Tuesday, March 31, 2020

An Unexpected Gift

Every so often on one of our trips a student or a group of students will surprise you with a gift. I never expect them to happen, and I usually do my best to dissuade them from even considering them. That said, some students, usually the ones who were clearly raised well, will go out of their way to sneak away at some point on the trip and gift us a gift. I'm always remarkably touched when this happens. On this latest trip to India my student Chris, who is a great kid, surprised me by handing over this gift during the cricket match (which, as I said a few posts back, he was the driving force behind arranging). It's every bit as heavy as it looks, and I'm happy the border security obviously had more things to concern themselves with than my massive bronze Buddha.

It's beautiful even unopened. I think Chris somehow found this in the old shopping area down the street from the Brahma temple in Pushkar.

And then it turns into it's own shrine. My friend Kathy, herself a Buddhist, proposed that I now have to become a Buddhist, which is pretty unlikely. Although, as I often proposed during my year-long discussion of faith, I'm often amazed by how much I think of day to day life as a Muslim feels like Buddhism.


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