Sara and her mother’s hometown of Bacolod is a small city. It’s a bubble.
“That’s why [Rose] wanted to reach out,” she says. “Otherwise, you just live miserably knowing that there has to be something else out there not just this thing.”
In spite of her years of absence, Sara exhibits a deep empathy for her mother. When she reflects on her time at the ranch, she ultimately finds herself grateful for her time there, for the people she met and the way it expanded her understanding of spirituality and the world around her.
Gilda, too, speaks rather benevolently about Osho—the guru who drove a wedge between her sister and the rest of her family. To each is their own, she tells me.
Ellie Phillips, a friend of Rose and Rajneshee with self-admittedly less “devotion” to Osho (she even laughs with me about how she was part of a cult), speaks of the guru and his impact with kindness. Osho, in spite of it all, was the connective tissue that brought her and so many people from around the world together.
This isn’t a puff piece about Rajneesh. Nor is it one that laughs at and condemns everything and anything his following. This isn’t a piece that memorializes my grandmother, nor is it one that crucifies her. I guess, that to say, this is a piece about everything in between. Perhaps it's about the incredible irony that everything I can't seem to make sense of has shaped the way I try to make sense of the world.
My grandmother’s pursuit of spiritual freedom and attempt to escape the rigidity of a lifestyle molded by colonialism led her from the Philippines to India to the United States and countless places in between. And now I find myself here, in Los Angeles, recounting her journey, thinking about the way pain becomes collateral. How her attempt to find a world wherein she could exist freely meant leaving her children to exist in a world without her. I think about how my presence in Los Angeles, California is oddly indebted to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. But, above all, I think about how my life started long before I was born-how the pain, joy, curiosity, selfishness, and selflessness of our families indelibly forms the world we inhabit.