I still dream about India at night. Perumal still texts me. I chat with Sundhari on WhatsApp. I write my old India roommate Line. I look through pictures. I pray for Seetha and Lakshmi.
To be honest, these past 11 months have been the hardest in my life. I sincerely hope life won't give me anything harder. I always thought I'd have to mentally prepare for India, but now I think that India prepared me for the immense pain I'd soon feel.
My field studies family and I always sat around wondering why we felt so much more alive in other cultures than our own. Why we'd smile and become ten times happier when we'd meet someone from the country we once lived in and visited. We were all students. We all either had depression or anxiety, later discovered we were gay, were single or if married were in the process of divorces. I think we all felt, or are feeling, lost in our own society and culture. And we'd come alive when welcomed by another culture and country, even though we were physically so different, and when we'd see things from a different point of view. We knew our culture and life in America to be so unfair and strange that of course we'd have something to learn from other lands, from people who had nothing and were yet happy. Now I think we're all at a point where we still want to experience life in different cultures, but are also cognizant of the fact that we can't escape our weaknesses and the trials God has in store for us.
Robyn Davidson talks about her camel journey across Australia. Odysseus reflects on his ten year efforts to finally find home. Frodo comes back to the Shire. It's funny that we think of movie and story endings as truly endings. They lived happily ever after. The end. And yet they're all stories that only lead to more challenges in life. Robyn Davidson said our lives are full of camel journeys. Joseph Campbell says we're all on our own journey. I had my experiences in going to India, and am now on a different journey figuring out how to continue living while knowing I will never be able to be with those I love most in the ways I want to.
My blog is entitled Odyssey to India, indicating the long time I thought about and prepared for my time to live there. Yet our odysseys are never ending. Or, perhaps they do end but are constantly transitioned to another odyssey of a different lesson or pain.
Spring is here. Outside my office is a long sidewalk flanked on both sides by jasmine bushes. Every time I walk by I lean over to smell them. The fragrance wafts into my mouth and nose. I'm immediately brought back to a time when someone loved me enough to put jasmine flowers in my hair every morning.
A couple of nights ago I explained some of my situation in a Mormon Feminist Housewives group. One of the elderly women looked at me and said, "Sarah, God wants you to be happy and to have His fulness. And He wants you to be with someone who you can love as much as you want." I've never thought of that before. I've always felt like God was constantly planning heartwrenching trials through which I must pass, and that death would be a sign of his mercy and relief.
All of our journeys bring us to different persons. People who make us laugh or cry, people we want to share our lives with but aren't able to, people who give us hope, like this elderly sister above. We're all here together on our journeys, interacting and coinciding and dancing. Journeying together.
