Touchdown.

Coming to you live from sunny SoCal, these words are tinged slightly with nostalgia, motivation, raindrops, jetlag, hot tea, cool nights, reflection, longing, decisiveness, and indecision.

After quite the long trek across many seas, one ocean, and three continents (via one train ride and three flights), I find myself writing to all of you from the living room of my maternal home, sitting on a couch struggling to revel in solitude while all i am able to honestly manage is jostled. Every item, every room, every street, every vista in my current proximity is imbued with teeming memories, each flush against the next, slightly overlapped, individual moments reflecting from different pairs of my own eyes. It's so interesting to come back after such a long time, especially interesting after seeing something new everyday for so many day, for suddenly seeing so many familiar things is making me feel...claustrophobic? No, that's not quite right. I'm feeling the presence of myself quite acutely, tangibly- more acutely than i have in quite a while. The presence, that is, of the selves of many yesterdays. The presence of my past persons is palpable in the memories of the spaces around me. My couch remembers, the driveway remembers, the tangerine tree, the street signs, the clear air on the mountains at 6 after rain knows a me from each day of the last 15 years. Sitting or standing, walking down paths well worn by my own feet, I can't help but feel like a flip-book jessie, one single in a sequence forming a complete picture only when viewed in context and in motion.

This is the mindset that I'm coming to you from.

Surveying my audience from this mood, what can i possibly share with you? What kinds of reflections on India are possible at this juncture?

For an overview and in the neighborhood of brevity, India was a country to be reckoned with, an experience that lingers like 3am on my hands. Multitudinous experiences touching such a variety of nerves that eventually a system re-set of perceptions, emotions, and reactions was achieved. I shall not forget the role of China, who had a heavy hand in this as well- it's accurate to say that the process of re-assemblage completed by India was only possible after the disassembly artfully undertaken by China. Disassembly is a slow and painful process, the strip down of desires, impulses, and duality related attachments/concepts done more by force than choice; reassembly, on the other hand, was comparatively pleasant while equally momentous.

Today I am talking entirely about inner processes initiated and pushed to fruitation mostly by (what appeared at the time to be) outer forces. I better understand the myriad of ways people build up the experience of india; the skepticism and confusion previously admitted to have been, at least in some ways, relieved and sated. I leave you at this time with the previously revealed reflections, to return to you on a later date with more concrete relations of events and occurences, more clearly defined perceptions, more sensically wrought musings.

Sweet dreams.

love&light
jess