The Space Between Heaven and Earth is Like a Bellows

Manhattan loomed over the planes taxiing to and fro on the jealous Newark tarmac. I was sitting on the chairs for the passengers of Continental flight 82 splayed out by gate 123, idly looking out the window, looking at the people, looking at my book. To some extent I felt like I already had dipped my toe in the vast ocean of humanity that is India -- a chorus of exotic tongues murmured amongst us, bindis adorned many foreheads, the smell of incense wafted from peoples' clothes, even the seats were arranged much closer together than what I had ever seen before....

We boarded the craft and I settled down between two young cosmopolitan Delhites. The flight attendants came around shortly after we took off and offered us a surprisingly tasty in-flight curry. Politely negotiating the close quarters of the aircraft while trying to eat my in-flight meal was a glimpse of the long rides on Indian Railways that awaited me. Sated, I snapped on my headphones and soaked in one of those most fascinating of spiritual treatises, the Tao Te Ching, and sleep came to me amid the droning cadence of jet engines and Thomas Cleary's fatherly baritone voice.

A great deal of "airplane sleep" ensued, where one goes in and out of consciousness in an undifferentiated haze of oddly chipper flight attendants asking "Do you want something to drink?", the tyrannical edicts of the almighty bladder, and of course the perennial plaints of the squalling brat right behind you. In that hypnagogic limbo between Heaven and Earth, somewhere over Afghanistan by my reckoning, a million chattering voices welled from 30 thousand feet below up into my thoughts. Calls to prayer, family feuds, singing of songs, small talk, big talk, low talk, high talk, instruction and destruction, and myriad other utterances -- all of these smaller vibrations heaved up and down, in and out -- breathing, as it were, as one. Their breaths harmonized and like drops of water falling into a still pond transmuted into a single, droning, almighty voice, the Voice of the Alone: OM.