a return to the same practices, a gesture of remembering again. It's ok to forget. It's ok to forget. The long-time practitioners return and return again. You are always invited to take your place beside them."