Chapter no 71

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

My flight leaves India at four in the morning, which is typical of how India works. I decide not to go to sleep at all that night, but to spend the whole evening in one of the meditation caves, in prayer. Iโ€™m not a late- night person by nature, but something in me wants to stay awake for these last hours at the Ashram. There are many things in my life Iโ€™ve stayed up all night to doโ€”to make love, to argue with someone, to drive long distances, to dance, to cry, to worry (and sometimes all those things, in fact, in the course of one night)โ€”but Iโ€™ve never sacrificed sleep for a night of exclusive prayer. Why not now?

I pack my bag and leave it by the temple gate, so I can be ready to grab it and go when the taxi arrives before dawn. And then I walk up the hill, I go into the meditation cave and I sit. Iโ€™m alone in there, but I sit where I can see the big photograph of Swamiji, my Guruโ€™s master, the founder of this Ashram, the long-gone lion who is somehow still here. I close my eyes and let the mantra come. I climb down that ladder into my own hub of stillness. When I get there, I can feel the world halt, the way I always wanted it to halt when I was nine years old and panicking about the relentlessness of time. In my heart, the clock stops and the calendar pages quit flying off the wall. I sit in silent wonder at all I understand. I am not actively praying. I haveย becomeย a prayer.

I can sit here all night. In fact, I do.

I donโ€™t know what alerts me when itโ€™s time to go meet my taxi, but after several hours of stillness, something gives me a nudge, and when I look at my watch itโ€™s exactly time to go. I have to fly to Indonesia now. How funny and strange. So I stand up and bow before the photograph of Swamijiโ€”the bossy, the marvelous, the fiery. And then I slide a piece of paper under the carpet, right below his image. On the paper are the two poems I wrote during my four months in India. These are the first real poems Iโ€™ve ever written. A plumber from New Zealand encouraged me

to try poetry for onceโ€”thatโ€™s why it happened. One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I just wrote this morning.

In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace.

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