Continuing In the Spirit

The last two posts published here –  Return to Source (5th April 2023) and Pilgrim’s Return (29th March 2023) – reflect the loss of energy and direction that increasingly characterised the years that followed from Nepal 2021, and, earlier, the pandemic year of 2020, when I had had my most profound spiritual experiences. The Blog itself with its Spiritual Guide sections was actually conceived and started in Nepal in 2021, so, following my return to India in 2022, I wrote series of posts about Rishikesh itself, which I hadn’t been able to in 2020. In 2020 I had spent nearly eight months in Rishikesh based at Hotel Greenhills, the first six during the stricter periods of the Indian pandemic lock down, when the Tapovan and Laxman Jhula districts had reverted to much the way they would have been before adventure tourism and the spiritual industries sector changed them into what they are now. Then there were just the traditional village folk, temple and ashram devotees, sadhus of many order, the street cattle and the relatively few tourists and yoga enthusiasts stranded there after the rigours of the early lock down period took hold, and escape proved impossible.  I had been one of them, although there with intent, rather than happen chance. The 2022 posts, following my counter-intuitive return via Cyprus and Sri Lanka as they did, chart my shock and disillusionment at the remorseless return to the rampant secular consumerism that now characterises Rishikesh, with the Tapovan district selling itself as the Adventure Tourism Capital of India, and the whole spiritual sector once again surfing the wave of the capitalist wellness industry, and new cafes popping up everywhere to serve the rapidly expanding international backpacker market.

Following from the 2022 posts which concluded with Works Still to Do 20/6/22 I returned to the UK from Kerala, where I had spent a month after the period in the north, itself predicated on my belief that the formal Pilgrimage had indeed ended. I had travelled with Sahdev Rana, my trusty guide and driver, back up to Dharali and Gangotri mid May and had conducted what I termed ‘the rites of termination’ with a small private puja at Kalp Kedar temple, marking for me the ending of the Pilgrimage period, started in 2019. Desultory attempts to revive the travel blogging in 2023 confirmed the inertia that had set in, so I finally shelved the site and devoted myself to other pursuits, which included a long period of working out where I was on the Pilgrimage pathway, whether still on it, or whether it had indeed finished, as the final posts speculated.

The years following Works Still to Do were remorselessly difficult, and it seemed that In the Spirit had pretty much said all there was to be said in terms of spiritual guidance and insights. I felt unable to guide myself even, given I had no clear template about how such a ‘journey of a lifetime’ could be finished, if it ever could. As I floundered around in the space in between, I devised a whole new site, originally called ‘Forever Sadhu’ reflecting my determination to continue the journey, then morphing into Turbulent Priest continuing the spiritual theme, but focusing more on my life as it began to re-engage with the world I had left behind in 2019.

In my several returns to India in 2023, 2024 and 2025 (this year) it seemed that I was working out the means to comprehend my experiences, and how India had changed from being that magical oh so spiritual land of temples and tigers and high snow capped peaks where I had those sublimest of pilgrimage revelations, to just another modern country in the throes of globalisation, devoid of any kind of special feeling at all. The several posts published on Turbulent Priest record this time poignantly enough.  A Tale of Two Bridges, Off Grid Living, Pilgrims, Mendicants and Beggars, The Song is Over, Going Full Sadhu, Sadhu Free Zone. Moving On and, probably Changing Times all document in their way the struggles of trying to work out how to interpret the post Pilgrimage period. So I will leave it to those to tell that story and direct readers there. Now I am writing a book of the Pilgrimage which charts the whole experience from its naissance to its ending and which explores in more detail the struggles that we face to understand our own personal story, given that each of us, to live an authentic life, will have our own personal pathway. There is no such thing as an ‘off the peg’ life, although increasingly it seems that that is what people are looking for, to avoid the sorts of blank spaces, and periods of cluelessness that seem to stalk the journey and life of the true Pilgrim.

But probably what really spelled the end for me was the erasure – almost literally – of Dharali, epicentre of my most significant Pilgrimage moments. Watching the video footage of the immense wall of rock and water which swept away houses and people, and buried the whole village – traditional and new – under many metres of mud on that fateful day of 5th August, spelled an end more final than any I could have dreamed of myself. Now all I have are the many photos of that beautiful place and its people which offer poignant testament to those times.

I could have called this ‘Ode to Dharali’, but I have to believe that life, and the Journey with it, go on, be it now here back in the land of my birth, than there in the land of my dreams. I may certainly have touched Divinity in those times, but we are made to be human and counselled to honour this (1), although I feel that despite literally ‘coming back’, probably after such a journey with such experiences, one can never really ever come back, and most certainly not to the former self and way of being left behind as I boarded that flight to India on 18th November 2019.

So now it makes sense to keep In the Spirit as the site for more spiritually relevant stories and insights, and Turbulent Priest where I critique the world that I live in, although I imagine there will be many times when these two, and the two aspects of myself represented by them, will keep up a rich dialogue!

 

1. It is well expressed in an excerpt from the life of the fourteenth century German mystic Henry Suso¹, produced in Evelyn Underhill’s seminal work on Mysticism ²: