This morning during our meditation session, Ms. Tous suggested letting go of bad energy by thinking of someone who never reminds you of disappointment, resent, or bad feelings. More than anything else this morning, this statement perturbed me greatly. Initially, I wasn’t shaken by her comment as I began to mentally scroll through my closest friends and family to find “my person.” To my surprise, I found no one.
Read MoreIt seems that I’ve been broken by the swaying greens. Trees have been written about for centuries, in stories, fables and poems. I’ve always found them boring and repetitive, but I had not been listening well enough. Here, the trees let themselves be taken by the wind, the birds, and all the life around them. A continuous song echoes through their leaves. And yet, these trees are still planted firmly on the ground.
I have broken the fat hurricane of clutter in my mind to listen to the noise outside, the noise of the trees. There lies a stillness that is not empty, but open and light.
In this moment, my heart has broken free from heaviness.
Read MoreIt is the emotion behind a smile that I share with Hetal, the nine-year-old girl studying at the Gandhi Ashram School whom I met a few days ago. It is the ability to open my heart that I share with Mukesh Bhai during meditation. It is the mutual trust the Gramshree women embody during their daily life that I share with my fellow Niswarth peers. Slowly, by noticing commonalities as opposed to discords between me and citizens of Gujrat, my mind is clearing and growing, not as a 16-year-old Indian American Andover student, but as a person.
Read MoreI realized that I don’t think much. I only noticed this after probably the 8th or 9th group discussion of which we held last night. My eyes were glued attentively on each and every speaker and every now and then I would laugh on the inside and throw out a little smile if I found something that the presenter said even mildly amusing. Not once would I think of something worthy enough to either progress the discussion or muddle the conversation into an even more befuddled one (See I did it again, I laughed at something as simple as muddle and befuddle rhyming together).
Read More“Oh it’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate. It takes guts to be gentle and kind.”
–The Smiths
Because love is a major theme on this trip, I have looked at the word as a way to see past the differences of people. To forget gender, religion, race, and sexual orientation, and to see people as human. However, I have started to think about the word forgive. How forgiveness is such an important aspect of love. I started thinking about how you must forgive and learn to appreciate what has been given. In the Lord’s Prayer, the last line goes “Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” When I hear this, I can’t help but think about a scene in the movie Gandhi.
“Gandhiji, I have killed a man,” sobbed a Hindu.
“Why did you kill him?”
“He killed my son.”
Read MoreThis is coming to you at 4:56 in the morning, and I’m not sure whether it’s Friday of Saturday, but that doesn’t really matter right now.
I’ve yet to have one night here in India that I have slept soundly. I always end up waking up at 2 or at 4, which is fine. I usually just pop my headphones in and try to drift back away. But tonight, or early morning is different. There have been hundreds of thoughts floating through my mind recently. I’ve been trying to understand and classify them, though I’ve failed. I’ve tried to understand them because I thought I know myself and have failed because I really don’t know myself the way I think I do. However this morning about 10 minutes ago I woke up and finally figured some stuff out. It’s a very simple idea, and we’ve heard over and over but I never really, really wresteld with it until now: truth.
Read MoreWhile sitting cross-legged in a circle of kindergartners whose consistent sequences were intermittently interrupted by the comparatively sizable bodies of my friends, my eyes shifted to my right, focusing on an old instructor. Or rather what was behind her. I caught the sight of a girl lying face down, bare-chested, with her back facing me. Although the instructor’s body was blocking the other half of the child’s body, I was able to discern the bones of her ever expanding and deflating chest cavity, sticking out of from the sides of the skin that made a zealous attempt to cover the frail and sharp-curved skeleton underneath.
Read More“Namaste.”
“Namaste!”
“NAMASTE!”
The children at the Bal Sanskar School gave us a chant of hellos as we passed by, and I grinned, thankful for this true welcome and midafternoon energy booster. Wherever we go, the children exude a sort of honest and cherubic ebullience that I can’t seem to find in those of us past that obscure frame of time when childhood comes to a close and adulthood hovers in the horizon.
Read MoreOn our first day in India, we visited the Gandhi Ashram. Still very jet-lagged, I wandered through the simple rooms and found myself in the kitchen, taking half-hearted inventory of Gandhi’s utensils and telling myself to bask in the simple elegance of Gandhi’s lifestyle. This was clearly a lesson I was supposed to learn—everyone knows the transformative power of Gandhi’s ideas and example. At this point an Indian girl in a flowing pink shirt who had been examining the utensils too turned and asked me my name.
Read MoreWhile working at the Riverside School, I was struck by the idea of design thinking. I was fascinated by the idea that people can tailor solutions to perfectly fit a problem. What I like about this method is how it values context as critical to understanding problems. The first step in our design thinking process was to learn about the communities we have just entered. The next stage was a time of imagination, which saw us take risks and envision bold solutions. After distilling these undeveloped ideas into a finite course of action, we were left with something pretty incredible: actual solutions designed for actual problems in the real world.
Read MoreAn elderly women, her gray-streaked hair pulled back tightly in a bun, sits on the floor, hunched over an intricate quilt, patiently and slowly embroidering a light green thread into the detailed cloth, one stitch at a time. A younger lady sits cross-legged beside her, a small, sleeping child on one knee and a spool of thread and cloth on the other. She too works steadily and calmly, occasionally pausing to reposition the child or stretch her fingers. The two women, along with several others, sit under a covered patio dotted with fans, potted plants, and small pieces of artwork.
Read MoreImagine: you’re in your car, this time, with the steering wheel on the right. Traffic is moving in the opposite direction of what you’re used to. The grumble of the engine awakens the car and it begins to breathe frosty air onto your sweat-caked face. You begin to look for a lane to put yourself in, but there are no white lines on the ground. Instead is a long black road. On the road, green and yellow rickshaws zoom past you ignoring any type of speed limit. You turn your head to see where the rickshaw came from and a herd of 10 brown cows are trekking along 5 inches from your window. Wanting to touch them, you roll down your window and stick out your hand and pet the furry beasts.
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