Searching for Heaven

By RAVI DYKEMA

You must have wondered what it would be like to leave this rat race and move yourself or your whole family to an exotic foreign land. What would you learn? Who would you become? Could you leave your troubles behind? Could you find true contentment? Would you spend your time studying and reading, building things, growing food or socializing with the locals?

The far-away world of weird food, odd music, strange odors and foreign tongues offers such a huge range of possibilities. Maybe . . . even . . . paradise?

We spoke to two people who did leave their familiar worlds behind. (See “Going Native,” page 24.) No, they didn’t find paradise. But they did both find life-changing challenges and experiences. You can share in their joys and sorrows as you read their stories—and dream more vividly of your own, if you were to go native as they have.

I, too, have imagined creating a life abroad. Such images and yearnings are part of my lifelong quest for self-knowledge, for ultimate understanding, for full-on awareness. I have written of this quest before in this space. And I want to share with you my favorite story. Written in mid-Summer 2000, it suggests that paradise may not be so far off, after all.

Searching for Heaven
As I write this, I sit on an old electric utility spool beside the pump shack at my family’s ancestral land in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Our cozy cabin across the lake is electricity-free, and my laptop’s battery doesn’t work. So here I sit swatting mosquitoes, plugged in to the electric service near the road. I can’t face writing longhand, even to escape the mosquitoes.

I have visited “the Pond” most of the summers of my life. And, unlike everything else, it doesn’t change much. In fact, it hasn’t change much since my great grandfather built it.

But I do. And those around me do. I remember when, as a toddler, the barn was a LONG walk from the house. At age 21, I came here one rainy May on my way back from my first six-month study in India. I stayed here alone for two days one frigid January when my first wife had just left me. And I have brought my children here almost every year of their lives. This evening they have made a game of delivering things to me by canoe from across the lake. They just brought me a lawn chair (but forgot the mosquito repellent). To my kids and to me the Pond is Heaven. At least it is close.

And it’s heaven that I have been searching for. Since I was in my early twenties I have figured that life should keep getting better and better, until, eventually…heaven!

So each year, when I leave my Pond heaven to return to my changing life on earth, I usually write myself a list of things I think I need to do in the next year to get closer to heaven more of the time. They are usually practical things, like create a budget, do more fun things with the kids and deepen friendships.

It has started to rain so I have retreated into the tiny pump shack with my lawn chair and my laptop computer, the screen of which contributes the only light in here. The pump starts up and startles, me, as my kids run the tap in the house across the pond. The rain-sprayed air smells of old wood. I type the last few words of my editorial. I ask the question I ask so often, “Is this the heaven that I have been searching for?”