train of thought

                 The margin bar blinks and blinks. I hit the space bar to make it stop. Its blinks again like the railroad crossing at which I wait, thinking there is actually something to wait for beyond this crisp moment. I stare into this bright white screen with the first sips of caffeine igniting dawn. 

I should go stretch. Nourish my body rather than crank it up and try to express what feels impossible: Sapana.   

Not today. My adrenaline train steams down the track of mind. Running over my breath and body without care, I sip. The more fuel, the faster it heads towards the “this is it” destination. Only the engineer realizes the destination is a mirage, and laughs. Silently. 

The conductor never hears. 

He is always busy busy busy 

pressing buttons buttons buttons.

What within wants such momentum? This anxious, grasping, unsettled, insanity that must know the truth. The engineer tries to tell the all hands that fuel the train, there is nowhere to go, we are already there, but they think he is crazy. The passengers, who hold all memories, demand attention. The conductor tries to make everyone: the hands, the passengers and the engineer get along. He steers straight ahead. The cargo of this precious life gliding past golden farmlands, abandoned building, bustling skyscrapers and graffiti tunnels, pine forests, roaring seas, homeless encampments... the wooden slates and iron rails carving their way through time and space. 

Until

 she enters the conductor's quarters.

In the wee hours of night, when the crossing signals blink bright, and the horn awakens only ghosts, the hour when none are awaiting to cross the tracks to the place only the engineer knows is nowhere but here, the conductor puts the train on auto-pilot. The train steams with passion into the heart of life: Love. The passengers snore. The hands that fuel rest with reserves burning. The engineer, wide awake, observes in moonlit silence the train approaching a sudden shadow.

The whole train is in love.

CRASH!!!

A speeding daredevil driver did not cross the tracks in time. His car is crushed like his very breathe. And now, the train is in bardo too. The passengers want to know where they are going. Confusion. The hands are floating away. No more fuel. The engineer still watches. The bewildered conductor asks, Where did she go? The passengers fling memories making the cargo: every mother, father, sister, brother, child, lover, teacher, yes every relationship, every item ever owned, the backpack from the first day of school, the last gift from grandmother, every home ever lived in, the one in the woods, every bite ever taken, the pancakes drowning in maple syrup, the tuna melt, the chewing gum, every shoe ever worn, every vacation spent seaside, the shells brought home, the endless toenail clippings like the crescent moons one has watched wax and wane, like the breath rising and falling derail into the abyss of bardo, 

The In between.

The gap.

The engineer, why didn't he ever say STOP? He had the view. No heart. He didn't realize the passengers like him, would die too. The conductor, all heart, was taken by it. No view.

To arrive at the final destination one must unite engineer and conductor for the sake of all passengers who exist as much as the memories they hold. One steers knowing the destination is no destination. . Some days CRASH! 

One must try again with all hands. Down the tracks of life the train steams until every single passenger arrives at the no destination. 

Sapana is aboard. 

I am recklessly trying to steer this foreign train down unknown tracks.

Sapana- Nepali for dream

      

      Shilpa and I board Buddha Air's small plane filled with Nepalis heading home for Dashin, Nepal's Christmas. I am seated across from a young couple I met earlier at the ticket counter. They frantically swapped around the contents of their luggage, carefully packing bottles of Johnny Walker Black and Green amongst boxes of designer perfumes before reweighing the bag. They spend the flight over the majestic Himalayas on their swarvorski crystal studded iphones. Like most flights everyone starts talking only when the plane's wheels hit the runway. Plane etiquette is like a bar. The awkward feeling of being so close to the person next to you for an hour only you attempt to meet each other right before getting up to leave. I learn they have been living in Dubai working as housekeepers at a big resort. Meeting this couple en route to their village for the first time in many years remind me of the exploitation of migrants in the wealthy UAE. Most are promised big salaries, but end up so in debt they cannot return home. They are held like slaves working in the most horrific conditions. I wonder if the couple's story is like the ones I read about, but I don't press Shilpa for more translating. This language barrier forces me to really think about what I want to know. My small talk is becoming painfully apparent. It is as if Nepal is silently asking, what is you really want to know?

     The couple were the first of many young people I would soon see along the paths heading out of Taplejung, the city still nine hours of away by jeep from where we have just landed in the Jhapa District. One boy, carrying a Weenie the pooh bag with the handles across his forehead (Sherpa style), told me he was bringing fresh vegetables to his grandparents who no longer farm. “All those rice fields,” he says pointing to the overgrown tiered fields, "are farmed anymore. There are no young people who stay. Everyone wants to go to Kathmandu. Or even better, out of Nepal.” I walked behind him for miles thinking how I too could not wait to get off the farm I was an intern on two years ago in Maine. I counted down the weeds until I could get back to my book or some writing that simulated my mind. Knowing the phenomena of brain drain leaves countries like Nepal dependent on foreign aid and jeopardizes the very communities I trekked through, I can't say I wouldn't do the same thing, yet I trek along romanticizing agricultural livelihood. Like the Nepalis in pursuit of western materialism, I am in pursuit of their eastern wisdom. The forbidden is always tastier.

      Descending the plane's steep steps into the humid air, as dense as the lush green fields surrounding the runway outside the city of Bhajarpur, I stand with my pack remembering British Guyana's Krpung airstrip. Krpung is a tiny nearly abandoned 1960s diamond mining city, where I began a trek through the Amazon in 2008. I stride off the final step after Shilpa whispering a prayer. Please don't let this guide get me lost. If he fucks up, I will not blame him.

       Memories of wading through Guyana's Esquiba River's blackwaters by moonlight in search of a lost canoe flood through me as I wait with Shilpa under the shelter along the washed out runway for the taxi that will take us to the jeep. I sit on my overstuffed pack reflecting on my Amazon adventure with Samo, the 60 Guyanese ex-diamond miner my friend, Ashley and I convinced to be our guide. He nearly killed us twice in not knowing the mining trails through the jungle had changed over forty years. The river rose over-night so rapidly that when I awoke at midnight from my hammock to pee my foot dangled into rushing water. I turned the headlamp on see the socks and shirts on clothing line hanging on for dear life as I soon would be too. I began yelling at Samo for everything telling him he must go find the canoe while brave Ashley, a flashlight in her mouth, dives into the rushing black in search of the canoe. Samo and I wait for her. And wait. And wait. "This is your fault! What kind of guide are you? We are Americans, this is your fuckin country and you should know it!" The memory comes so vivid, I can see Samo's terrified brown eyes in my flashlight. While I drift further into remorse, Shilpa, as would become usual, has her head in reality flagging down the taxi. As we drive to meet our new guide I recall one of Chogyam Trungpa's slogan's: Drive all blames into one. I silently vow to do this with this Nepalese guide, Bal Krishna, no matter what.

