Varanasi - Part 2
We took an early morning boat ride along the ghats and got to see them from a distance. People bathing, chatting, brushing their teeth, coming down to the river for blessings from the great mother Ganga. Our barefoot guide told us stories all along the way.
Afterwards, for what seems like hours, we wandered the crooked curving streets of Varanasi, no bigger than alleyways, passing snaking lines of people, squeezing to the sides of buildings as massive crowds split us apart. We shopped and were suffocated by the city, buried in its vibrancy.
We got a ride toward the airport from a friendly, talkative man who sang to us in Sufi. I wish you could hear it for yourself. We were riding through the crowded streets full of cars, bikes, people, animals, everything. All of the sounds along with his singing combined into a surprising, blissful harmony. While he was singing I looked across at the woman next to me and for a moment the world outside her window flashed and flashed and flashed, changing each time. I could see all the cab rides in all the cities in all the countries we would visit. The cab and the view outside the windows kept changing behind the woman I love, seeing our future journeys made tangible by the briefest taut wire of time.
And as he sang, the world fell away. Our lives and our knowledge, all of our books and facts and devices and property fell away and I had a clarity about infinity. Here it sounds hokey and trippy. If you were to ask me about it I would shy away and change the subject, or laugh it off. It is entirely possible it was an emotional response to ending a trip, too little sleep, or maybe just something I ate. Yet I cannot deny the moment, whether it spiritual or metaphysical or delusional.
The infinite worlds that exist in the infinite space, each unknowable culture with its own movements and beliefs and structure, and within them each person with their own thoughts and feelings and beliefs and structure. Theories of gravity, dark matter, the reasons planets turn around stars, the things inside things inside things that hold atoms together, string theory, the laws of physics, the science we have created to make sense of this world, all of it dissipated like smoke. The strong, sudden, peaceful feeling that we are all of us less than specks of dust, our voices have no memory, all the work of all the ages do not weigh a pin. Nothing to be known so nothing to struggle with knowing.
That gave me such peace. Spiritually and scientifically, we will forever keep grasping. The more knowledge we get ahold of, the more that will spread out before us. When he stopped singing I wanted to ask him to turn the car around. I felt like we could keep traveling forever, seeing people, walking through the countless cultures of our one small lonely planet. Maybe this was the blessing we received from the river Ganges, that we need not worry, life keeps going.
In efforts of travel I long to understand places and peoples, to not be a tourist but eat the same bread, sit in the same dirt, look without western/American/my own eyes upon a place unfamiliar. And here was the universe telling me it was useless. There’s no need to worry, just enjoy the ride. We are alive.
