Pushkar

"You'll get used to Hinduism," she said. Our first day in Pushkar I had some shopping to get done - a notebook, fabric for a salwar kameez, finding a tailor - and I mentioned that I don't like to mix my temple visiting with consumerism. But the divide here cannot be made so simply. Religion and everyday life go hand in hand, visibly, seamlessly, and to me, confusingly. Yet, giving money when one goes to the holy lake to do their puja with a priest, or purchasing offerings of sweets and flowers to leave at a temple, is little different than placing one's tithe in an offering plate. It's just that it's visible, vocal, and far from secret.

Even as a holy city, Puhkar is not so subtle and sublime. It is a mashup, a clustering of pilgrims, chic hippies, aging Deadheads and tourists. Sitting at the Jaipur Ghat at sunset, the sounds of bells from the hundreds of temples in town are drowned out by dreadheads playin their guitars obnoxiously loudly whole singing terrible covers of The Doors. Bob Marley blasting from shops is as frequent as the local brass band leading a wedding procession down the narrow backstreets. Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining. There's something incredibly fascinating about the whole situation. And I find myself trying to dissect each moment. And then I forget what I was thinking about entirely because as we've been walking down the street, I've simultaneously been cut off by a cow, almost hit by a motorbike, been greeted by a shopkeeper in Hindi, smiled and hollered at by children in English, and Jon next to me is having a completely different experience he is explaining to me, trying to point out the monkey eating offering from an altar while also talking to someone he's struck a conversion with. And so our days go - walking aimlessly for hours discovering small, seemingly insignificant moments, gaining small successes each time we purposely set out to do something simple and succeed, find the perfect cup of chai or learn the name of another delicious street snack.

It all must be taken as a whole.

Fair has nothing to do with it.

There are many things one learns looking and listening out their fourth story, Pahar Ganj, New Delhi window.

Nowhere makes sense if you try to do everything your way and avoid, even ignore, the silently taught lessons that surround you every second. You might be the one who has things backwards.

What seems at first chaotic is in fact a delicately practiced dance.

And I am not the only one who has not mastered the steps.

Even though many things seem "unfair" to so many, "fair" has nothing to do with it.

Funeral processions and wedding receptions are not opposites. They are each, in their own unique way, celebrations of life lived well.

In loving memory of Mona Gryba - our thoughts are with all back in Canada today.

The kindness of strangers.

Every moment deserves its own re-telling, but is of course impossible. When I think back over the last five days, I see mostly the incredibly kind faces of strangers. Walking down the street and having babies thrust into my arms for photos from their parents, groups if school kids surrounding us in a park posing for photos, the kind smiles of the old Sikh guards at Sri Guru Ram Das Niwas in Amritsar, being invited to a wedding next month after a long, broken conversation in the middle of the street...

There's still a lot of shock, though.

Here we go again...

In the final throws of preparation, I find myself going over the lists I also went over again and again, trying to make sure I have everything. Inevitably, I remember things I forgot, hidden in drawers, pockets and secret places, safely stored until they would be needed again. And even though I left them, I feel better knowing that they are there, waiting for me, giving me a reason to go back.

I can't help but feel as though I chose the perfect book to read on the first leg of he journey. Pulling out of the Vancouver train station, I re-read the introduction to Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World:

"So much seems possible at the beginning of a trip, so many things seem brimmed with meaning. The small towns slipping by, the unspent time ahead, herons meditating in marsh grass, a pigeon mummified beneath a bridge, the backseats of cars waiting at the clanging gate ("crossing / crossing"), the little decoration some nineteenth-century mason worked into the high peak of a factory wall, now abandoned, now disappearing over the horizon. Each thing seems all the more declarative for its swift arrival and swift departure. From a moving train I don't see the opaque weave of the real, I see the more expansive view the shuttle gets as again and again the warp threads briefly rise. I always take out my pen and begin to write, as if the landscape itself were in a manic and voluble mood and I its lucky and appointed scribe. I become convinced that just before me is the perfect statement of how things are.

That it the traveler's delusion."

I think, maybe, I'm okay with the delusion right now.