As I try to make sense of my wandergrief after 3 weeks in Kyoto, I look back, sieve through, rummage among my memories. This was not the first time I’d been down this road. What lessons from the past can I take comfort in? What hangover cures might there be?

Ask, and you shall receive. The heavens are relentlessly committed to our well-being, & gratuitously generous in our favour.

This time, it’s from a past life, after having spent 30 days doing yoga in the yoga capital of the world, Rishikesh, India. Again, the same experience, the same process. Another instance of transformative travel. Dedicated time spent learning something new and challenging. Being vulnerably open to the ancient teachings of sages past. Touched again, by the supernatural and the supernormal. A river runs in this story too. So many patterns. In this story of Rishikesh, I realise I’d always written the same story, over and over again.

“As here, same elsewhere.” - Shiva Sutras 3:14

Different age, different place, but always, the same story.

-–

Last day in Rishikesh.

How do you begin to leave a place where God’s heartbeat dwells?

As I left the ashram grounds on my last morning and looked back at the pre-dawn streets which had been my backyard for the past month, with songs & chants of devotion humming in the background, a growing sense of longing & lament had already crept in.

Then as Shantosh - the kindest & warmest soul of a store-owner of the Brown Bread Man shop - gave me a lift on his motorbike (first & only bike ride in Rishikesh!) towards my departing taxi, longing was slowly replaced by a refreshing sense of excitement. Truly up-lifting indeed, was the lift through dawn, through streets just waking up, towards a changed life at home away from this new home I found and loved a thousand miles away.

Everything changes. Again.