     Writing this, a year later, this vow taxes my every last cell of patience with Bal Krisha who does the same to the payments I send him for a little girl who continues to force my knotted ways to untangle.
 
She was still hundreds of miles away.  
 
      Local buses, eager to get their Dashin passengers off and new ones aboard, end up sliding off the roads and down mountain sides. Seeing news footage of such buses attempting to pass one another on narrow cliff like roads without guard rails in most places was the deciding factor to fly and not to be cheap by a taking said bus from Kathmandu to Taplejung, the city where our twenty day trek to Mount Kanchenjunga would begin and was suppose to end.

     Shilpa and I finally meet our “private jeep” as the itinerary says only to begin collecting the trekking agency's entire family plus one girl whose home was on the way. Apparently, the $180 jeep ride was the ticket to get all their children home for Dashin from Bhajrapat, just twenety miles from the Indian border, where they attend boarding school. The ripped off feeling burns in my chest. So this is why we didn't fly directly to Taplejung? It wasn't anything to do with the bad reputation of Tara air!


        This burn, this grasping of money each time I negotiated with Sujan, the youngest of the seven brothers who started Estasty Nepal, the Thamel based travel agency, tightens my familiar knots. My palm clenchs around foreign bills whenever I travel to the places where I am seen as a walking white ATM. Wondering how much more they are charging the American follows like desperately needing to pee when all the toilets around trigger gag-reflex the instant one steps inside the usually dark room with a hole in the ground. My palm feels like my blatter pressing against my stomach making my thoughts violently agitated, unable to concentrate, all I want to do is release myself/call the vendor out for his price gouging, but can't knowing I need this raingear. I must hold it as I must behold the deeper truth: I have the money. I buy things at twice the price/at least I peed. I can slightly relax into even more unsettling fact that perhaps he needs the money as much as I need the gear: we both are trying to survive. Only his is without choice. His children must eat, whereas I am choosing to put myself in dangerous alpine conditions for no other reason than: its an adventure; which to me is as necessary as food. Life without adventures is like food without salt. 

    My tight-wad palm high fives itself with At least I am not that bad whenever I watch the Isrealis miliant like bartering. They win by exhausting the Nepalis seemingly deeper sense of humanness. I am guilty of romantizing Nepalis, but the gentleness beneath their facade of businessman humbles my heart each time I watch them sell something and then laugh with their fellow vendors or be laughed at. Such a game it is to them, whereas, so many foreigners like myself, are so dead serious.

     The nine hour jeep ride through roads morphing into creeks as the mountain run off inches half way up the tires has everyone on the edge of their seat. One of the twin boys heaves over everytime we stop. When he is finally too weak to puke out the window anymore, he falls asleep. His head bangs against the glass until I put my hat there as a pillow wondering where his mother is. At mid-day we stop in the famous Ilman, land of tea fields. I weave through the labyrinth of waist high dark green glossy leafed tea bushes while everyone finishes lunch inside the roadside tea house. Beyond the fields are the mountains I would traverse. A rainbow appears as I head back to the jeep where I see everyone waiting. “How do you say rainbow in Nepali?” I ask the sick little boy who appears better now.“Indrini,” he shyly replies. This first word in Nepali I learned (beyond hello, thank you and how much) became the opening line of a song I wrote with Shilpa while trekking:
“ilam mati indrini hacio” “the rainbows above ilam are smiling.” A song that was inspired by the child I would soon meet whose name reminds one: its all a dream.

         By midnight the bumpy ride not only has everyone in the jeep feeling nauesa, but the jeep itself seems to be losing its senses. The headlights work when they feel like it, forcing Shilpa and I to be the jeep's eye. We hold our flashlight out the window as the jeep wades across another landslide. At last, the road reaches the mountaintop. A canopy of stars twinkle like the lights in the valley below. We are only a few miles from the Taplejung Hotel, where Shilpa and I would crawl into stiff sheets and ignore the manager's knocking at 7am... 8am ....9am....10am, "Miss, hello? Guide was waiting." Such waiting on behalf would become the guide's dance with Shilpa and I, the out of shape dancers.

     We finally stumble downstairs into the lobby around 11am. Twenty minutes of downloading a single email, I receive the reply from my parents. Hello Dearie,
Might have to evacuate due to Hurricane Matthew. Killed hundreds in Haiti and is heading for South Florida as a class five....

“Miss, its really time to go. We are already behinde schedule,” Bal Krisha says and would come to say almost every morning for the next twenty two days as he pried me away from my journal. I reluctantly power off my ipad and step into the muddy littered streets leading out of Taplejung to Bal Krishna's village, Hangdewa, home to his family and few neighbors and a small school that was founded by an English woman, who I would end up in close relations with upon returning to America as an offical sponsor of her newest student. But all of this was still as far away the Himalayas looming on the horizon past the rice fields and ablone river visible from Bal Krishna's traditional mud home. The abode home was painted like all the Nepali houses in the Himalayan foothills: white, trimmed with cobalt blue and left naturally terra cotta at the base. Thatched roofs are slowly being replaced by zinc panels. Bal Krishna's wife, Tikka, has just given birth to their third daughter. She sat with the baby in her lap and their five year old, Jessica, bashfully was clinging to her wide legs.

The eldest daughter, Monica,home from Kathmandu, was still reconciling with the fact that her cell phone has no reception. Shilpa and I busied ourselves with repacking our backpacks contents into the dufflebag Bal Krishna would carry as our guide/porter. We repacked selfishlessly trying to put as much weigh into his pack. Some items were to be left behind, many of which Shilpa thoughtfully brought along were it not for my naïve scrutiny.  “We don't need so many shirts. Two is fine.”

“But if they get wet we need more changes?”

“Where are we going to put them?”

“Where your books are. Choose one!”

