"Oh, no! Thank you," I kept saying, frustrated¹ at how inadequate² those words sounded, how impossible it was to express ample gratitude³ for their having lifted me to such a towering height.

Another one hundred seekers arrived a week later for another retreat, and the teachings and the brave endeavors inward and the all-encompassing silence were all repeated, with new souls in practice. I watched over them, too, and tried to help in every possible way and glided⁴ back into turiya a few times with them, too. I could only laugh later when many of them came out of their meditations⁶ to tell me that I had appeared to them during the retreat as a "silent, gliding⁷, ethereal presence." So this was the Ashram's final joke on me? Once I had learned to accept my loud, chatty, social nature and fully⁸ embrace my inner Key Hostess--only then could I become The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple, after all?

In my final weeks there, the Ashram was imbibed⁹ with a somewhat melancholy¹⁰ last-days-of-summer-camp feeling. Every morning, it seemed, some more people and some more luggage got on a bus and left. There were no new arrivals. It was almost May, the beginning of the hottest season in India, and the place would be slowing down for a while. There would be no more retreats, so I was relocated for work again, now placed in the Office of Registration¹¹, where I had the bittersweet job of officially "departing" all my friends off the computer once they had left the Ashram.

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