Wanderlust.

Worry is the nonluminous dark matter of the mind. The trepidations we spend countless minutes, hours and days constructing in the caverns of our brains are just slippery slime that, when willed to do so, will simply slink away. In reality, thoughts are transparent like a gentle breeze, but our minds grasp onto the constant dialogue of firing neurons and create moods, emotions, feelings, attitudes, habits, and patterns with the aim of rendering what does not exist, concrete. According to this logic, worry and neurosis exist on the same plane as acceptance and joy. Our wide eyes ought to be filled with wonder, not worry.

I cannot stop contemplating the movement of human existence. Stillness remains an allusive ideal; she rests complacently on a velvety chaise lounge in the palace of my brain. Lines of progress and reprise run parallel; creating a magnetic tension with one another. I have an inescapable longing for an absence of the strict reign of seconds, minutes, hours and days. The arms of time encircle my body like a too-tight woolen sweater; I itch and squirm with discomfort, but to no avail; unless the article is removed, comfort will not be found.  What could we become if we threw away our instruments and suspended our minds and bodies in space? Could we create an evolved process of living?Is it possible that we could deconstruct our self-made enclosures to simply be free? 

Busses, rickshaws, ambassadors painted white, bicycles, and cows all jockey for position; traffic lanes optional, blaring horns are a constant. Heaps of trash decorate alleyways and plazas like paintings do walls; a dilapidated picture those piles paint, running parallel to the tarp tent colonies that hug the roadside. Hinglish spoken and scribbled on the backs of autos and advertisements . Paneer and ghee for lunch, Bollywood films in the rainy afternoon. Turban-clad Sikh gentlemen stroll next to sari-sporting, bindi wearing women; mortaring freshly laid brick walls. Kurtas, salwar Kameez, and jeans all intermingle giving birth to an east-west fashion love child who proudly dances in the streets. Many malas have found a home around my neck, many dark eyes have gazed inquisitively upon my pale skin. A sea of a million faces passes me by, continuously. Wealth and poverty, beauty and deprivation, promises of progress amongst an abundance of ruin. In Delhi, there is movement. 

Human experience is collective. The plethora of thoughts, perceptions, ideas and emotions that flow through the minds of all people are unique in manifestation, yet so common in their underlying basis. 

I am embarking on a journey to India, to fill my eyes with things they have yet to see, and to replenish my heart and mind with a newness that (sitting here in my parents’ home in suburban Colorado) I cannot currently fathom. 

Walk with me as I collect new experiences in a place decorated with the intricate lace of the unknown.