“Fine, put the heavy food in the duffle bag for him to carry.”

“How many socks do you have?”

Back and forth we went, sorting out what felt like all the essential: should I bring my left arm or my right?

    Such an act, would happen for the next few days between our packs and the duffle bag, until we eased into that smooth rhythmn which harmonized the more we trekked stride in stride. Not only did our notes begin to resonate (me always lagging behind, Bal Krisha blazing ahead and Shilpa, the metronome holding us in time, occupied the middle) they created music as we shared our our beds on freezing way below zero nights, our meals when food was little and most of all the stories that reminded us how similar our very different lives were. Such music was, for now, still an off key melody as Bal Krisha could not close the pack, nor did he figure out that he could carry the duffle bag inside his backpack. So terrible I felt that second day as I watched him hike with the duffle bag strap around his neck and balanced on his chest and his own gear on his back, as I skipped along with less than 20 pounds. Even though other Europeans walked with nothing more than camera and water bottle leading their entourage of heavy laden porters shlepping all their extensive camping gear because they did not want to stay in teahouses, I still felt guilty. This was only the beginning of my porter morality dilemma which occupied much of the trek. The ultiamte realization was that while I carried so little on my back, I carried so much in my head. This being the notable difference between myself and the porters I befriended along the way.

I see now how hard physical work creates a steady and humble mind. There are, ofcourse, exceptions to any grandoise statement. Exception: the drunk porters and the American woman who cannot turn off her big deal theory of what the meaning of life is about.

       

   We trek for three days to Lelep, where I met Sapana, the little girl who unknowingly forced me to grow up and take responsibility for a situation that would change our lives forever. 

Stupafied!

   

        My romantic fantasy of completing Ngondro practice at Nepal's holiest pilgrimage site, the Bouda Stupa on a rented private prostration board where my body would get ripped with 1000s of prostrations a day as my mind obtains 'the view' so I could quickly start performing Vajrayogini dance adorned in the antique jewels and skull costumes I drooled over last night in Shilpa's father's curio shop, was sobered by devout bald, toothless Tibetan woman wearing filthy heavy pads and prostrating around the stupa in the busy morning crowd. I watch, realizing where my devotion ends and doubt begins. Why I am even walking around and around this stupa. I'm praying for Haiti? Hurricane Matthew hits tonight...that country is already a disaster....but anything can be prayer.... Dance. No, writing is my prayer... fuck walking in circles.... A familiar anger that says 'Buddhism is bullshit' takes over and I give up.

        I duck into the plush Noryang Hotel café facing the Stupa and splurge on a five hundred rupee breakfast. Sipping complimentary green tea next to the goldfish tank, I observe the crowds of mostly Tibetans circumambulating the stupa. Some count malas as they talk on the phone, a group of ladies in sneakers do exercise speed walking as they finger malas, older hunched over Tibetans shuffle along slowly spinning each prayer wheel they pass, young monks by-pass them to spin the next wheel. I analyze the faces to see who actually looks devoted and who is just doing a mindless ritual. Feeling without faith, I didn't want to be alone in my little self created hell of annihilation.

     Some Pilgrims have journeyed across the snowy Himalayan passes to reach Bouda, their holy destination. In three days, I too would begin a pilgrimage through the Himalayas to Kanchenjunga, the third tallest mountain on Earth. They set their bamboo baskets and duffle bags down in piles before entering into the Stupa's small inner chamber to offer butter lamps and prostrations. Surrounding the circling crowd are rows and rows of beggars sit on pieces of card board or scraps of blankets, protecting themselves from the bricks that have began baking in the morning rays. By afternoon eggs can fry. A group of twenty blind people have arrived, all with canes and dark glasses and arrange themselves into a long line. Next to them are the Hindus in orange robes and white body paint. Everyday they chant, play accordions, tambourines and ring bells as foreigners take pictures before tossing dollars into their big jar. Nepalis sell milk tea from giant thermos on the steps below the shops surrounding the stupa.
   
    A fly cleans his hands on the edge of my water glass. I look at him thinking I should do the same, but my breakfast of steaming greens and hot spicy soup arrives. I'm already full from all the green tea and bananas I ate from my bag while waiting, but I eat anyways. My body a reflection of my mind these days: stuffed with confusion. No limits. At Shilpa's I have been eating heavy plates of meat and sweets that her mother insists on refilling no matter what I say. I blame her rather than owning my own lack of discipline and the loneliness I am trying to fill. Part of the reason I've checked into the Dragon Hotel next to the Stupa is to cleanse and find my own rhythm again. Being a lazy princess for the last two weeks has left me lethargic and guilt ridden for not getting up and doing my practices.

      I see the Stupa's giant bell slowly making its way up the Stupa. Nine men help balance the heavy six foot bell up the pulley system of ropes and bamboo poles. The circling crowd begins to notice others looking up and pressing their palms together in whispered prayer. I step outside to better glimpse the top of the Stupa to where the bell will return to now that the reconstruction on the dome is complete. The woman next me chants louder as we watch the men make their way onto the bamboo scaffolding. They have a good fifty feet before they will reach the top. I film the bell rising along with everyone holding up their phones. Everyone seems to be holding their breath as it nears the top. The bell, symbolizing dharma Buddhist teaching ringing across the land, finally resumes its thousand year old home. Cheers break out, little ritual bells ring from the shops, some clap, some prostrate, some blow conch shells, some keep filming. I feel their devotion as I too stand clapping in the land where Buddha attained enlightenment. Since the earthquake last year, the Stupa has been under daily construction. In just a few weeks the Karmapa will arrive with crowds swarmed around his car as it attempts to make its way to the stupa for the consecration ceremony. 
 
 

    A crowd's joy awakens inspiration and I head back to the Dragon Hotel to finally do my practices. The front desk informs me I have a message to call Shilpa and I need to call her immediately. 

"Hello, Anna?"

"Yes, what's up, Shilpa?"

"Plans have changed with my family. We need to leave for Kanchenjunga in two days. Can you be ready?"
"I guess."
"Okay met me at Ecstasy Travel this afternoon to confirm the itinerary."

