Stepping into the Mess: Unpacking India & Nepal

by Kayce Stevens Hughlett

“Be a messy and imperfect lover of writing and you might be surprised by what you’ll be able to create and how much more satisfying it will be.” Jennifer Louden

Photo Credit - Harry Fisch, Nomad Photo ExpeditionsTen days ago, I returned from a life-changing photo tour to India and Nepal. I’ve been “unpacking” in my journals and wondering where this story begins … or ends. Ha! I’m coming to understand there is no such thing, so today I embrace Jennifer Louden’s blessing of messiness and imperfection and simply begin with a page from yesterday’s journal.

I am distracted. I sit on my cozy front porch where I want to bounce from book to quote to iPad to Instagram or Facebook or take a nap. Inside. Outside. Anything to keep me distracted and away from writing and unpacking this trip into India, Nepal, and photography.

Jet lag taunts me. I can’t sleep at night. I crash during the day when the sun is out. Hulu beckons to me … just one more episode of Scandal, please. Like the boatmen on the Ganges in Varanasi. Boat, Madame? Boat ride? I wish I could turn away from the at-home distractions as easily as my practiced no, thank you to the boatmen. Sorry. I don’t have any rupees. Sorry. Not today. No. Thank you.

Okay, Madame. I’ll be right here when you’re ready. I can’t discern if this voice comes from the boatmen, Hulu, or my writing project that’s beckoning me. Perhaps each. It is my choice. I can stroll through the photos of the Ganges, flip open my iPad to watch mind-numbing TV, or stay here on the page.

Staying here feels like agony, a test. What am I afraid will happen if I stay? What will be revealed? When did this get so hard? I am full to the brim, my words overflowing like garbage in the Indian streets. My story mixed with the scent of cow dung and sweet incense. My toes dipping into the Ganges where ash mixes with glorification and disease.

Dis-ease. Why do I feel it? Because I don’t deserve these adventures. What the heck? Where does that voice come from? The voice that tells me to play small and keep quiet? Even the legless beggars in Varanasi shout and call for attention, dust in their teeth and dirt beneath their cracked fingernails that pull them along the jutted streets. They shout to say, “I AM HERE!” If they shout, then why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t you?

My inner response answers: Because I am too blessed. What?!?!? Too blessed? NO! It is my gift to share these stories with the world. From the noisy, dung-filled streets to the Business Class flight home where I felt both guilt and relief. Overpopulation and overindulgence. It is my choice to choose how I speak of these things.

I am a citizen of the world. My residence is not one isolated pocket in Seattle.

My phone buzzes by my side, but no one is there. I think about going to yoga, but I am dead-dog tired. I am the bedraggled hound laying at the foot of the earthquake-damaged temple near Bhaktapur. I am the perky pup next to her Ming dynasty twin. The scrawny mother with hungry babes begging at her tits. The mangy pack that howls along the Ganges. The fluffy white female on a leash. Is that me?

My whiteness confused the people of Hardiwar and Varanasi, Nepal too. My blonde hair and eastern clothes. My large camera and open face. “You are so beautiful,” I hear the girls at Buddha’s birthday squeal. Is it so wrong that I’m delighted by that? Is it vanity to want to be beautiful inside and out? I saw so much beauty in those exotic faces—tired, worn, weathered, as well as the Indian and Nepali beauties with their perfect makeup and kohl-rimmed eyes.

There is so much to say. I grasp for a framework and then I realize that this story may not have one. To grasp is like trying to hold the wind in the palm of my hand.

There will always be naysayers who don’t understand these tales. I’m invited to tune them out. My story is bigger than the past two weeks. I have winged my way around the world and with that I bring back its glory and its weight. The story is not mine to keep secret. It is a story of magnitude, not smallness. So, today I begin.

“Be not content with littleness… Yet what you do not realize, each time you choose, is that choice is your evaluation of yourself. Choose littleness and you will not have peace, for you will have judged yourself unworthy of it… It is essential that you accept the fact, and accept it gladly, that there is no form of littleness that can ever content you… For you will be content only in magnitude.” A Course in Miracles

The Great Boudha Stupa - World Heritage Site