A Calling

So I had been planning a trip to Mysore, India for at least a year for January through March of 2011. Through a strange series of events my plan, or at least my passion for my plan slowly eroded, at least for that time frame. The timing felt off. What I needed was an American fix: quicker and including my husband. A vacation, that included yoga, America and the ocean. My husband, having just returned from Europe was also in a funk and I was determined that we find our love of our country again - if not the state in which we are currently living. I told him we shall "go West young man" and so my dream of visiting my teacher Tim Miller in Encinitas, CA was born.

It felt like a true calling. A road trip to find the "Great American Dream" a la Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson minus the drugs and the booze and the craziness. I could hear the Pacific, too cold in which to swim, but so beautiful crashing against the shores. I could hear Tim's distinctive count of "1,..2,...3..4..5, nawa inhale, dasha exhale, ekadasha pick it up...." I had questioned him too much the last time I had seen him, had too many doubts about going to India before I saw him again. In my soul I know that he is my guru.

It's a classic American solution to a classic American problem: the urge to wander, a dissatisfaction with where we are now and a profound sense that out West lies something greater and perhaps as we reach our late thirties and look to our forties we don't remember the simple solution anymore. The road trip west to find our guru. Traveling across the Mississippi, across the Rockies or the Ozarks, across the desert of infinite probabilities and finite possibilities, until we reach the Pacific. Find our peace. Follow the highway of our bliss until the endless miles force our souls to reveal all of our inner truths. And in the desert we wander, until we hear the voice of our inner guru calling us home. Wherever that may be.