Seeking Self Discovery and Deception

Tourists don't come to India, as a rule.
Rather, those drawn to this ancient culture are most likely seekers.
Seeking what?

Answers to life's greatest questions, to mankind's oldest riddles or just an answer to that perennial quandary, "Who am I and why am I here?"

My association with Mother India began in 1970, when I was selected as Kalamazoo (Michigan) Community Ambassador, and sent on an all expense trip to India for several months. Each successive visit I have fallen more deeply in love with the lands and its people, my family's suggestion I, "Get India out of my system" long abandoned.

Today, nearly 40 years into this globe-spanning relationship, I discovered something I've been seeking even longer!

I found a slimming mirror, just like the one I coveted as a girl at my Aunt Ann's house. I bagged no classic spiritual truth of self discovery; I am simply thrilled with a mighty, welcome tool of self deception. A mirror.

My mother's younger and only sister, Ann, and her husband Uncle Bill, had six daughters...the Macdonald family my Midwestern family visited in Massachusetts every summer.

Such glorious vacations included full days at Nantasket Beach and its fantastic amusement park. My brothers remember the tiny Dixie cups of cola ("tonic" according to Aunt Ann; we called it "pop") totally unsatisfying for their growing male thirst. Raising girls only, my Aunt found boys, their behavior and appetites, amusing yet alien.

Images flickering in my beach memory bank:

• my water loving mother, riding the waves, a wild tomboy, untamed by the cold Atlantic's whip


• my father, creating competitions involving smooth, palm sized stones and deep holes


• my busy brothers, darting like sandpipers between the parents


• the six girl cousins holding down the hot horizon, stick figures with pencil-thin legs below blotchy pink and orange bathing suits.

With no soft Massachusetts accent and no picture of me as a Bride of Christ hanging at my Aunt's, I regarded me and my body with great disappointment and growing revulsion. My round bottom and wide hips cast a sickening shadow on the sand. No braids, pigtails or carefree ponytail, my short matted hair fairly screamed, "I'm not a cute Macdonald." I found it safest to stay wrapped in a towel, secretly sucking my faithful thumb.

Only the guest room mirror at Auntie's provided respite from my self loathing those summers. Propped against the wall (Uncle Bill was not handy like my father) the angle mercifully reflected a thin me with long legs like the cousins.

How I loved that lying looking glass; I stared at my implausible reflection long after bedtime.

So, today, nearly half a century and half a world away, I am delighted to find another such mirror here in a Chennai guestroom, at another Aunt and Uncle's home. Another loving mirror that presents me trim, narrow and less. And what perfect synchronicity! Tomorrow, Aunt Boona and Uncle Suren and I head East to the ocean, this time, the Bay of Bengal.

Thank you, Universe, for slimming this seeker, just in time.

(Photo of me in Bay of Bengal added March 1, 2009!)