To the Himalayas

Well, it has been quite a while since my last update, and there's so much to say! Classes finished uneventfully. Lots of work and papers and cramming--the usual flurry at the end of the year. I feel I did well in my classes, and we all had a lot of fun living together in a Guest House here after our home-stays, just bonding and working and doing our thing.

A day into research Chhunit called and said we should get ready to go to Spiti, her home village where I planned to do a portion of my work, the next day! So I packed many warm clothes in a flurry and the next day took off with her and two of her friends on an overnight bus to a place called Peo. We got there in the afternoon the next day and got a guest house for the night where we watched Bollywood movies on TV and ate MoMos. We took a 7am bus the next day, only to find out one fourth of the way out that I, as a foreigner, needed an "inner line permit" to pass on a portion of the highway that is super close to the "Indo-Chinese border," Aka Tibet. Chhunit and I sent our big bags along with her friends and just took our backpacks back down for ANOTHER night in Peo, and after a day of paperwork, rain, and more Bollywood, we finally headed to Spiti.

The bus barreled and grunted up and up and up through switchbacks and down and back up huge canyon walls, over pastures and through canyons that looked like VERTICAL pastures. The greenery thinned out and the rocks became more creative and stunning with every hour. Near sunset we ran into Chhunit's brother-in-law in another Spitian village and we grabbed our bags and jumped in the taxi that he drives, with another twelve or so Spitians, two of which were her aunts. The car was full of gum-smacking and music, until the tape player was switched off and the sound was replaced by the women all chanting mantras as we headed into a blizzard. We stopped for tea along the way--the main social activity in these parts it seems.



We got into a village called Kibber when it was dark and the snow was still going. This is where some of Chhunit's relatives live, and where she went to two years of secondary school before becoming a nun, and it's the furthest place you can drive to before walking the rest of the two hours to her own village. We didn't do that that night, though--we were fed and tea-ed in Chhunit's aunt's house where I sat with the others around the stove in the sitting room and fought the sleepiness that, were I to give into it, would remove me from the immediate warmth of the animal-dung fire that seemed to be my lifeline. I asked Chhunit where the bathroom was eventually and she took me outside on the way to it. The snow had stopped, and so when I stepped out I finally saw by moonlight this other-worldly scene that I had entered. White blockey houses with trapezoidal black window frames stood on a hillside in a hugely mountainous landscape, big prayer flags stood to greet the wind in every direction, and all that snow reflecting the light was crisp and still and serene. I threw my arms around Chhunit and she laughed at my enthusiasm and led me through two doors to the hole in the ground over a compost heap that was the potty. I asked where the animals were (I could smell them) and she said downstairs. Interesting, I thought--I'd heard of some people in the Eastern parts of Tibet building houses with the stables on the first floor to heat the second floor, but I hadn't imagined it like that here. We took turns squatting and returned to the sitting room before finally crashing. Chhunit asked me "What you think of Spiti so far?" and I told her it was amazing. She said "you must be so boring [read: bored]. My aunts in the car are telling me 'oh, she doesn't know Spitian and we are not talking English so she is probably so boring.' And actually I don't speak English so I don't know what I say you." I tisk-tisked the way people do disapprovingly here. I told her not to think I was bored--I was just taking it all in. And to stop acting like she didn't speak English because even though it was broken I understood it fine and it was certainly better than my Spitian, which I'd never studied a bit! It was beautiful, and I was happy, and I would try to pick up as much Spitian as I could.

In the morning I blew my nose and it promptly started bleeding with the dry cold that I had subjected it to. I grabbed some toilet paper and ran for the bathroom, but after going through one wooden door and before entering the second I glanced down the staircase where a gaggle of goats looked up at me. I stared back down. One of them bleated. I couldn't figure out how to latch the first door. I also had to pee. I wouldn't take long. They won't go out, I thought. Not in the time it took me to pee.

Thirty seconds later I was standing with a bloody tissue protruding from my nose and my belt undone grabbing the fleece of three or four scared goats and trying to shove them back through the door while they bleated and trampled around. I finally pushed them miraculously down the staircase and went around the corner to where I could ask a now-awake Chhunit how to close that damn door. With her help I managed to empty my bladder, laughing hysterically to myself on the inside, though she was unphased.

