FOR MOST OF US who have ever traveled to East Asia, the trip involves a several-hour flight across the Pacific. For Lucy Horne, her first excursion to Japan took her a full two weeks. She traveled by train. “Denmark to Warsaw, Moscow, Vladivostok,” she tells me the afternoon we meet. “And then over to Japan. I don’t like plane travel. You miss what’s in between. I wanted to know what was in between.”
Horne was in her early twenties when she made that trip, many years before she joined Kashi, an interfaith ashram in Sebastian, Florida, and became Swami Dhumavati. But even as a young woman, the “in between” experiences in life—the something that we miss because we are moving too fast—was what she was after.
She tells me the story as we take a tour of the ashram grounds. It’s the middle of January, but the lush greenery of mango trees and bamboo provides relief from the intense sunlight.
