AGAINST THE WIND ~ Marta

My mother and I on the beach. I have come here with her, to the farthest point on Long Island in the fall after everyone has left the summertime beach and it has become something else – raw and rough. I am looking for nature without buildings and thought maybe if I drove all the way to the end of Long Island I would find it. And I have no way of getting there except with my mother in her car.

I live up in the mountains in a yoga ashram. I’ve been living here for years and lately I have been wanting to get out of it more and more – it started when the passion to write hit me hard again. I’d just come back from India, a bunch of months as the guru’s secretary – le-dee-dah, everything should be different now or something – and I’m finding that I want to be in a writing group.

It starts with Urvashi coming up to the talk to me in the evening. I’m behind the Registration counter, by myself, closing up for the night, putting out on the counter the push-button phone and the hand-calligraphied sign that Archana made – so pretty – welcoming the late-arriving guest and asking them to please pick up said phone and page Security who will come and give them a key to a late-night dorm because it will be too late for them to walk into a regular dorm where everyone will be asleep in anticipation of getting up at 3 to walk to the Temple in the dark and meditate, and in the morning the late-comers will have to return to Registration – to this long front desk with its row of computers – and be checked in properly and assigned to a proper dorm.

We know that some people come late on purpose to get the late-night dorm because you usually get to have it to yourself, but we haven’t figured out a way to close this loophole.

I have been thinking about writing again, feeling that yearning inside that I used to feel, that I felt very intensely at certain times – intense enough to really act on – to quit my job and then the brick wall would descend and the blackness that told me I would never be what I wanted to be, I was crazy to fall for that dream thing again, because I was damaged, remember?, not whole. How else to explain that other people wrote and kept writing while I started and stopped?

The thing about yoga was that it didn’t think writing or art was very special. There were other things more important and for a few years I willingly packed away writing with things like blue jeans and New York City streets and apartments and those long drags on a pipe, holding the smoke in as long as I could – all things that didn’t seem to be taking me anywhere – and threw them into cardboard boxes that fit under my twin bed, the only space for non-public things in a room I shared with two other women, each of us in our twin beds, each of us with a bureau – a few drawers and a few hangers in the shared closet.

But a few years later the writing thing was hitting big time – like wanting to listen to rock and roll again instead of the unbroken soundtrack of Sanskrit chanting – and wanting to be in New York City again, just walking on the sidewalks – just me in jeans and hiking boots, the way I used to walk.

Something must be wrong with it if it feels good. It’s too simple. If I really want to get something out of life and not take the easy route then I should take the hard route, the one where I stay up in the ashram and sign up for another seva assignment like washing mounds of potatoes in freezing cold water next to a girl who tells me – her hands plunged in the cold water – that she has some condition I’ve never heard of before where she mustn’t let her hands get cold. Neither of us thinks this is a reason to stop or ask for something else to do -- or planting small trees in the rain with twenty other people, trying to plant each one the way the head of the Garden Department demonstrated because if you do it wrong the plant won’t get enough water or too much, and when will the truck come with tea and cookies from the kitchen, and then finally stopping for lunch, going back to the dining room, wondering why I don’t feel like I’ve really done something even though seva is supposed to be such an important practice?

But I am going to New York City every Wednesday. I’ve been sent on a project there so I get to not go to my office every Wednesday. I get to leave at 7am after breakfast. leave in the 12-person van, unloaded onto the Upper West Side at 9 with the hours of the day spread out for me like a feast and I am starving.

Urvashi and I start talking about writing. She wants to write too. She knows of a group in one of the nearby towns – someone she works with told her about it – Urvashi has always been a bit of an outsider, different. She lives here like all of us, but she has a full-time job in the local college. She pays rent to the ashram to live here instead of being on full-time staff. She has her own room.

We do not warm to the Sunday afternoon group in the local town. Soon we make our own group.

It is in this time that I go out to the tip of Long Island with my mother. In a lot of ways my mother is a pretty good go-to-the-beach buddy. She is game.

We get to the last little town and to a little place where we rent a room. It’s raining but I am desperate to go out to the ocean. I have to go out. My mother comes too. We walk against the wind. The rain soaks us. But I don’t want to stop. I have come for this. I want to get as far as I can away from everything I have known and it’s like I can never get far enough.

I am wrapped in a red and green woolen shawl that an old Indian couple gave me as a gift. I take photographs and then we turn back. I don’t feel ready, but at the same time I know I can’t keep going – not in this furious rain and wind. I have to go back, to that snug room.