Notes from the Puddle

People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people. – Johnny Depp.

This is one of my favorite quotes. For the past few years I have thought of this quote from time to time, and in returning from our trip to Pondicherry, it crossed my mind again. We visited the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (see photo) where I bought a book called A Greater Psychology. It talks of the possibility that there is consciousness in every single thing, how even the plants and rocks could be conscious but in a form that we can’t recognize. This reminds me that there exists something much larger than the world surrounding us, the villages, cities, countries, oceans. It is the world inside a single person. If we consider that each person we meet is a new world for us to discover, how they think, how they feel, their history, etc., it is breathtaking the worlds we have yet to discover. Sometimes I wish I could meet every single person in the world. This is probably the one thing I wish I could do more than travel to every place. Of course this is impossible, so often I am left wondering, as I pass people on the street, Who is this person? What is the world inside of them like? Their past, present, and future are lost to me.

A graphic designer turned farmer in Auroville, an apparently harmonious microcosm. A warmhearted, verbose auto-rickshaw driver with nearly perfect English and a fair rate. An Aussie veterinarian with dreadlocks visiting a small permaculture farm in India to work for a couple of weeks. A poised middle-aged woman on an overnight train from Thalassery to Pondicherry to visit her daughter at college. In each of these people another world is there to be discovered. Love, hate, war, peace, hunger, wealth… All of these things in a single body.

On our first day back in the community, between shifts at the tailoring workshop, we accompanied Jessy and another woman to a funeral service of an older woman who had recently passed away. She is a world lost, yet she is represented by the beautiful flowers and music of the ceremony as well as by the presence of her friends and relatives. But this is only a fraction of what her life held, what she thought, felt, and, experienced, things that will never be regained.
So with a heavy heart I thought of these things as I stared at the red woven carpet that stabbed at my feet. I thought about the photographer capturing shots of the service with us in the background, and how our presence changed, however slightly, the worlds of the people present. They watched us, curious, probably as to why we were there. And I thought of how my world was shifting drastically, having witnessed my first funeral in a small community in South India, and how I would never forget the face of this woman, this world, that I never knew.