Skip to main content

Psycho-geographer Buddha Walking


Instead of down-town streets of the modern world, where it originated, I imagine walking down the streets of an ancient city in India ( Varanasi comes to mind immediately) like a psycho-geographer would.

My meme is a simple "First right and Second Left". I see myself wandering unawares into temples, shops, ghats of the Ganges, court-yards and lives of unknown people. Mind mapping Vishwanath Gali could be a psycho-geographer's dream
come true.

Let's say I take a photograph at each stop borrowing from the beautiful idea of degree confluence. I repeat my tour at various times of the day, over days months and years. Other walkers like me do the same. We have no stated objective besides repeating our patterned walk over and over again.

At the end of ten years should we consolidate all our data would order emerge from apparent chaos ? Perhaps it would turn out that on every third Tuesday, at ten past one in the afternoon there is a always a woman in purple at a singular coordinate.

What is a woman in purple on every third Tuesday afternoon ? could well be a Koan ( A question in Zen Buddhism that cannot be answered logically; a technique used to test consciousness and bring awakening
) even if not profound as "What is the sound of one hand clapping"

Maybe the answer to that would need a heightened awareness of the walk itself. Psycho-geographer would need to turn Buddha walker

Something about this train of thought leads me to correlate Yoga turning hip-hop though the situation I describe is more about returning to roots than departing.

Comments

buckwaasur said…
lol...looks like u r mindfully walking around various websites...and it is fascinating to see the way u connect the dots and bring some coherence to ur narration from all the chaos...:-))
Heartcrossings said…
Thanks, Buck. The direct consequence of having a short attention span, too many interests and no time to dwell too deep on anything :-)
buckwaasur said…
lol...more power to ur attention deficit disorder then...:-))

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques