Bardo Travels, Part 1: In the City

Bardo Travels, Part I: In the City

Joshua

I had an interesting experience at the end of our group call with Parvathy and Ram in July.

The call had been announced just a couple of days earlier, and for most of it I was able to be fully attentive, sitting in the living room of a San Francisco apartment generously loaned to my partner Macy and I while she worked in the city for a few days. But by the end of the call, as it turned out, I found myself walking the downtown streets on my way to the subway. Once there, I would travel to the airport and board a flight, something I hadn’t done in quite some time.

The plan was that, on her way to work, Macy would drop me, with my bags, at the subway station on Market Street. But downtown San Francisco is notoriously difficult to navigate: it’s full of one-way streets that can take you far out of your way if you make one small mistake. We were only one block from the subway entrance when, sure enough, because we were in the wrong lane we ended up diverted in the opposite direction. At first we tried to make our way back to the station in her car, but the maze of streets, where you are prohibited from turning at all, much less making a U turn, ended up sending us even farther out of our way. Time was getting short for me to make it to the airport, and eventually it became clear that the best thing was to simply get out and walk, even though I would be carrying my bags. My upcoming trip included overnight camping, which meant that I had a large backpack with tent and sleeping bag inside, along with a regular suitcase plus a smaller pack containing books and my computer. Walking with all three of these bags would be unusual, but the large backpack was meant to be worn on your back, the small backpack could go on my front, and my suitcase had wheels that could roll along on the sidewalk. No problem. I would walk.

As the last members of our Yatra group were speaking their reflections about what the upcoming journey meant to them, and how the process of preparing for it was unfolding in their lives, I was checking the Maps app on my phone to find the quickest route to the Market Street station on foot. About five city blocks, it turned out. Not so far to go.

One of the first people that I passed, as I began my stroll, laden down with backpacks and a suitcase, was a young man standing on the sidewalk. Though it was only 8:30 in the morning, his vape pipe was producing vast clouds of marijuana smoke. The next two gentlemen I passed appeared to be conducting, just at that particular moment, some important business: they stood close together and spoke in soft, serious voices while carefully observing their surroundings. The next man I saw was in a regal pose on the concrete sidewalk: in fact, his posture was not unlike that of the Reclining Buddha I had seen the day before at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. His body was stretched on large pieces of cardboard –to keep the chill of the concrete from reaching him, no doubt. His clothes were dirty and tattered, and he was sporting a ragged grey beard, but the look in his eyes was bright: it seemed to me the exact look a sadhu on the streets of Tiruvannamalai might have given me. He gave a knowing nod as I passed by, loaded down with my important possessions. ‘Everybody,’ his look seemed to say, ‘is on their way somewhere.’

Perhaps it was everyone’s voices on the call, reminding me of our shared purpose, but I felt completely at ease in these “sketchy” surroundings – sketchy being the technical slang term my children would use to describe a neighborhood such as this – despite the rather obvious fact that I was overflowing with items – a phone, computer, even a tent! – that would have had much greater value to the people around me than they did to me. And yet I knew, with calm certainty, that the people I was encountering on these streets would do me no harm. In fact, , beyond simply not posing any threat, each of these brief encounters had a positive quality: I felt that each of these men had taken me exactly as I was. There was not a whiff of the question “What the hell are you doing here, looking like that?” in their response, which would surely have greeted them had they come into my neighborhood in the country, just one hour drive to the north. Instead, we were all there together, each of us on our way somewhere, on those shared streets on that San Francisco morning.

It had been some time since I’d ridden the subway and it took a bit of roaming, with my two backpacks and my suitcase, to locate the correct entrance, pay for my ticket, and find my way to the right subway track; and then, last but not least, to make sure I was going to get on the train headed in the direction of the airport and not the opposite way. Once inside the cave-like station, far below the city streets, I was surprised to find that Zoom was still working. Parvathy’s voice in my ear was saying, ‘Some of you are saying this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, but who knows? Maybe you will end up going many times!’ Just then the train emerged from its dark tunnel, the words “SFO” – the three-letter code for San Francisco International Airport – appearing on the electronic sign on the side.

For almost twenty years, going to the airport to catch a flight had been one of the most regular occurrences in my life. During that time I made 12-15 work trips per year, plus sangha journeys and family visits, all of which would involve multiple flights. But this time, I hadn’t set foot in an airport in fourteen months. The last time I had -- also at SFO – it was not to travel myself, but instead to welcome other beloved guests.

On that occasion, in May of last year, Gangotri and I had driven to SFO to greet Parvathy and Ram on their arrival from India. Ahead of us was a packed, six-week schedule of retreats, satsangs, showing of Ma’s art, and gatherings with teachers from other traditions; our itinerary would take us from California all the way to New York, via New Mexico and Colorado, and finally back to the west coast of Canada for a Baul gathering. But, as probably all of you know, this was not to be.

Instead, Gangotri and I sat in the International Arrivals terminal while Ma and Ram were held, probably only a few hundred feet from us, by a single immigration officer who eventually denied them entry. Only after fourteen hours, when they had been placed on a plane returning to India, did a kind passenger lend them his phone so they could reach Gangotri and I and confirm what had actually happened. Glum and dejected, Gangotri and I had finally departed the airport, considering what it was -- in the field of our own activity, and the broader flow of events -- that had led to such a startling and disturbing occurrence.

It was after that experience that I set an intention not to get on an airplane for the length of a year. My personal circumstances had also changed dramatically – I no longer had to travel for work, and I had almost no work to travel for – and this resolution was a way to mark Parvathy and Ram having been denied entry as something significant: something that warranted self-examination and slowing down, not continuing at the same pace I had maintained for all those years prior.

And now, as the group call wrapped up and we all signed off, I was on the subway heading for San Francisco Airport once again. This time my destination was a small town in Montana, where -- if all went as planned -- I would see my former teacher for the first time in many years and undertake a small trek to a high mountain lake that had, for quite some time, been my chosen site of pilgrimage during the summer months, when the snow allowed for passage. If the spirits were favorable, I would reach that mountain lake – at the high elevation of almost 3000 meters () – on an anniversary that marked the completion of a significant karmic cycle. And the opportunity presented by both these meetings – with my old friend and former guru, and with the lake that was the primary place for worship of the Goddess – felt like yet another step towards what awaited all of us – patient, unshakeable, dwelling in perfect stillness in the silence of the future: Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash.

To be continued. . .