Couchsurfing

Couchsurfing: it's an online travelers' hub where you can meet potential hosts, guests, guides, and travel companions, all free and nonprofit. It's also how I stayed in Europe for a year, how i met some of the most important people in my life, and why I live in Switzerland. Yet I forget sometimes why exactly I do it. Usually that's around 2 AM in a fog of other peoples' smoke and loud talking, at one of the big meetings. I start to wonder if I have imagined all the magic there. Is it real? Did I really meet such amazing people couchsurfing? Why are we all just drinking buddies now?

And then you meet someone who changes your whole perspective on it again. Let's call him A. A and I had tea yesterday and it was like a breath of fresh air into all the dense smalltalk that any big meeting of strangers can be. I felt the most amazingly good feeling there in the Red Angel, looking at this person who is very different from me, but at the same time running almost parallel to me. Talking, pausing, looking at each other, it was like looking at a part of me in someone else. Aha. This is what we talk about in yoga, the "sameness" of everyone. the universality of existence. We are the same. And, beautifully, we are completely different at the same time-what stays the same is that twinkle in the eye. It's got to be the most important thing out there, that twinkle. I am sure a cosmologist one day will finally find his equation and it will read:

life=(twinkle in the eye) + laughter + tears

That part of me that aches for interaction on a deep level felt like it was drinking champagne after a 2 year draught yesterday. Of course, that could be partly because we did in fact drink champagne later...Regardless, it was the most refreshing feeling to be so at ease in someone's company, to have none of it pertain to sexuality, and to know that this is inside of every person that I meet, somewhere, just waiting to be ignited by a moment of sitting still and looking. Just looking. What a gift.