thought, though? Well-it wasn't even a thought. It was an action.
I jumped out the window.
To be specific, I crawled outside over the railing, gripping it with my sweaty palms and dangling there from two stories up over the darkness for a moment, only then asking myself the reasonable question, 'Why are you jumping out of this building?' My reply came with a fierce, impersonal determination: I have to get to the Gurugita. Then I let go and dropped backward maybe twelve or fifteen feet through the dark air to the concrete sidewalk below, hitting something on the way down that peeled a long strip of skin off my right shin, but I didn't care. I picked myself up and ran barefoot, my pulse slamming in my ears, all the way to the temple, found a seat, opened up my prayer book just as the chant was beginning and-bleeding down my leg the whole while-I started to sing the Gurugita.
It was only after a few verses that I caught my breath and was able to think my normal, instinctive morning thought: I don't want to be here. After which I heard Swamiji burst out laughing in my head, saying: That's funny-you sure act like somebody who wants to be here.
And I replied to him, OK, then. You win.
I sat there, singing and bleeding and thinking that it was maybe time for me to change my relationship with this particular spiritual practice. The Gurugita is meant to be a hymn of pure love, but something had been stopping me short from offering up that love in sincerity. So as I chanted each verse I realized that I needed to find something-or somebody-to whom I could devote this hymn, in order to find a place of pure love within me. By Verse Twenty, I had it: Nick.
Nick, my nephew, is an eight-year-old boy, skinny for his age, scarily smart, frighteningly astute, sensitive and complex. Even minutes after his birth, amid all the squalling newborns in the nursery, he alone was not crying, but looking around with adult, worldly and worried eyes, looking as though he'd done all this before so many times and wasn't sure how excited he felt about having to do it again. This is a child for whom life is never simple, a child who hears and sees and feels everything intensely, a child who can be overcome by emotion so fast sometimes that it unnerves us all. I love this boy so deeply and protectively. I realized-doing the math on the time difference between India and Pennsylvania-that it was nearing his bedtime back home. So I sang the Gurugita to my nephew Nick, to help him sleep. Sometimes he has trouble sleeping because he cannot still his mind. So each devotional word of this hymn, I dedicated to Nick. I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK because he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do anything to help him. And not only that-he has wisdom and patience of his own, buried deep inside his being, which will only reveal themselves over time and will always carry him through any trial. He is a gift from God to all of us. I told him this fact through this old Sanskrit scripture, and soon I noticed that I was weeping cool tears. But before I could wipe the tears away the Gurugita was over. The hour and a half was finished. It felt like ten minutes had passed. I realized what had happened-that Nicky had carried me through it. The little soul I'd wanted to help had actually been helping me.
I walked to the front of the temple and bowed flat on my face in gratitude to my God, to the revolutionary power of love, to myself, to my Guru and to my nephew-briefly understanding on a molecular level (not an intellectual level) that there was no difference whatsoever between any of these words or any of these ideas or any of these people. Then I slid into the meditation cave, where I skipped breakfast and sat for almost two hours, humming with stillness.
Needless to say, I never missed the Gurugita again, and it became the most holy of my practices at the Ashram. Of course Richard from Texas went to great lengths to tease me about having jumped out of the dormitory, being sure to say to me every night after dinner, 'See you at The Geet tomorrow morning, Groceries. And, hey-try using the stairs this time, OK?' And, of course, I called my sister the next week and she said that-for reasons nobody could understand-Nick suddenly wasn't having trouble falling asleep anymore. And naturally I was reading in the library a few days later from a book about the Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna, and I stumbled upon a story about a seeker who once came to see the great master and admitted to him that she feared she was not a good enough devotee, feared that she did not love God enough. And the saint said, 'Is there nothing you love?' The woman admitted that she adored her young nephew more than anything on earth. The saint said, 'There, then. He is your Krishna, your beloved. In your service to your nephew, you are serving God.'
But all this is inconsequential. The really amazing thing happened the same day I'd jumped out of the building. That afternoon, I ran into Delia, my roommate. I told her that she had padlocked me into our room. She was aghast. She said, 'I can't imagine why I would've done that! Especially because you've been on my mind all morning. I had this really vivid dream about you last night. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day.'
'Tell me,' I said.
'I dreamt that you were on fire,' Delia said, 'and that your bed was on fire, too. I jumped up to try to help you, but by the time I got there, you were nothing but white ash.'
55
It was then I decided I needed to stay here at the Ashram. This was so totally not my original plan. My original plan had been to stay here for just six weeks, have a bit of transcendental experience, then continue traveling all over India… um… looking for God. I had maps and guidebooks and hiking boots and everything! I had specific temples and mosques and holy men I was all lined up to meet. I mean-it's India! There's so much to see and experience here. I've got a lot of mileage to cover, temples to explore, elephants and camels to ride. And I'd be devastated to miss the Ganges, the great Rajasthani desert, the nutty Mumbai movie houses, the Himalayas, the old tea plantations, the Calcutta rickshaws racing against each other like the chariot scene from Ben-Hur. And I was even planning on meeting the Dalai Lama in March, up in Daramsala. I was hoping he could teach me about God.
But to stay put, to immobilize myself in a small Ashram in a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere-no, this was not my plan.
On the other hand, the Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. So something was telling me it would be spiritually negligent to run off now, when so much was happening right here in this small, cloistered place where every minute of the day is organized to facilitate self- exploration and devotional practice. Did I really need to get on a bunch of trains and pick up intestinal parasites and hang around backpackers right now? Couldn't I do that later? Couldn't I meet the Dalai Lama some other time? Won't the Dalai Lama always be there?(And, if he should die, heaven forbid, won't they just find another one?) Don't I already have a passport that looks like a tattooed circus lady? Is more travel really going to bring me any closer to revelatory contact with divinity?
I didn't know what to do. I spent a day wavering over the decision. As usual, Richard from Texas had the last word.
'Stay put, Groceries,' he said. 'Forget about sightseeing-you got the rest of your life for that. You're on a spiritual journey, baby. Don't cop out and only go halfway to your potential. You got a personal invitation from God here-you really gonna turn that away?'
'But what about all those beautiful things to see in India?' I asked. 'Isn't it kind of a pity to travel halfway around the world just to stay in a little Ashram the whole time?'
'Groceries, baby, listen your friend Richard. You go set your lily-white ass down in that meditation cave every day for the next three months and I promise you this-you're gonna start seeing some stuff that's so damn beautiful it'll make you wanna throw rocks at the Taj Mahal.'
56