We recruited two guys to help us carry our big bags (I thought this was the only reason we needed them, at least) and after being beckoned by friends and relatives along the way for tea three or four times, we finally headed for Chicham, Chhunit's village. We rounded the hill at the top of Kibber and Chhunit pointed at a cluster of about thirty houses across a huge valley on a neighboring mountain side and said "This is Chicham." Well, not exactly the quick walk I had imagined, but OK! We trotted for about forty minutes along a dirt road and when we got closer Chhunit said "you look, this is spen." She had tried to describe "spen" to me earlier, but had given up since I had apparently had no idea what she was talking about. When we got closer I saw that the guys who were now ahead of us were at the edge of a gigantic gorge and were pulling a rope attached to a metal basket on a wire that was strung across it. "We're going across in THAT?" I asked. "Yes, this is spen!" she told me. "This is insane!" I said! And it was. We loaded three of us into the thing and flew half of the way across before the guy in the basket with us heaved us the rest of the way across. He then pulled himself the other way across once he'd deposited us on the other side and sent Chhunit's monk friend Takpa back over with the bags. We failed to pull him over, though we heaved with all our might, so our macho man pulled him all the way back over and sent him across again, and this time we started pulling earlier so the momentum would help us drag him (squealing a lot by now, stuck over a huge drop and all) finally over to us.

The rest of the walk, even though I now had a fair amount of adrenaline in my system, was really hard. I felt like the air just simply didn't exist here, and my mouth refused to let my nose do the breathing for a second. If I paused my panting to wallow I was gasping afterwards! We hiked through shortcuts that led us up big sloping dirt hills, stopping to rest every hundred yards or so (I was glad I wasn't the only one exhausted). When we FINALLY got to Chicham, walking past a hundred calls for tea "cha tung!" we finally found Chhunit's mother waiting on the hill by their house for us with Chhunit's nephew in a blanket on her back. We greeted them and they followed us into the house--big and beautiful and oh-so-welcome to my sweating-though-freezing self. We settled down around the stove and I watched Chhunit light up like a candle and play with her nephew that she hadn't seen since last summer (now a year and three months old, walking when he feels like it and one super smart learner!) Her older sister and mother covered me in blankets and made sure we all had lots of tea. I ate some with them and then started to droop, so I was put under fifty pounds of blanket in a cold (because--stoveless of course) bedroom. I tried to sleep but mostly tossed and turned and shivered. I got up when it got closer to dinner time and I heard more noise coming from the sitting room, only to find that I was locked into the room from the outside (someone had latched it, probably to keep the cold out). Thus, my first meeting with one of Chhunit's younger sisters was when she rescued the freezing, awkward me who was banging on the door, needing to pee again after all that tea.

That night was pretty terrible overall. I loved the family and was overjoyed by where I was, but I went through a lot of symptoms that I only realized later were classic altitude sickness. I was starving, but once I touched food to my lips my appetite evaporated. I was tired, but couldn't sleep; I was exhausted, but sitting down. I sat there like a stupid zombie, apologizing about not eating the food that I promised tasted good, and tried to keep a smile on my face. It wasn't until I took my pulse and found that it was 120b/m resting (consistently for hours actually) that I realized: Oh, duh, this is altitude sickness! You're really not supposed to move around and hike much once you pass 9,000 ft (not for a while, that is), and there I was, after hiking and heaving a basket across a gorge, unable to drink the cold water that was being offered to me, just sheepishly asking for some boiled water and trying to refuse the sweet tea that I knew would only dehydrate me. I refused the fever reducers that they offered me (I found out later that they probably would have helped, but at the time I thought it counter intuitive to thin the blood that was struggling to carry oxygen from my lungs to the rest of me.) I was put in bed where I lay and moaned for about an hour. I felt such severe pain in my chest, my heart exhausted like it was running a marathon that it couldn't stop running, that I wondered if I was having a heart attack (though of course I haven't a clue what that feels like). Chhunit finally brought me some unidentified pills which I deliriously took without question. Immediately, though my pulse was still pretty fast, I felt like the fist in my heart un-clenched. A calmness settled over me, and the severe discomfort lessened. When Chhunit returned to get ready for bed (she herself was coughing up a lung, to the point where I was worried about TB), I asked her what she had given me. "It's not medicine," she told me. "It's blessings from His Holiness." (The Dalai Lama and other important religious figures here sometimes bless pellets of sacred substance that they make in monasteries and distribute them at religious functions). I smiled and almost laughed. "It's working," I told her. Not that I hadn't much faith in such things before hand, but I certainly wasn't expecting that.

