It was 2010. In a guesthouse in the tea district of Kalimpong. More specifically it was in the bathroom of the guesthouse. Three weeks into a five-week backpacking trip across India, a tanned and naked 4-year-old boy with white curls had mastered the Indian squatting style as he filled a pale green bucket with water and used the plastic jug to wash his body and cool his head. His huge blue eyes always darted about as his mind computed, and every so often he would express a well-formulated sentence or question. I always stayed close, not only for when he needed me but for my joy in observing his expansion into this new version of himself … a version connected by threads to something so ancient it needed merely a reminder for it to incarnate. He turned to me with eyes still actively evaluating the question. “Mum,” he asked, “can I be a monk when I grow up?”
“Of course, NooNoo,” I replied, “you can be anything you want to be.”
He returned to the creative wash time and I could tell he wasn’t quite finished with this particular thought process. I was correct. “Actually,” he continued, “I don’t want to be a monk, I want to be the man who teaches the monks.” Pensively continuing his water play, he was searching for the correct words for the teacher of the monks. And then he beamed, eyes bright, staring directly at me with such a content look of joy on his face. “I want to be the Dalai Lama!” he declared.

And that was that. Intention set, thread thrown, life path paved. Of course I knew this wouldn’t be a reality in the form of what we know this world to be. Yet, I have a sense that on some level in some dimension, the weave of the story of why this particular human came to me is knotted into the fabric of the red thread now wrapped around my left wrist.

As someone who considers herself adept in the art of letting be, letting go and letting god, I can also be fierce when stubborn. There was something about the masterfully planned month-long yoga program in Delhi that had to be prised out of my tightly clenched fist. Leisure, sabbatical, adventure: these are things that do not need to be justified through studies and struggle. Time. Patience. Practice. Pivoting on the trajectory back to the void, data points get computed and wired into the roots entwined in the new foundations I am building. The Tree of Life.

Gazillions of pilgrims and travellers ahead of me don’t diminish the sense of pioneer I bear like a branding tattoo. I’ve taken India off her pedestal; seeing her more realistically for who she is. And I love her for all her authenticity. She hasn’t changed. Of course. I have. Of course. I solidify the teachings and learnings. Off course. 

I explore her more fully with a new friend I have known for lifetimes. Scapegoated from my own family of original sin, she invites me into her family fold and I am home. We share space, memories and dreams as we wander the streets, the markets, coffee houses and bookstores. I find Rooibos Tea on the menu along with Chinese Tea … the dot-to-dot of spiral weaves connecting me to my birth home and to the tea ceremonies in my multi-national soul home.

Early morning Lodhi Garden runs with her father—“Go, go, I meet you here one hour”, he declares, swiftly picking up on my super-charged energy levels. This is my happy drug. I run so fast I almost hit a low flying bird. I run to keep warm. I am fast not only because I am cold but because the physiology of my radiant smile is the fuel for my accelerator. Five laps. Friendly faces. Connections. Joy … pure and simple. Life and love is woven from it.

I leave Delhi in an electric cab. “Burn fat. Not oil” demands a large painted bicycle street side. A man on a motorbike pulls up beside a sign on a park wall. “Feeding of monkeys here is strictly prohibited.” He is holding a clear plastic bag heavy with bananas. It’s not his lunch. He feeds the monkeys. Lost in translation? Brazen drivers read between the non-existence of lines and signs. A peacock flies across the road in front of us. Electric blue. Energetic Phoenix flames blazing. My microbiome has once more been imbued with another layer of immune health. My being has been further educated with a new module upgrade. I am charged with a new vitality. Plugged in.

I recognise that decades-ago travels have been more boundaried, more disconnected from myself that I couldn’t fully connect to others like I can now. I recognise how this trip is on the trajectory that highlights how radically this has changed. My puzzle connectors find their bigger picture. The bittersweet parting after three days that sit on the vertical timeline holds beauty in the knowing that there is still so much to experience here; things and people to return for and to.

