GHOSTING ~ Marta

My mother’s house is small and white on about half an acre, a scraggy stretch of grass to the road – scraggy in the best sense, it’s real grass, not clipped and manicured, and she has different plants growing here and there, nothing tidy and Martha Stewart, everything a little ragged, some plants doing well, others that never rooted properly. It’s a quiet road she lives on.

Across the street is a slightly grander house, the kind that’s made to look like it was built in Elizabethan England – white plaster with beams of dark wood. That house was always considered special when I lived in that neighborhood.

I would drive by it, not that often although it was so close to where I lived. I would go by, usually a passenger in an ashram van, returning from the city or perhaps a group run to the bank, and I’d look at that house through the window as the van passed and I’d think how Baba had actually stayed there twenty years ago or so. It was hard to imagine.

Baba was dead now, but I thought of him as a true saint. Not the kind of saint I’d learned about in Catholic school, but a real saint, a person who actually existed and had been as close to me as that house.

The house is almost empty now. One man lives in it. His wife and little girl used to live there. He bought the house and fixed it up and brought his wife, and they adopted a red-headed little girl baby and then my mother moved in across the street and took care of the little girl for seven years and then the wife and the little girl left. I think of these houses and this street as if part of me is still part of that landscape, and I see how quiet it has become.

Just up the road is a small Catskills hotel that in the Borscht Belt heyday was called The Windsor. Then it became a place called Sadhana Kutir, a mass of buildings spread over I don’t know how many acres, but enough for an avenue of bungalows, and several buildings of dormitories, and a few smaller buildings for families and hotel-sized rooms, and offices, and what had once been a nightclub, and the Sewing Room and the Frame Shop, a snack bar, the bookstore warehouse, and a stop for the shuttle bus that came by every twenty minutes – three times an hour – old schoolbuses painted a dark royal blue.

I lived there the last three years of my ashram life, and worked in an office there, and had my two cockatiels there, and scrubbed a lot of bathrooms, and folded dorm-fulls of soft beige polyester blankets there and vacuumed and dusted and chanted and meditated in the small dark meditation room – sound proof, lit only by candles. I drank hot milky sweet perfect chai there at four in the summer morning, waiting for the shuttle to take me in the dark to another part of the ashram where the chant would be happening, the pre-dawn chant that took place every single morning year after year after year without fail with live musicians with microphones and lead chanters up front, and rows and rows of us each holding a chanting book in our right hand at eye-level – the men on one side of the aisle, the women on the other – our backs straight, legs crossed, sitting on the floor, each of us having brought our own meditation kit – a cushion perhaps, certainly an asana, that was the bare minimum, an asana – the rectangle of white wool that Baba had said was the best material to meditate on because the wool absorbed the energy of our meditation, and a shawl -- pretty much everyone had a woolen shawl. Some carried their bundle just loose in their hands, most had a bag to hold it all.

You’d come in, kneel down where you wanted to sit and bow your head to the floor towards the guru’s picture up front – a big framed photograph of her face with her big brown eyes looking right at you – you’d bow to her, and as I’d bow I’d feel it every time, I was bowing to some kernel inside of me, some place inside of me that was her, because we were not separate, I knew that, that was the point.

And then each person would unpack quickly, smoothly because they’d done it so many times before: pillow, asana, book, shawl – and sit and chant.

I drive by now in my own car and look through the chain link fence and the world I knew in there is all gone. It’s something else now, another organization and I can’t read the sign at the entrance, it’s in a different alphabet and it’s not as though what we had there was so great. It wasn’t great at all. It was fraudulent and worse. But part of me hangs over that place and looks down on it and wonders where it all went. I had thought it would last forever. Thought I’d be there forever. And it ran away like water through my fingers.