TheBanyanTree: Unfolding

[Jena Norton]

How exciting! Indian weddings are great times, so you'll get so many memories and experiences!

Jena Norton 

    On Sunday, January 13, 2019, 7:15:24 PM CST, Teague, Julie Anna <jateague at indiana.edu> wrote:  
 
 I have pinched myself, but this is actually happening: I am going to India. When I was a young kid, living in Otwell, Indiana (population 500 and dwindling), I had a picture of the Taj Mahal tacked to my bedroom wall. Probably from a magazine I found somewhere. I was maybe twelve. I thought to myself, “someday I will go there.” (Fat chance, Little Julie Teague from Otwell, Indiana.)  I can’t explain why, but I was born with wanderlust in a family who barely traveled from the town they were born in. I was also born a poor kid in the Midwest to generations of hard-working people who were not college-goers. Mostly dirt-poor Irish immigrants who made it to the US but not much farther up from the ground.  But I was also a poor kid born with a big imagination, a lust for life, and access to books. And books and books and books. I’m absolutely sure that the same desires and dreams ran through a number of my forebearers. My dad, for instance, has been a frustrated artist his whole life, but being saddled with poverty and kids and bills and jobs and addictions left little time to pursue art other than the never-ending arts and crafts he did with us kids. (We carved and drew and tie-dyed. We did pottery, glass cutting, macrame, and crochet.) Blame it on fate, luck, timing, or sheer stubbornness, which maybe explains me, but he got stuck in some ways that I didn’t. 

I shake myself sometimes—here I am. Why am I here? I am a college graduate with a decent University job. I have helped my own kids get through college, one who almost has his Masters degree (although they both work and always have, as did I). I survived as a single mom and now own the small home I live in. I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro and the Peruvian Andes. I’ve swam with sharks in Samoa, crossed through the Berlin Wall, handed out shoes and toys and toothbrushes in ten different Caribbean countries, and dragged my sad little suitcase over miles of cobblestones of Spain and Italy. I have touched the stones that Christ touched and wailed at the Western Wall. I have been awed and amazed with the world and the people in it (some of whom I’ve met), with my life, with the good fortune I feel like I’ve half fallen into and half made. The universe has smiled on me. Yes, there have been decades of horrible shit—divorce and dying and sad sad stuff. I haven’t forgotten, but I’ve let it, mostly, go. 

(Also, when I was twelve, about the same time I was conjuring up the life that would lead me to the Taj Mahal, I memorized The Desiderata. To wit: “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.And whether or not it is clear to you,no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” I took that to heart. I took the whole thing absolutely, one hundred and fifty percent, to heart.) 

Where was I? Oh yes, India. I’m going there in March to attend the wedding of John’s good friend (and my friend of two years) Ronak. It’s a three day event with a Henna festival, a Bollywood dance party night, a black tie event, and a day long traditional Indian wedding. In a castle in Jaipur. (I can’t even say those words without nearly leaving my seat with jittery excitement.) On the day of the wedding, the bridegroom (Ronak) will be riding in on an elephant to meet his bride. After the wedding, we will travel to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and spend the night, because we’ve been told we should really see it at sunrise. I think, yes, I should see it at sunrise.

I can’t express what this all means to me. Or to Little Julie Teague from Otwell, Indiana. We are, that little girl and I, somewhere between disbelief and a very, very, life-long, closely and daringly held belief that, yes, the universe is unfolding as it should. 

Julie




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