On Robyn Davidson's two journeys

Today’s newsletter from Allen and Unwin mentions a couple of books of people going and living in midst of aboriginal people and learning their ways. While learning about an ancient, exotic and intelligent culture is always interesting; in one of these books puts the spot light is on the traveller (and not on the people towards whom he is travelling) – which if done well could be a great book.

I came across Robyn Davidson first in a magazine interview while living alone in a new city, and reading about a woman travelling alone with a dog and camels in the middle of the desert struck a chord. There was also one of those things that she said; when you are alone in just your own company “it is not what you think but how you think that matters.” This, in exactly these words, is also something that Swami Tejomayananda had said at some other point, in some other context. I could not think of absolutely any difference in ‘what you are thinking’ and ‘how you are thinking.’ It took a long chat with Br. Gautamji before it made any sense. However, I digress.

It took me a couple of years before I could lay my hands on Robyn Davidson’s first book about her travel across the Australian desert, called Tracks. My favourite thing about Tracks was how pretty much a city girl could, before the end of it, find some integrated understanding of the natural world around her – or as I like to put it - how tracks on the sand, mean a journey of a creature, mean that the weather is about to change in a particular way. How she sublimated the conversations of the mind (that pervade our waking and dream life) to be truly awake to all that was happening around her. What made Robyn Davidson also interesting, apart from her fascinating journey and excellent writing style, that is, was the fact that she, like me, listed Australia and India as places of great significance in her life.

Her other book is called Desert Places, and is about a journey with nomads of Rajasthan. It took me mere months to get the second book! However, for some reason or another, (she writes that) she never manages to get that grasp of her surroundings in this journey. At some level, she becomes a curiosity for others; at another level, I think, the communication (and here I mean, apart from the language itself, the things that get said, others that are just hinted, while others that are just simply known) is so complex, that being awake is not enough – you would need a teacher.

And, as is said elsewhere, the teacher must be wonderful and the taught must be wonderful... for all the journeys to be completely fruitful?