     For the next 48 I hustle together whatever gear I can find on the list Sujan, the youngest of the seven brothers who started the travel agency, Ecstasty Nepal gives me along with a with a bill for $1100 and my twenty two day itinerary. "My second eldest brother, Bal Krishna, will be your guide. You'll meet him the day after tomorrow in Taplejung. The jeep will drop you at the hotel where he will come to get you. Give him this," Sujan hands us a sleeping bag and envelope. I hand him my Bank Of America debit card cringing that 90% of my account is now gone. He manually swipes it in a carbon copy machine. We shake hands.
"Thank you," I say noticing Sujan's smirk growing. It would take me months to understand why he looked at me this way.

      Most of the gear I borrowed from Shilpa's collection I barely cram into my backpack of other gear I borrowed in Ashland. In her spare bedroom is a bag of gear the famous mountaineer, Messner, the first man to summit without oxygen, left behind when he stayed in her family's home many years ago. I open his dusty black leather duffle bag in awe that I am in its presence. I borrow his lavender colored wool visor promising to return it if I return too.


      Shilpa's mother shoos us to the upstairs shrine room where her father leads a ritual for any family member traveling. I am familiar with the steps as I watched her brother and his wife go through it before they travelled to Tibet two weeks ago. Since we are running late we rush through the ceremony of milk sipping, eating hardboiled eggs and dried fish, throwing the rice offering to the protector gods, and leaving with a big red smudge on our foreheads and a yellow kata around our necks. I hug her mother and father good-bye. I see the nervousness in their eyes and think of my parents. I shoot them a quick email from my iPad before hopping into the car. We are off!

Plan A: pipedream

       "Miss Anna, drink Nepali?" Shilpa's father holds up a bottle of Black label. "Gift from bank for Dashin!" His laughter reminds me of school boy's mischief.

    "In America you only get lollipops," I reply shaking my head. I want to join him. Loosen up enough to ask him if he could arrange for me to meet the venerable Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche; I learned last night Shilpa's family considers Rinpoche their guru. I read about Chokyi Nyima, a well known Dzogchen master, in Jeff Greenwald's memoir, Snake Lake, a story about the author's struggle to remain as a journalist in Nepal during the violent revolution in the 1990s or head home for his suicidal brother. Jeff's relationship with Chokyi Nyima seems to be his lifeline as death foreshadowed his days. The intimacy he shares with such a realized person filled me with longing to meet such a teacher. Never in my wildest dream did I imagine I would spend time with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche as I read the final heart-breaking chapter of Snake Lake in my tiny camper in Ashland, Oregon. It turns out Shilpa's father knows the author too from when Jeff photographed Medawisla Lodge
 one of the Buddha statues in his shop for a book cover. Nepal is the small world. One that would eventually release me from my smaller one: my pipedream.

     Instead of a glass on the rocks, I try to stay dry with the women in the kitchen in hopes to earn their respect, but Shilpa's mother shoos me back into the living room. The TV blares Bollywood videos filling an otherwise awkward silencMedawisla Lodge
 e with her father. As a white woman is it expected I would have a cocktail? What the mother and the daughter-n-law, who traditionally moves into the husband's home, thought me as a guest in their home for months still haunts me. I sat writing and sipping served tea so many mornings, and afternoons reading My Journey to Lhasa by Alexander Davis Neal, the first foreign woman to enter Tibet disguised as an old Tibetan mother, all while Shilpa's mother worked around the house and the daughter-n-law headed out the door for her investment banking career. My insecurities about spending any idle hours journaling or reading plagues me in whoever's home I am in. I was raised with German work ethics, by woman who are always moving. Let's do it faster, faster, faster!  Stay busy, busy, busy! Let's spot remove those fears, mop up our shame. Doesn't this house look fantastic? Don't open the bottom drawers! The capitalist God fearing machine churning out more, more, more brilliant beautiful things for but at what cost to the womb and planet?

         I have these guilty genes even though my work appears to be a hobby since it brings no money.  The fear that I am "dharma bum" as my teacher says looms when the bank emails 'your account balance is below $25' reaches for that first bite. The cycle begins: I comatose such fears with binging. Then I feel out of control and start writing to try and regain lost ground. I write down all the things I ate followed by pages of trying figure why I am so insane. Fine combing the memory for golden hairs of awareness. Undoing the knots until its too tangled in the moments I don't want to face. I need a new escape quick. Doubts whisper: Memoir is bullshit, vanity! Go meditate!  These seeming doubts are really my escape goat for not sinking deeper into ink when memories too painful surface, making writing the work I write off instead. Back to the meditation cushion next to the desk. Emotionalizing prayers, cranking it up into a drama....until its time to be silent and 'rest in natural awareness', which is when my insides scream: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!  Off to a new escape: clean, organize the house.  I am every neurotic woman  in my family staying busy busy, busy with more, more, more. New escape, the ultimate escape: Call boyfriend. I stay in bed until I feel catapulted by guilt to go see my teacher. I drive to my meditation center. And The cycle begins again.

       In the living room, I stare at the five foot golden Tara statue's beautifully sculpted body: her lotus bound feet with intricately carved anklets matching her bracelets and long strands of necklaces falling over the sleek belly and perfect breasts. She gazes with compassion beneath a jeweled crown resting upon her ebony hair. Tara ("mother of liberation") is the Buddhist goddess of compassion and action. She is known for giving her crown to a beggar who asked for it in hopes to marry her daughter into a noble family. Tara practices embody the outer, inner and secret teachings that lead one to self mastery though meditation. Tara's symbolism is the last thing on my mind. I want her body, jewels, and silken dress to perform the graceful fluid dance of Tara that I watched Helen Fox Appell teach to her devoted student in Portland, Oregon at the Nepalese temple where I first met Shilpa. Helen helped build Dance Mandala with the Nepalese priest, Prawjal. They continue to authentically pass on the unbroken lineage of  Newari dances. Like Buddhist Vajrayana practices, they have been directly transmitted from teacher to student for hundreds of years.
       
       Against my meditation teacher's advice, filled with his warnings that I should stay in retreat and complete my Ngondro practice, I ventured from Portland to Portland, and by a lucky chance to Nepal, in hopes to study the dakini's dance; at least that's what I thought at the time in my pigeon hole view. Dance was just the catalyst for this a life changing journey through the Himalayas that began in Oregon.

