Blessings

Delhi is a place of transition and passage for me as I start this pilgrimage. Tomorrow before sunrise the next leg of the journey to Ladakh, and to begin this pilgrimage, begins. Yet today it was clear the pilgrimage has already begun. Blessings poured in from many directions. Friends and loved ones reached out. Support for the logistics of this complex undertaking arrived in many directions. Eagles and monkeys played outside my window. I even took that very rarest of things, a nap.

Two, very different other kinds of blessing energy punctuated the day. In the late morning, one of the other Ladakh travelers and I ate a long breakfast and decided to venture out for a short walk in the heavy Delhi heat. Not ten minutes from the hotel, the heavens suddenly opened—literally? figuratively?—and we crouched under a banyan tree and got soaked to the skin. Thoroughly, miraculously drenched. Living in California these past few years, I’ve come to appreciate as never before the pure gift of water falling from the sky. I’ve come to not take it for granted. We stood for a while under the tree, and then, the rain barely letting up, ran back to the hotel and burst into the lobby, dripping and giggling.

The other blessing was a gift from Hanuman, the representative of courage and service in the Hindu tradition. Hanuman is important to me, and I have known and visited a particular Hanuman temple in Delhi for a decade, soon after arriving in India. Part theme park, part place of sincere worship, the temple—a 60 foot tall Hanuman image—towers above the Delhi traffic and beckons visitors in for a smile and a prayer.

I visit this temple each year to ask for a blessing before setting out to Ladakh. This year I went over mid afternoon, only to find the gates locked, a few other disappointed worshippers shaking their heads outside. “Even the gods are resting,” my Delhi agent said. So I went home and took a long nap.

But out of great kindness, he took me back in the evening, just as the evening Aarti was beginning. We stood while priests blessed the various deities in the temple, played bells, banged drums, while everyone chanted. I let my bare feet sink into the marble and connected to the vibration, the coolness, the long continuity of practice. Across these traditions, at the end of the day, we are all seeking and celebrating the same thing, and we are always already connected to it, the thing we are seeking.

As we picked up our shoes on the sidewalk to leave, I noticed that one of the priests, whom I recognized from other years, had started a fire ceremony out on the sidewalk and was beginning a puja. He beckoned me over with a combination of pity and kindness (who is this fumbling person who keeps returning here year after year?) and told me to sit. As he chanted, he threw incense on the altar, and soon someone brought me a bowl of incense to use, following his rhythm. Svaha: release, offer. Somehow in the midst of chanting and tossing things into the flames, the priest still took care to gently correct the mudras in both of my hands—a kindness and a teaching I won’t soon forget.

Now it’s time to take the first next step—supported by all Beings, nourished by the Divine and the mundane, and ready, as we say in the Zen tradition, “to live and be lived for the benefit of all Beings.”