Flying Home

I am on the plane at the moment, miles above the ocean and about to cross the international date line. I am heading for Auckland, my final stop before Christchurch. I feel a sense of freedom flying across the sky encompassed by the dreaming stars with the quiet waters below. It feels magical, surreal, to be remembering all the things that I have learnt, even right up to those last few moments spent in New York, and knowing that I will be constantly re-remembering these lessons for the rest of my life. The flight back always manages to put things into perspective.

I could never have imagined when I was primary school when people would ask what I was going to do when I grow up, that in fact my life would be guided by one of humanities most respected teachers.

When Sri Chinmoy flew from New York to New Zealand in 2002, not long after he arrived in Hamilton he told us all the things he had managed to do on his long flight south. One thing was that he wrote many Bengali poems which he set music to the day he arrived. I remember this day well as it was my 16^th birthday and the girls in our Centre had put in for a plane ticket for me to fly up to Hamilton. When Sri Chinmoy first arrived he offered prasad (blessed food) to everyone which felt very special. I was to be leaving later that day, but just before I did I bought him a notebook with New Zealand scenes throughout. Later, I saw he had used it when composing a song for Lydia Brady, a local mountain climber.

I have so many fond memories of Sri Chinmoy in New Zealand, which I am sure he does too! He has been here four times and often tells people about how he lifted 1000 lambs and 100 very heavy cows in New Zealand. 

After being away from home for two months, flying on this plane, I feel very free and grateful to be returning to my beautiful homeland.  I feel more awakened, maybe it is that I am completely jetlagged, but I feel totally inspired and am loving how life is unfolding itself in front of me, and things are being revealed in ways that would almost seem accidental. This is one of my favourite poems:

To look
Into your Master’s eye,
Is to enter
Into your own unexplored universe

-Sri Chinmoy