We Made it to India

February 25, 2014
Katherine Austin Wooley

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We traveled from our humble Detroit roots across the rocky ocean waters to Amsterdam Schipol airport, where, having not slept much at all on the first flight, we had the energy of children excited to be on an adventure.

The airport activities showed as much. We had strong coffee in little glasses with the blue and white designs of the Dutch. We invested in massages, meditated in the meditation center and marveled at the energy of being in another country, with all the bustle of people on their way, on the journey, in transit.

And then we boarded the flight to India.

That became the demarcation from traveling and anticipating to finally on our way.

We walked aboard the two-story 747 and found our seats way back in the 53rd row and settled in with blankets and pillows and, promptly, fell into sleep.

We needed to. The anticipation of the months and weeks leading up to this trip were wearing on us, not to mention the movies watched on flight #1 and sheer giddiness of we're-going-to-India and the day has finally come.

So we slept and we watched TV shows and movies and we chatted with the woman (a mother of six grown kids) in the seat right beside us, on her way for a solo month from Oregon to India.

When we arrived in Delhi, it was two days later and the wee hours of a morning in a foreign land. In the airport, the decorations above the immigration lines were massive mudras, hands showing the sacred positions that create energy shifts in consciousness.

This is the country we've come to. This is the state we want to be in.

Everything went fine through immigration and onward to our hotel in the gray murky smoke-enveloped night. And we arrived at a hotel as posh as many we would find back home, maybe even moreso.

While we were waiting at the gate in Amsterdam, we befriended a little girl eager to go home with her grandmothers, dressed in elaborate saris and friendly smiles. She kept pointing her finger out the window at the big blue plane and saying, "Go!"

We knelt by her little body as she pressed her nose against the glass, her fingers splayed on the glass to get a good grip and steady her gaze toward the adventure.

The journey truly is the destination. This much is true.

For all we have now, with the hours that got us so far around to the other side of the world with all our stuff and anticipation, and all that will unfold in the days and weeks to come, we have only right now, this part of the journey, this moment, this feeling of I am here, finally, I have arrived.

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