Inner and outer adventures in India

 

You meet an elderly man on a ferry bound for Greece. He is a fellow American in his 60s, you are a young man in his early 20s, fresh from a stay in a Greek monastery. He tells you part of his story and invites you to accompany him to India, the country that has been his home for decades and where he lives the life of renunciate enjoying an extended pilgrimage, with the only fixed destination: love! 

He may be a saint, he may be mad, he might conceivably be both, but why not? Why not indeed if you are the writer and photographer, Thomas K. Shor who in a series of books and extended photographic essays has shown a remarkable ability to befriend people with striking stories to tell that touch on the transcendent, the holy, and not occasionally the eccentric and strange. (As here, for example, https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/04/searching-for-paradise-in-hidden.html ).

Ed Spencer, the renunciant, had taught medieval history at Harvard until the Second World War brought him into the services and a posting to India. India greeted him as home and a subsequent encounter with a guru in Bihar sealed this connection (not one to be shared by his future wife as when he returned with her after the war, she quickly left and divorced him, leaving him to his life of walking). He traveled the length and breadth of the sub-continent, befriending people, earning a reputation as a saint or sage, but always maintaining a certain distance; and, always moving on.

Shor's account of meeting him, being and traveling in India with him, and their amicable parting of the ways that releases Shor into his own adventure is a compelling and engaging read for three principle reasons.

First, you see India (in the 80s) through the eyes of an engaging neophyte traveler open to new experience, open-minded and observant yet too not reluctant to share their doubts and hesitations. His portrait of Spencer is eminently balanced with admiration and a recognition of his gifts not excluding observing him as a human being with continuing flaws; not least a certain impatience and continuing cultural blindnesses.

Second, you are with a traveler who is learning the art of surrender - that when the whole that is India invites you simply to flow with it, you take a deep breath and, mostly, do. So as they hit the road, Shor allows himself to be guided by Spencer's intuition of where to stay, how to receive hospitality, how not to be afraid. That this does not always work, and that Shor cannot maintain Spencer's standards about not using money or running to a convenient shelter at the hint of obstacle makes the account more endearing and realistic. It, also, means that finally they must part ways, amicably, but realising too that Spencer's renunciant discipline has taken decades to acquire, and Shor's path is different.

Third, having left Spencer, Shor's journey compellingly becomes even more the gift of the whole - rife with significant coincidence and spiritual happenstance. He decides to travel north to meet with Lama Anagirika Govinda (whom Spencer has known) and who should he meet at the Delhi Tourist Office but the only person capable of showing him the exact way to Govinda's house and providing the requisite map for the journey. However, his potential host and introducer to Govinda is not there, though she would be unable in any case to provide an introduction to Govinda as owing to the onset of Parkinson's disease he has returned to the US. Nevertheless Shor stumbles into the house of a person who can help him, who has met and been given the same sacred token that Shor acquired in Delhi, and who studied with Govinda. Shor finds himself full circle, staying with a Tibetan lama and his family, who as a child had known and loved Spencer.

You close the book with a smile on your face, remembering all those common moments, possibly less pronounced, when you yourself let things unfold, stopped layering the world in your expectations, and allowed things to emerge. This includes in my case reading this book - that I had on my pile for so long - but picking up at the right moment, when I am 'stuck' and the world's answering activity has apparently departed only to discover in reading it a renewed sense of possibility if you pay attention and allow surrender.