We are driving through the streets of Jaipur with street map in hand as we go. We are weaving in and out toward a Kali-Tantra manuscript written on paper made of cardamom rinds and a Quran written in the elegant calligraphic hand of the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb. Ram Singh, the driver, and I have just become acquainted in the last couple of days. He is not especially happy wandering around Jaipur looking for the Museum of Indology when he would rather take me to known tourist destinations like the Amber Fort or the Palace of Winds.

On the corner of Ghat Darwaza and Agra Marg, it is just as my grandfather described even these many years later. Among the crowd sleeping on the wideness that a street corner sidewalk provides …the din of traffic choking by in the exhaust …is a family …father on one side …mother on the other …children in the middle. One tot is standing up. He is naked and jumping up and down in the already blistering sun mixed with the odors of both filthy, blue fumes and bodies arising from sleep. His mother is trying to dress him in clothes so old they are translucent. He does his baby dance …one leg up and one leg down to maintain his precarious balance …laughing and smiling and waiting to eat chapatti. His mother’s face is tired and drawn. She is not laughing baby smiles. She is not doing a dance. I am full of sorrow at this sight. Tears sting the back of my eyes.

The museum is up ahead down back streets in a quiet neighborhood where parking the car is effortless. I wander in awe in this dusty, old place of paintings and manuscripts …this place of Dharma …Tantra and the Upanishads of Veda. I find the manuscripts …the Quran of Aurangzeb and what I thought might be his glass bed in the basement. Later I find out that I am wrong …it is merely a glass bed. Someone has been sleeping on it. It’s an unmade bed with a dirty oriental rug as pallet and a grimy blanket half-hidden on the floor beside the bed. I am confounded by the sheer number of artifacts stuffed so neatly into this dusty treasure house. I am filled with delight and wonderment.

One moment I am full of sorrow. The next I am full of delight and wonderment. The memory of the family lingers …the artifacts in the museum unfold a fragile understanding of how one memory relates to another …a kind of pensiveness that sees a family sleeping on a street corner in the context of a culture lasting thousands of years. When we wander around at will, we belong to the realm of the ephemeral. The curtain parts ….we step into lands where the ground moves beneath our feet.

You may wonder what this narrative has to do with meandering thoughts by the side of a sea …cleaning a fish …missed airplane connections …a snow storm …but they all reflect a similarity. To wander around from place to place is rarely what one thinks it will be.

I didn’t start out thinking it would turn out this way …that things would not be according to plan.  Sometimes, of course, I went on a “vacation” in the early years.  Maybe I will again.  How can I know?   Sometimes a vacation fulfills a need for rest and a change of scenery. We reconnect with those we love.  We encourage our sense of adventure.  We save our money to go or slap down a credit card if we are not in the mood to delay our gratification.

Sometimes, though, a “vacation” shifts into something else.  The ego emerges from its depths to surface in one of its favorite places …travel.  We stumble unwittingly  into the land of the ego’s illusion.  We sleep in pristine hotels with many stars without noticing who is changing the bed we slept in and scrubbing the toilet we sat on …eat sublime meals prepared in a temperament of creative grace without realizing the place the cook may really live in or what his family may be eating that night.

We take in famous attractions and are eager for someone to snap a picture. I was at the Eiffel Tower. Here is a picture of me at the Pyramids. The ego likes to travel and report back. The ego loves big things …big bridges …big walls …big structures where lots of people push through the crowds and wait patiently to get just one picture without too many other people in it as if the memories of this place were ours alone …as if we were less if people didn’t see us in a picture there (or insecurely think we are more than they are, because they have not been there themselves).  The ego fights to deny what is real and insists that we believe that we are in control with our pre-paid tickets …our vouchers …our traveling prescriptions …our immunization records …our insurance cards.   We come home to our lives with our trophies …our pictures and souvenirs that we were overcharged for that gather dust in our houses …things that get knocked about or sold at a fraction of their worth after we die.  We wash the dishes after supper …sweep the floor …dream of the next time. What a nice time we had! How self-satisfied we are with the perceived success of our lives.

We’ve all sought this illusion. We will all be tempted again, and, perhaps, succumb with the opening of a travel brochure …a TV commercial …someone’s stories of a tourist bubble of clean hotels with sparkling pools …gourmet food and expensive shops tucked away from the squalor and circumstances of the people who really live there.   Sometimes it is difficult to assess just when we will be tricked into selling our souls for the price of an entrance ticket.  Have we missed what has meaning?  Have we turned away from a quiet quality we didn’t even know that we sought?  How can I answer except for myself.  All I can know is that we go however we go.

Wandering without the noisy  ego in tow leads us to subtle differences. We give up the illusion of control and how we think things ought to be when we wander here and there. What will we find? Will it be wonderful or terrible? Perhaps it will be both. Wandering is humbling. We are dirty and hot and give thanks for a bucket bath in a less than agreeable place. Sometimes it is advisable to sleep in our clothes …draw the line at eating breakfast on the dirty, checked tablecloth where the pigeons have left their not-so-little gifts of black and white droppings. The next night sleep comes in a garden so lush and green it makes the heart ache …and then, out to find a tiny restaurant where we remember to pray over the food for traveler’s mercies against illness. Occasionally we really do get sick and continue to explore between walking from toilet to toilet or search for an apothecary that sells salts against dehydration.  Once in a while, it does become necessary to lay in a hotel bed missing the sound and the sites ordering water and crackers and, if lucky, lovely ginger ale to sooth our aching bodies even if it is warm and flat. After all, there is nothing to miss …no sites to be “seen” …no specific pictures to be taken. We are blessed that we are not in control. Our frailty is what it is and craves water and rest. We find calm under the covers, our heads on a pillow. The next day illness departs. We wander out into the streets down alleys and byways with new energy and thankfulness in our steps at well being …awake and alive.

In wandering we face ourselves. We face change. Change is often ugly. We see the ugliness that change has wrought in our lives and begin to ferret it out with the baking of bread in the inconveniently insane, rented apartment …a walk in the street away from the disaster of our hotel choice toward a new decision to leave what we characterize as the familiar. We engage with people and things that offer up the fullness of life in all of its manifestations …the uplifting, the mundane …the desired, the rejected …the sacred, the profane …and come back with the ugliness of change transformed into the power of light  that comes from an unknown source and, if we are blessed, character. We find things in ourselves we did not know existed …and we become what we may have been intended to be.

A journey through the little roots in a pot of flowers we plant …a walk to the backyard in winter where a bird comes to us looking for seed or companionship …a drive to a restaurant no one seems to know about reveals as much about ourselves as a wander through far-flung places. We give up control. We have dirty hands …a bird surpasses its fear for curiosity (so do we) …we eat the daily special off of plain plates banged onto the Formica table held up with vintage chrome legs …our feet sliding back and forth on linoleum beneath our shoes as we get to know the waitress. We’ve departed from the herd. We’ve journeyed into the experience of others as we take ourselves with us wherever we go …our natures …our frailties …our imperfections …our memories …our constantly changing entities through boredom and interest …discontent and realization.

In the desert of Rajasthan after Jaipur, Ram Singh and I become comfortable with each other and have many conversations about India and our lives. He will leave me in New Delhi. I reach New Delhi just in time. I must repack my bags in Ram Singh’s trunk on the side of a busy freeway next to a garbage dump. No one has pointed out beforehand that I can leave my bags in New Delhi while I travel on. Socks drop out on the road. I forget to take clean underwear and Ram Singh fusses like a granny as he roots around in my bag, “Do you have any medicine? Take a lot of medicine with you.” He knows I already have a familiar sub-continent “lurgy” as Hermione has described in 50’s British lingo in an email to me that I’ve read at a seedy hotel in Jaisalmer …he knows and I know he knows. The “lurgy” will be my fast friend for some time whether I have medicine or not. He has just told me to take medicine to calm his own fears about precautions against the miseries of a woman traveling alone. He will call ahead frequently to assure himself that I am in good health. I will learn to fib a lot.

He leaves me at the New Delhi airport with my disheveled bag and my discombobulated demeanor and I am left to sort out the upside-down airport …wait upstairs and go downstairs for the bus to the plane …figure out what plane???? There don’t seem to be any signs???? Everyone is crowded up against the gates …sitting on the floor. All the chairs are taken. I stand surrounded by the lovely colors of India waiting in this modern building with its Costa Coffee and Pizza Hut enduring travel behavior that is at odds with the modern age and hearkens back into the last century. For all of us there, it is the same.

Soon, though, I find myself in another kind of Tibet that lives as a refugee amongst Hindu Temples and relics from the British past …Lord Elgin and the First Gurkha Rifles …the old hill station of McLeod Ganj where the Dali Lama now lives …I have arrived in Dharamshala. I have finally come in a wide circle of years around the Himalayas to the other side of the mountains beyond China. The air is clean …the sun reflects itself off the snow-covered caps that have already begun to recede as Winter has glided into Spring imperceptibly. The Himalayas are glorious and I take the afternoon to climb up and up a well worn path as far as my body can take me to a decidedly modest waterfall. Clear water from the melting snows far and away splashes down to a small pool of stones. It will make no difference to me that I will never reach the roof of the world …it will be the air and sun of this place …the mountains that inform me about how my life does not loom large and important, but is a tiny speck of a nature that seeks only harmony.

I turn away from this point I’ve somehow come to …walk down a path until I find the road. I step out onto it and descend. The sun is at my back. The shadows are long. People are washing their clothes in the river beneath  and drying them on rocks.   Already things look so differently than when I was climbing up and up.

How can one not be humble at what life offers up to us as change?