I’m not a fan of the fast approach that doesn’t allow acclimatisation to the new landscape. I also don’t like packing … jamming everything into prescribed allowances … or the cattle herding of airports and moustachioed officials with hooded eyes and sticks. I feel more of the era of large trunks of flowing garments, riding on the backs of elephants. Servants set up camp en route. Tigers and imminent dangers alert me to where I am. I was made for an era of intrigue and exploration, the pioneering days of breaking expectations of who I am meant to be and who I am. And in the same gaps and disparities, I find the pendulum sweet spot where I can curate some comfort and ease without either climbing the elephant or being trampled by it.

Just to affirm I’m always ahead of my time, I was too early for Sri Lanka—still monsoon—I’m also too early for Himachal Pradesh—still snow. I’m okay with that. Podium place always. And the timing is also always perfect. The portals keep opening. As I let go into the void, blessings come flooding in. I make connections and drop the future into my past so I can live into my present.

I wasn’t meant to come to Dharamshala in the 90s or early 00s. It had to be now. It had to be solo. It (and I) had to be empowered and ready to ask the right questions rather than seek the often desired answers. I wake up. Is that Everest peaking? Dry mouth and drooling at the back of an uncomfortably small plane. The descent brings clouds. The mirage gradually takes shape. No, not clouds … the majestic Himalaya Range stretching the breadth of my sight, face almost pasted to the small airplane window. Porthole … sounds like Portal.

As I become so fully engaged with who I am, there is no longer any separation with the other. I walk, connect and panic about being frozen whilst trekking … I find a Decathlon. It’s closed. I feel I am being called to adapt. I buy Tibetan socks in McLeodGanj and learn how to measure foot size on a fist. It’s mostly impossible to determine from where a life lesson will come. Three days again feel like three weeks as ice-cold days stretch wide open beneath Dhauladhar. Caught in the shadows, the snowy peaks rise up in sunshine.

A friend catches up with my journey—not surprisingly a few lightyears behind my flow—and asks which tea has won my heart. “Duali-tea”, I say, “of course.” India is a paradox which brings the dark and the light, the shadow along with the golden shadow, into awareness. For integration rather than resolution. Because not everything needs to be resolved.

Integration is what I feel most fully when meeting with His Holiness; a meeting I have held in intention since that 4-year-old reminded me of what my future holds. It is now time to give it attention. Energy. Flow. The child in me connected to the child in him, and His Holiness and Penelope no longer existed as identifying labels stitched on human form. Our engagement held no austerity. Only innocence. Only love. Only compassion. We were simply two souls delighting in the joy of the knowing of something perhaps I will never know; dissolving and free falling into the depths of each other’s gaze. The later photos show even his security guard captivated by the interaction. Giggling like children, there was nothing to ask for, so I opened my hands and offered him blessings from his soul friends in South Africa. There was such emptiness and, in the emptiness, such fullness. I feel complete.

Leaving Naddi, Dharamshala and Junglaat … for now … I arrive in Bir to eagles and paragliders. Initially terrified of boredom if planning to stay in one place for more than five or six days, the journey keeps stretching out like hand-pulled Tibetan noodles, and one month at a time now feels quite cosy. The monastic Deer Park Institute will be my home now for a month. With the unfolding of my winter suspension, I discover that in the surrender of my plans to the divine intelligence, I have arrived in the composting of my spring. In the seeking and planning, I sometimes forget that all I need do is show up and whatever is seeking me will find me where I am. Unwittingly and yet with the ancestral guidance of those who walk beside me, I am discovered by a full month of courses and workshops for which my heart has sung. Invocation. Sacred AUM.

Next month I return to the home of His Holiness for another week to unpack more of what the mountain masters hold and offer and to ask of this holy place what it can receive from me. There is always more. I simply have to keep practicing opening my hands, my eyes and my mind to sift and shift all the debris clouding my vision of what I’m here to do.

I am the liminal guru, on the threshold of learning and teaching, breaking and building. As much of an enigma as India herself.

As the end of a poem I wrote decades ago divulges:
… I am old. I am wise. I am high
I am all the flowers and the trees. They are me
I am unpredictable. I am power. I am many
Penelope, you are seen by all.
But you are things no one can see.’