      At Tashi Choling (a temple located in Ashland's Colestin Valley) I asked Sangye Khandro, Gyatrul Rinpoche's wife and translator, why I have to do ngondro and isn't their a Ngondro for dancers or any other kind of movement that is more feminine. She replied, "If you want to learn to dance with the view you must do your ngondro... but if you find another ngondro, let me know!" Everyone in the retreat laughs except for me. I knew she was telling the truth.  Dance with view, dance with the view, dance with the view... her words replay like a mantra I don't know the meaning of as I look at Tara statue's third eye in between conversation with Shilpa's father about which temples are important to visit in the Kathmandu Valley. His whiskey eventually opens both of us. I finally just bluntly ask, "Would it possible to meet Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche?"  He shows me the family photos of Rinpoche on the same red velvet couch I am sitting on. It was decided that the very next morning Shilpa and I would venture to the "white monastery" where Rinpoche is teaching. I felt like I won the lotto that night as I laid in bed awaiting the sun.

   Shilpa leads us through the shoulder to shoulder meditation hall at  Ka-Nying Shedrub Ling Monastery. The first glimpse of my peers: young western Buddhists in Nepal with their saffron robes, pale shaved heads and prayer wheels spinning as they chant in Tibetan. Others in Lulu-lemon numbers sporting malas. Greying brunettes in chupas Tibetan dresses. Judgement floods like poison through my veins. When I hear some guys trying to figure out where Rinpoche is going after teaching, I snap. Buddhist groupies?! My mind reels discrediting all of them one by one in line awaiting to get Rinpoche's blessing, until I catch myself feeling important when Rinpoche recognizes Shilpa and invites us to lunch.

        Meeting Chokyi Nyima for the first time. There are no words for this profound moment, except I was having a bad hair day :)

        (Yes, that Ani Choling in the background. She glows in real life. Amazing human!)

      "Where can I practice Ngondro?" I ask Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche after Shilpa pushes my stiff hesitant body towards him. Shilpa squats down next to his plastic lawnchair (one of many surrounding the giant buffet celebrating the end of a week long teaching) and translates for us.

      "Rinpoche wants to know where you received Ngondro teachings?"  I tell him about my teacher from Maine, a student of Chogyam Trungpa.

       "Who?" Chokyi Nyima says holding my face when tears stream. I try to explain about Tashi Choling and the Dudjoim Tesar Ngondro I received a month ago. Rinpoche holds my chin tenderly in his hand the entire time I talk. He looks out at the rain pouring over the edge of the open concrete room beneath the giant incomplete monastery. I feel myself flooded with nervousness, wondering if he is going to tell me to become a nun. He and Shilpa talk in Nepali. Then he looks at me and says in perfect English, "Practice the triple excellent first," he pauses looking at me with a big smile. "I promise you," he adds somehow knowing I need convincing. Rinpoche looks back out at the good omen, rain and sunshine, as if its the first time in his life that he has seen a sun shower. He points with childlike joy and laughs. "She can tell you." Rinpoche calls over a girl who I later learn is from Mexico City and lives in Kathmandu as a Spanish translator. She advises me about his website. I try to hold it together as she explains how to sign up online for teachings. My romantic vision (Plan A)  about some far-away Ngondro retreat has been reduced to a username.

      All the pressure I have been putting on myself pours down like the afternoon shower as Shilpa and I head out for the Great Boudha Stupa.

            The Great Boudha Stupa is a major destination for Buddhist pilgrims from the Himalayas, Tibet and throughout Asia. One legend ("Hidden treasure of the Guru Padmasambhava") says a widow with great aspiration approached the king with her meager saving as a poultry keeper to make a great offering of  Boudha. He granted her permission to use land the size of an single ox's skin. She cut the skin into strips and claimed the enclosed land; today the area of the stupa measures 6,756 square meters. Her ambition to build such a magnificent stupa caused much jealously among the rich and powerful. They petitioned for its end, but the king honored his word. "Since permission to build has been given, it shall not be rescinded." Thus, the Boudha stupa continued to be built, rebuilt and restored again and again since the first mention of it circa AD 400 in Chronicles of Newar Society.

     
       We approach the post-earthquake Boudha Stupa in a drizzle making the normally congested area nearly vacant. Men continued to push wheel barrels of mortar up hundreds of steps. Shilpa and I move through the debris onto the second floor, where a table is lined with small sandbags containing the fallen Stupa. I silently thanked the gal I met in Ashland who told me about these unknown keepsakes. We sat down beneath the thunderous sky and everything I'd felt in Chokyi Nyima's presence began to make sense. It was as if I sat down a thousand of those bags that I didn't even realize I was schlepping. Part me of didn't know what to do with my free hands. I'm used to be anxious. A familiar nervousness surfaces, but a deeper solace settles over me like the low sky. I felt myself begin to let go, my chest heaving with release.

"Why are you crying?" Shilpa finally asks.

"I'm so fucking hard on myself."  I thought I needed to do thousands of prostrations like Helen everyday, all day at the Stupa on a rented prostration board. I was secretly quite happy they were out of use because of the earthquake's damage.

"We all are," Shilpa says staring up at the men scaffolding across rickety bamboo poles.

"This past winter I jolted off my mediation cushion one morning and began tearing up all my journals. Years worth of writing. I burned the pages in the wood stove. Ever since then, I've been so confused. Until now."

"What changed?"

"They are the same thing." It was one of those moments you realize something as you say it.

      The clarity that the process of creating art is the same as meditation, one is fully emerged in their work with full awareness that they are will to go through it no matter what with the aspiration to awaken others, had been obscured for years until this moment. The cycle was broken, but only in thought. Could I actually remember this moment when fears begin to reach?
  
       I sensed my own greatness was being restored in phases like the Stupa each time I returned over the coming monthsas I watched it molded dome eventually shine golden again. I'd circumambulate the Stupa with hundreds of Tibetans. As they spun the Stupa's prayer wheels, I walked trying to convince myself to believe the brochure was telling the truth: "The Great Boudha Stupa answers all prayers. It is like a wish filling jewel, which automatically answers any entreaty and prayer that is made to it....Whoever hears and mention of it will have placed the seed of enlightenment upon their mindstream... 

      Off to Plan B: Trekking, now that my big secret plan A was a pipedream.

