I’m not sure Maria is coming back from India.

Just kidding, sort of, but we spoke this morning, and it was wonderful to hear early this morning how much she has fallen in love with that country.

There is no better way to wake up that to hear the excitement and wonder in her voice early in the morning.

Maria just returned from two days in the village of Bodpur, four hours from Kolkata and another world – beautiful, prosperous, clean and welcoming. Bodpur is, in part, an innovative and successful experiment created to keep rural women away from the sex trafficking trade by offering them work training and economic alternatives at home.

Maria just fell in love with the place and was busting with good news – she is planning to teach her potholder class tomorrow and the people running the program are talking to her about her selling the potholders here in America an on her blog that the girls she is teaching there  make.

She would not only teach them, but provide them with a market for their work, and keep them in their village and help them to be independent and provide for themselves and their families. She was disappointed she didn’t get to teach right away, but India has its own ways of doing things, and they got around to it, as I suspected they would.

Most often, it is desperation that draws rural women into trafficking and anything they can make or sell keeps them away from that path.

India is a perfect match for Maria, a beautiful and intense land of unimaginable contrasts. The people are most often generous and friendly, the poverty is staggering, the colors and traditions and smells and fabrics and food are just astounding. Talking to her makes me want to go there, and it now seems likely she will be going, again and again.

The country  is not only a never-ending visual feast, but it has a deeply spiritual side, and lives very close to nature in ways that are wonderful an ways that are not. In her village, there were hordes of baby goats. She loved that.

“You’re coming,” she told me this morning, so I guess that is that.

No more pondering. Maria sometimes seems and is shy, but she has an iron will when she makes up her mind.

I guess I’m coming next time, and I can’t wait to run around there with my camera. I’ve had dreams about that. There is a sweet side to India, and a dark side.

Tonight, she is going to tour the infamous Red Light District of Kolkata, from which so many of the girls she is meeting were rescued. I imagine that will be a difficult thing for her to see.

She is so in love with India, I think this country will not be a regular part of both of our lives. I jokingly asked her if she will come back, and I know she will, but the place is in her blood and imagination,and will soon, I think, be revealing itself in her art.

The trip, as I imagined, is changing her already. I have never heard her so strong and confident and excited and sure about her purpose in the world. She overcame much to get there, it was worth it all.

Can’t wait to talk about it with her when she comes home next Sunday.

Maria is back to blogging, and a lot of people will be happy to hear that. I think this has all opened her up in many ways that have yet to reveal themselves. I am so grateful she went and grateful to the many people who helped her go. Soon, I think, made-in-India potholders will be on sale on our blogs and at our Open Houses.  How cool, the might potholder might help transform the world.

What an antidote to fear and anger and despair.

My Sunday: some blogging on Maria’s fading laptop (I hope to get my computer back on Monday.) More listening to Alison Krauss, I am in love with her new album Windy City. A walk in the woods, lunch with a friend from New York City, maybe a movie or maybe a book. More later.