October 10, 2010 Back in Nepal

Yesterday we drove from Bairoling Monastery where I am staying to Amitaba Monastery, an hour away. The ride was across town over really bad roads and I was in the way back of the SUV. It was much bouncing and looking out side ways as the city of Kathmandu passed by. Images still linger of the markets, tarps spread out on the dirt with food, clothes and shoes displayed while dogs, a vagrant cow, chickens and people wandered through. These tarps lay five feet away from the busses and cars, motorcycles and bicycles that sent dust and fumes everywhere. And the people, poor, dirty, carrying loads on their backs or their heads, children playing or being led by a mother on the edge of the road watching out for the motorcycles and bicycles that like to sneak around the cars and busses stuck in traffic. The women are always beautiful though, their saris glowing in the brilliant jeweled tones and their luxurious, black hair thick in braids or tied in a ponytail or knotted on the back of their neck. The last part of the drive was fifteen minutes of up requiring a stop to engage the 4 wheel drive before we arrived at the top, breeze fresh with the scent of the terraced fields and pines that lined the way.

The monastery is pristine, freshly painting in the wealth of colors that Tibetans love. There was the archway that houses the five Buddhas sitting guard and then three more giant Buddhas, the last two gold colored shining in the sun that sit in the bottom, middle and top of the stairway that runs up the rest of the way to the top of the mountain. Amitaba Monastery is for nuns, one of two in the country. And you can feel them; their quiet grace as they move about, smiling softly when spoken to.

After feeling quietly nauseous from the ride, the breeze was welcome and I stood for some time outside the gompa (temple) and watched the hawks, looked at the valley below with Kathmandu spread out below, seeming another world away. And yet behind me, beside me were mountains still green with terraced land and trees on the top, a bright, verdant green. The clouds were wild with possibility, some whipped cream white, others dark and threatening. I knew that behind them were the Himalayas, like another realm of silent gods.

The next morning, at 3AM when I again woke, I thought of those images and realized that my life feels a bit like the landscape I had spent the day in. There is the part of my life that is Kathmandu, loud and messy, untamable in its desires and determination to wrest from it what I want, or what I think I want. But if I look at it in the wrong way, it makes me sick and I get caught in the suffering, my own and others. And there is another part, the part like the monastery that has fresh air that sweeps out my fatigue, my vague sense of illness. From this place I can see where I have been and can feel a moment of reprieve. And from this place I get a sense of the Himalayas beyond, softly moving, almost a whisper, of where I might go.