Kathmandu

            

     Since landing in Kathmandu I've yet to find silence. At dawn, pressure cookers hiss 'rice is ready' after the puja bells are done ringing the gods, a swaddled soft cotton cloth somewhere cries, diesel exhaust pipes rumble by beckoning the roosters to compete with the dogs as the evening's stereos blare before fading with static. The white noise of night buzzes from the old wooden telephone poles tangled with a hairball of black wires. Some dangle with live death. Electricity in the city is like roulette, even the wealthy can lose in an instant.  The quietness I crave does not exists- not even in the dull flickering glow of street lamps hours before the surrounding Kathmandu Valley turns golden with dawn. The sun rises over the royal purple Himalayas alighting the rice fields beyond the city's silhouette of ancient temples and modern high rises; the view from Shilpa's fifth floor.

       Long before the National Anthem blares from the schoolyard below and the Himalayas turn as white as the children's uniforms singing along, my mind wakes to a faint dog's yelping and the low buzzing beneath my window. My tired limbs are ready to explore beyond the high walls where I lay beneath a crystal chandelier hanging far from the fumes above the streets I wander by day. Guilt plagues my steps. Confusion leads. A familiar feeling from my time in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, only I didn't come to Nepal to rebuild a school or volunteer with an organization. I came on my own mission, one that I question every time someone asks what I am doing in here. Everything within cringes. "I am here to trek," I say knowing this too is lie; I can't explain my real mission. It is a secret I've vowed to keep in hopes my ego doesn't make the purity of it into something it isn't. 

       Kathmandu suffered from a 7.9 earthquake in April 2015. A year and a half later, I step over bricks from the walls of the Narayanhiti Palace located in the heart of the city. The whole scene reminds me of Port-au-Prince's National Palace: the rubble of a former dictatorship rebuilt by future dictators in form of foreign loans. Its same old story: millions of international donor dollars fall into the pockets of government leaving communities to rebuild themselves. The Kathmandu Post articles on the rebuilding corruption read like the Haiti en Marche, the newspaper whose front page I carried home to remember the Haitian dancers I spent the summer of 2012 in 100 degree rehearsals.

           Unlike Haiti, the first island in the Caribbean to over-throw its colonizers with a bloody revolution, Nepal was never colonized. The British on the Indian border came close, and the Chinese on the Tibetan boarder even closer, but Nepal remained independent with its monarch until the 1990 People's Movement, when the country demanded democracy and ended absolute monarchy. Although the real end seemed to occur a decade later when the Royal Family massacred themselves at a dinner party in 2001. Haiti and Nepal, two completely different worlds, are the same in one definitive way for me: I'm forced to look at my myself in afternoon light- the time when your shadow looms the darkest and biggest. Finding the newspaper in the Port-au-Prince (PAP) airport minutes before departing to Miami was a moment when this light shined, and the shadow still looms onto the sidewalks of Kathmandu.  

           On the cover of PAP's most widely read paper was a photo from the 2012 Carnival de Fluers, Carnival of Flowers of a dancer from New York, the only other blan white girl in the National Dance Troupe, Ballet Balacou. Haiti's biggest cultural event since the 2010 earthquake which claimed the lives of more than 100,000 Haitians was represented by a dancing blan. This dancer was a friend of troupe's Haitian choreographer from days when he was in NYC on a student visa. She flew in a week before the carnival already knowing the folk-dance congo, a dance of courtship and a mockery of the French colonialist dances, and thus was given my assumed role. I had been rehearsing the dance with the troupe for months and was still a flower twirler! The amazing Haitian dancer, who showed up at every rehearsal early (something nearly impossible to do in PAP traffic) ended up twirling a plastic flower after I stood up to the choreographer for his injustice, not realizing I was creating one too by taking her role.

        As I sat in the airport staring at the paper feeling betrayed by the NYC dancer, suddenly the truth hits: I am just like her. I too felt entitled to dance. I was yet another blan (literally translated as light or white skin) acting upon unspoken privileges. The dancers forced smiles at rehearsals were finally understood- envy, dismissal. These dancers gave everything to the only thing that could not be taken from them by the colonizers, and once again were slighted by the hand of their own brother who wanted more the hand of a blan; in hopes to uplift himself from the feeling of colonial reside of inferiority and poverty that still plagues that mysterious island?  

Haitian or not, betrayal is felt in every heart. And everyone is betraying themselves on some level. 

        When I see the fallen Krishna (God of creation and destruction) temple in Patan, one of the oldest known Buddhist cities, I feel my own temple is in a similar state of collapsed beauty. Lord Krishna's head lays split in two and his missing arms were probably sold on the Chinese black market; the fate of many temple's intricately carved (every inch requiring hours of woodwork) columns and statues before they became guarded.  Once again I am in foreign land trying to rebuild with the parts that are lost in bedrooms, the pain once buried in ruins of memories is uncovered. I betray my temple, each time I open its gates to addiction. It was through Haitian dance that I really began to feel these memories, and understand my escapism when the pain arises. I followed these voodoo dances to their origins in the Haitian countryside, hoping to heal. Only I encountered the reality that binge eating is a privilege when I looked into starving sunken yellowish eyes of children. I left Haiti with the harsh reality that I was living a privileged life, and whining about it along with everyone else obsessed with health in America. We've lost our gratitude.

         The rubble of Newar architecture, the indigenous style of Newari people who built Patan's 136 courtyards and 55 temples in Durbar Square, has been stacked in neat piles: bricks, wooden columns, stone statues, golden pinnacles. The Nepali women and women working to rebuild their heritage, have bodies that are lean, strong and as flexible as the bamboo scaffolding they climb in flip-flops. 

Along the temple's iron construction barricades, the usual tarps are spread with piles of made in China. Dusk is encroaching when Shilpa and I finally stop for the day and take rest on a wall facing the Bhimsen Temple, a temple tourists are not allowed in, only devotees. “I remember hanging out here as a teenager. Somethings never change,” Shilpa says admiring all the young Nepalis gathering in the square. They sip from Nestle cups in their skinny jeans. The ones on the wall next to me are crouched over, their faces glowing blue from their iPhone screens. Like them I drift off into my own world trying to make sense of my mission in Nepal. In Haiti I at least volunteered helping in the camps in between pursing the dance.... I'm doing nothing for Nepal...but I believe in what I am after is ultimate compassion... am I really going to do it? 

