So today at Pannai the electricity is on and the Internet is working. Pretty fancy! Today is also my last day here. I hop into the Jeep at 3:00 tomorrow morning and will be on my way. I get into Chicago around 7 p.m. tomorrow, with all of the time changes it is about a 30 hour trip.

I'm really not sure how to sum up my experience at this point, but I'm okay with that. This journey has definitely been a huge challenge, and has thrown me some curve balls I was not prepared for. Yesterday I was playing with this kid Gokal. He was dropped off here during my stay in 2006, so I feel like we have this special connection. The kids usually like so sit on my lap when we swing, but he really wanted to sit beside me so I squeezed in. We were just quietly swinging there for a long time and at one point he put his little arm around me and I thought, 'I can't believe I get to live this life'. To get to hang out with these women and kids and also get to go back to my 'real' life, where I have so much more to be excited about.

In her book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about being in India, and how everyone is astonished that she isn't going to see the Taj Mahal (sp?). So she considers ending her time at this ashram early so she can go. And one of her friends tells her something like, "The things you are going to experience here are going to be so beautiful they will make you want to throw stones at the Taj Mahal." And I see glimpses of that there. I wish that I (and everyone else living here) didn't have to dig through all the garbage to get to the bits and scraps of goodness and beauty, but I guess that's just part of the deal.

In any case, it's clearly going to take me some time to process all of this. I don't have a simple answer to the question, "Hey, Cyn! How was India?" But I hope that, like so many other experiences, I will sift through things and realize that it doesn't have to make sense. It just has to be.