Crash course in what passes for reality

Reentering “the world” after more than a year in relative seclusion felt like being thrown into space and then falling, falling, falling into an endless  pit within the earth.

After the first burst of euphoria, when I stayed with Celeste and her mother in Brooklyn, followed by the long Greyhound ride back to Ohio, there was nothing to hold on to.

I was no longer in a nest of kindred spirits, and meditating alone is more strenuous than when sitting among others.

There had been moments in the ashram when I had wondered if there was a potential career path as a professional swami. Ponder that. Perhaps combined with poet.

Back home, I saw how far I had come from my upbringing in a straightlaced mainstream Protestant milieu.

There was no going back.

In the meantime, I had to see if I could reconnect to working in the news biz again or whether I could venture into fresh fields. Whatever developed needed to happen soon.

~*~

The time with Celeste was intense, passionate, somehow heightened by knowing we were heading in differing directions. I recall our time in the Brooklyn Museum, especially in its fabulous Asian art galleries. There were also the bagels from a grimy store under elevated MTA rails and I had to agree that those were the best, anywhere, despite appearances. And the next morning, when we rode the subway into Manhattan for parting, I saw something ahead on the tracks that became the prompt for my first novel, Subway Hitchhikers, now revised into Subway Visions. She then caught a bus to Virginia and the new principal guy in her life. (How she was able to be so open with me continues to amaze.) I spent the rest of the day wandering around Gotham, the Cloisters art museum, especially, and then took an overnight bus of my own west. It was a wild ride.

Looking back, I was molting or perhaps hypersensitive to everything. Even listening to my beloved classical music had to come in steps of reacclimatizing.

~*~

Trying to write anything in my hometown was difficult, though I did start with drafting the subway fantasy.