           The deeper lessons from Haiti I am reliving in Nepal each time I pass the earthquake's new shanty towns constructed of rice paper bags, old sheets and zinc panels: To truly help others one must master thyself. A confused person can feed and clothe another person, help them rebuild their house,  teach them English, educate their children but how do liberate another from the wheel of craving? We must first liberate our self. 

  

    

the mandala spins

  

Dāna (दान)       

The child,

 hungry.

His tiny palm's

 creases black with dirt

 extends for my 20 rupees.

Exhausted...

Coffee: a 100 rupees

                   20 to 100, rupees reflecting my fears: 

How much do I give?

The mandala spins.

The man without legs, hands in anjali
Eyes rolled back and chanting
on shredded blue baby blanket
His presence in my path asks:
What are doing with your healthy legs?

The mandala spins.

A sari is carefully lifted,
Red toenails in heels
step over the curbside pile 
awaiting a match:
instant coffee cups
Banana peels, wilted marigolds,
a muddy coconut cookie wrapper.
Plastic burns 
Incenses too.

The mandala spins.

Fresh pomegranate juice pours
The young Nepali boys 
Pretending not to stare,
my white skin sips-
The illusion of hope?

The mandala spins 

   

    

       

Hiking is not trekking

In a nutshell, if don't have time to read this whole story:

 trekking is like schlepping when you are not prepared.

       

          In the midst of congested Kathmandu the majestic pearls of the Himalaya's strung across the distant horizon were still far-away gems on a necklace I wanted try on and pretend, for just a moment, I was a dakini; the literal Tibetan translation is "sky goer". To explain the profound and vast meaning of a dakini is like trying to capture one of the clouds beneath the high mountains in which she roams. She represents the enlightened feminine within Buddhism and can be seen on many levels.   In my eyes she represented the gateway to enlightenment, and her dances were the keys to a realm that was outside of me, not within. I ventured to Nepal on a trekking invitation, but deep within I wanted to study the dakini's sacred dances to heal. Anything to to pass through a revolving door of addictions.

     I packed ankle bells, images of the dakinis, Buddhist books and practices, along with a sleeping bag, a water bottle, hiking boots, my favorite t-shirt from the Dali Lama, long under, a fleece, gloves, some water purifying tablets, rain gear, and other winter clothing I picked up from unofficial sponsor, Get-n-Gear in Ashland, Oregon- most importantly the DDD leopard bikini in their dollar bin. I felt prepared for entering the realm of the dakinis until..... Shilpa and I left the trekking office, where the necklace was put back in its case. I could not afford a porter, nor the plane flight directly to the start of the trek, nor any of the gear needed for zero. The dreamy Himalayas were now rocks, which I was expected to climb for eight to ten hours a day, carrying all my own gear. "Landslides from the monsoon rains have washed out the roads. A bus ride to the trek start is dangerous. Can you afford a jeep? Can you carry 40 kilos? (what is kilos to pounds?) You don't have a down jacket, seriously?" 

             My plan for trekking to the base of Mount Kanchenjunga, the third tallest mountain on Earth, would later reveal the way I was living: Relying on more prepared people.

     While I'm planning to wing it, Shilpa, who'd been to the base of Everest, is making the plan that would later save my frozen ass. “We need the guide. I'm telling you. This region is not like Annapurna,” she insists after we leave Ecstasy Nepal, the family-owned trekking agency located in Thamel, Nepal's tourist area originally created by early hippies according to her father, whose seen the area transform over his sixty years from small boutiques selling Nepali crafts, hostels, a handful of trekking shops and tea houses to streets lined with neon signs: New Orleans Cafe, Margarita's Dance club, Spa House.... Within a blink one is peddled by shopkeepers with the same knock off Northface' hoodies (Northfake), Nepali girls handing out menus before being blockaded by those whose shops are displayed on their arms, hand made puppets and flutes dangling above cobblestones.

“Okay, so we split the guide fee but no porters,” I say as I sort through a box of wool hats marked 'sale: 200 rupees'. "I just don't have the money." 

“I guess the guide can carry some of our gear," Shilpa replies. 

“Since you have to get back for Dashin, I'm going to trek the last section solo.” (Dashin is Nepal's Christmas)

"You are crazy."

      And so the itinerary was set: We would trek for 22 days to Kanchenjunga's north and south base camp with a guide. Shilpa would fly back to Kathmandu and I would continue solo through the Milke Dande, a section of the trail my heart was set on after reading this outdated trekking guide a hot outdoorsy guy gave me in Eugene, Oregon when I stayed at his hostel. I imagined returning his guide with pictures from a solo adventure undertaken just like the book's author. 'In the rolling hills of the Milke Dande one can see Kanchenjunga and the whole Himalayan range from Sikkim to Everest.'  This promised view seemed to be perfect closure for the trek, looking back to where I walked, but more importantly, I wanted to know I could walk alone.

       I spent the summer idolizing the authors who inspired me to follow their eastern footsteps: The Heart of he World by Ian Baker, A Journey Across Tibet by Sorrel Wilby, My Journey to Tibet By Alexander Davis Neil. My trek already felt mickey mouse compared to these epic journeys into landscapes far more barren than Nepal's trails lined with tea houses.

“Pick out a hat already or we are going to be late for the doctor,” Shilpa says before picking up the pace like a Nepali New Yorker. Undistracted by sale racks, she weaves us out of Thamel and onto the main road. Popping her head into taxi after taxi, she finds one that would cost me triple.

      The first trekking preparation on Shilpa's 'to do' list is: 'doctor/meds.' I join her on rounds of annual doctor appointments around the city. It was in these offices that I realized the adventure I was really seeking to trek was through the landscapes in my heart, one barren to the idea of motherhood. To arrive perfect and complete enlightenment, 'the view' from which I sought to perform the sacred dance of Vajrayogini, a Buddhist dakini, was only possible through becoming a devout Buddhist, not a wife, nor a mother, a nor maid or any form of domestication that would hinder my practice time. If only I knew then what I know now.

