the beginning

I can't explain exactly what prompted starting a blog.
Maybe it was the absence of my journal at the meditation retreat I just finished. Maybe it was my sudden desire to start writing in a new way.
Either way, I realized my journal writing and mass e-mails wasn't enough.. anyone who knows me well knows that I love stories, so maybe this will just be my new outlet.

So just some background.. I'm backpacking around India. This is my second long-term overseas adventure, the first being an eight-month trip around Western Europe, Morocco, and Southeast Asia. The main difference between that trip and this one is that this time, I don't have to go back to school in September. I don't have a return flight home yet, and really have no idea where I'll be next week. I'm just going with the flow, and living very much with the present.

My attitude to be in the present moment has been developing more and more in the past few years, but it was certainly this meditation retreat that brought it to a whole new level. That shall be my next entry.

As for the title of this blog, and the quote at the beginning... well, those who know me well know it's my favorite passage, and quite fitting for an attitude of Be Here Now. Unfortunately the 500-word limit will not permit me to write the entire Tom Robbins quote at the top, so I'll do it here:

"Bonk! went the clockworks, and then it went poing! And unlike the chimes of a regular clock, which announce, on schedule, the passing - linear and purposeful - of another hour on the inexorable march toward death, the clockworks chime came stumbling out of left field, hopping in one tennis show, unconcerned as to whether it was late or early, admitting to neither end nor beginning, blissfully oblivious of any notion of progression or development, winking, waving, and finally turning back upon itself and lying quiet, having issued a breathless, giddy signal in lieu of steady tick-and-tock, a signal that, decoded, said, "Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical with yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed again the wide grin of the horizon; and having experienced, thus, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanism can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed. .........................................................Bonk!"