Round one

     'Valley Maternity Nursing Center' is a foreign funded women's care center that opens after five when the doctors leave their hospital jobs. The waiting room is filled with mostly pregnant kurtas, a tradition style of dress, the colors as vibrant as the carnelian streaks from morning puja on their foreheads. The glass bangle bracelets worn by married women holding squirming babies, jingle with the giggles of their toddlers playing on the floor. Indian soap-operas silence some of the otherwise chatty women. I refill my water bottle from the communal machine for the second ultra-sound. “Blatter not full. Come back later,” the nurse said over an hour ago when I laid on the beach towel covered examination table, my head on a pillow case stained with hair oil. The doctor casually sipped her tea in between the women who entered the tiny room with a light knock, thus interrupting each other's exam. We are all women here aren't we? I thought of my gyno at home: the sterile white cold room, his blue scrubs and plastic hands with metal objects ready to prob one's insides. Wearing a soft pink sari as her uniform, the older doctor asked questions that guided her intuition and warm ungloved hands to my problem: ovarian cysts. My intuition trusted hers. I didn't need confirmation of an ultrasound, but complied out of courtesy.

“I can't hold it anymore!” Shilpa knocks for me and within minutes more blue space gel is squirted onto my belly. The nurse's gold and maroon paisley printed cotton scarf and matching gold and ruby rings glide across my belly. I close my eyes and listen to her bangles delicate music and try to take my mind off needing to pee as she presses the wand deeper into my abdomen.

“You married?” I feel my chest tighten, my breath stops.

“No. Why? Am I pregnant?”I look at the monitor, a screen that looks like cloudy blue like a planet in outer space. No oxygen seems to exist until she answers.

“Why did you come in for an ultra-sound?” she looks at me. And it hits me. In her eyes I am western woman without rules, without ritual, without reverence. I won't allow myself to wear Nepal's bangles I love so much until I get back to America's shores, the land where we make my own meaning.

“The doctor thinks I have cysts.” The nurse smiles as if I'd said I have cookies. Her smirk says I'll pour you some milk. She squints into the monitor, and her grin fades with concentration. She begins mapping constellations across my planet. Clicking the mouse to draw lines in the small black holes that I notice in the blue cloud representing my ovaries.

“Oh, yes.” She prints out her constellations on a glossy photo paper and wipes the blue space gel off my belly with a shredded piece of clean cloth. “Take to the doctor.” She hands me the photo of my outer space, which should be the inner space that I understand by now! I feel like an misunderstood alien not only in her eyes, but in own my skin. What have I done to my body?

I sit back down next to Shilpa and her mother, happy she doesn't understand English. “So? Are you-” I ask.

“No.” She looks sad. I feel guilty for being ecstatic that I'm not. She made this appointment to check her body's health because she wants to have a baby with her husband. To her its the miracle I deny.

“I have cysts.” Tears stream from unknown facet of denial.

“Don't worry. I have issues too.”

We wait another two hours to be called back in so the doctor can deliver our equally bad fates. If the cysts grow one more millimeter I must be operated on immediately. I promise her I will find herbs and refuse the list of prescriptions. “I want to see both in two weeks.” Shilpa and I nod knowing next week we will be trekking.

Round two The Dentist office.

Dentist: You have some cavities. Would you like them filled?

Me: How much?

Dentist: For the cleaning and filling 800 rupees. (8 bucks!)

Me: Great!

Dentist: open wide.

Me: FFffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

Dentist: Americans, so sensitive.

There is no such thing a Novocaine in Nepal.

Round three The eye doctor

This appointment I request, ready to embrace an easier denial I've been carrying for years: I need glasses. We visit the number one eye doctor in Nepal, “Asia's game changer!” according to the newspaper article Shilpa's mother proudly shows me before calling him with genuine concern, as if my eyes were hers. Her love and kindness is the heart of so many Nepali women, in whose homes I was made to feel not only welcomed, but loved as if I was their child too.

The eye doctor returns to Nepal from his global cataract conference in China during my final week in Nepal. Living up to his name- he changes my game. I returned to America seeing in HD, a definition so crisp and vivid some days I don't want to look. Nepal's lens magnifies how in America we suffer from having too much.... too much stuff...too many tasks...too many choices....

         The kind of choices we make in supermarkets. Rice from every country! I wander Wholefood's bright clean isles for the first time in six months, in a state of awe. Until I can't decide which rice will make me the most moral and healthy. I crave the simplicity of Nepali rice sold from a woven sack. Good rice vs bad rice, the familiar game arises. But something in me sees through the emotional saga of what rice. Anxiety is replaced with laughter. I realize the impermanence of this rice and this body that will eat it. I realize this teachings I've spent the last month hearing about conceptually in retreat for a split second, and carries me through the isles. I fill my cart with sheer gratitude. And sadness. Images of hungry eyes that met mine in Kathmandu are still vivid and blinking. 

     By the time I reach the check out line, the impermanence of my bank account hits. In America I'm poor. Back to the reality that here organic food is a privilege, whereas in Nepal, fresh food is affordable by most. In Kathmandu street food is on every corner: baskets of fruits, carts of fried sweets, skewers of meat. Restaurants served thali a daily lentil and rice meal for 150 rupees ($1.50) which most people seem to afford; not so say some people don't starve. In the countryside, agricultural livelihood is the way of life. The concept of America's food deserts (places where fresh food does not reach) did not exist in Nepal.

         I long for Nepali rice harvested in my trekking guide's village and cooked on an open flame beneath the Himalayan canopy of more stars than I ever knew existed returns as I pour the plastic bag of rice onto an electric stove top. I am just like the Nepalis: We want a different life.

         Most Nepali's I met in Kathmandu and the villages near where I trekked, go aboard in search of a modern conveniences, but something deeper too. They want to work in systems that are fair. “If you work hard, you can get ahead in America,” Shilpa says, “In Nepal people remain in their gar (family home) and most can't afford higher education. And a college doesn't mean a good job. Kathmandu is overcrowded and in the villages there is no opportunity. Young Nepalis want out.”

       I think of all the immigrants lined up to work in the American factory I take for granted. I don't believe in this machine, yet reap the benefits. I been clocking out in hopes its different somewhere else. 

         Unable to see greatness is born from the muck of our weakness, I look through duality's lens. I see the pollution coming out of the paper mill's rear, destroying rivers as I look down upon the clean white paper I write upon in search of  'the view' I ventured east to realize.

   

     Back on Peak's Island in Maine, I take off my glasses for a break from HD.