The next day Chhunit was in Kaza (the only place in Spiti large enough to be called a town) when I woke up, where she'd gone to get medical attention for her cough. I sat awkwardly in the sitting room with my book, feeling weak but much better (though getting up to use the bathroom felt like jogging a mile). I was sad that she was gone, but I was glad that it sort of forced her sister (especially her older sister who was home with the baby for much of the time) to open up to me and get over the language-barrier-shyness. I used a few Tibetan phrases that were close enough to get across and she used a hand full of English phrases that she'd learned in school before she had to help her mom on the field when their father died (after her eighth grade year, I believe).

I got a lot of reading and recovering done in the next few days: there was a puja at Chhunit's uncle's house because he had died 49 days earlier, and they asked a few monks to come to the house to do a puja (meditation/ritual) for their health since not only Chhunit but much of the rest of their family had suffered spells of serious illness in the past few months. I helped them ready the house and offerings (rolling two thousand tsampa balls one night) as much as I could, but mostly just tried to stay out of the way. At certain points I thought I was going insane not being able to communicate with anyone--talkative and outgoing as I usually am. Writing literally saved me. The more I wrote the less I felt like the voices in my head were spinning around in a whirlwind, wrestling with one another.

One day we journeyed out back over the canyon via spen (in turns with the rest of the village who alarmed me by fitting six people, bags, and a baby or two in each basket load) to go to Kee Monastery for a festival. Kee monastery is one of the largest attractions of the area--a 900 some year old monastery that clings to a small mountain as if the white buildings are a part of it. This part of the Tibetan Plateau is lucky to fall just over the Indian border, and so its religious locations have remained untouched by the Chinese. This festival was in honor of the main rinpoche's (reincarnate lama) birthday. There was dancing and singing and everyone was in traditional dress and looking great. Camera crews were around, the crowd was huge: it was awesome. I really wished I was less exhausted. I was led grumpily up and down hills (sometimes for no apparent reason, which was even more frustrating for me since I didn't know any of the words buzzing around me so I didn't know where the confusion was that was taking us on such excursions). We were served tea about ten times before I timidly asked Chhunit if there was a way we could get some water. My tongue was sandpaper at that point, and my mouth was the sticky cave that trapped it. She simply told me "no." A half an hour later, though, she told me that her monk friend Takpa was bringing me water, and a half hour after THAT, we ran into him and he handed me the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life: a full, cold Aquafina water bottle. I downed half of it in one go and then paced myself for the rest. During this process (and a lot of phone calls and random hikes around the little rooms in the back of the monastery where apparently many of Chhunit's acquaintances and family members live) we were ushered into the prayer hall and served a lovely buffet of left-over food. I ate like I'd never eaten before--the water, it seemed, finally restoring my appetite. I rolled down the hill to Chhunit's sister while Chhunit herself went to find the coat that she had lost along the way, and as I stood with her finally watching the performance I started to feel a hundred percent better. The day before they'd asked me if I would sing a song at this festival. I'd said yes, sure, imagining a small gathering in a temple somewhere. Once I'd gotten there that day, seen the size of the crowd and the formal nature of the events, and felt how exhausted and grumpy and out of it I was, I had promptly changed my mind. A new confidence grew in me, now. I knew it was kind of crazy, but then I remembered "hey, Lara, in your real life you ARE kinda crazy, and you do this stuff all the time. Besides...why not?" I asked if it wasn't to late to sing a song. And so a few acts later I was introduced as the guest of Chhunit's family from Chicham, I stepped up to the microphone, greeted the crowd in Spitian, Tibetan, and then English, and sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with all my jazzy might for the crowd, who started cheering after one phrase. I coughed a little at the end and wondered if I'd been singing a little too loud into the microphone, but many people I saw afterward asked me excitedly and shyly if I had sung a song and where was I from? I felt like myself again, and I noticed Chhunit pointing me out in a crowd from the balcony where she stood with a friend. I hoped that maybe now her pride in bringing me into her home was re-vamped after my poor health and strange behavior (how do you explain altitude sickness to people who were born above 12,000 feet and don't speak your language?) had probably dampened it.

Self expression is so important, I realized: not just for me but universally, I think. For me, singing is a huge ice breaker in this regard. I remember being in fourth grade and standing up to sing a solo (My Heart Will Go On) in front of my entire elementary school, where, for the most part, I was an outcast. I had such a positive response afterward that for the first time I felt like my voice had power and I could truly express myself to people, and they could actually LIKE it! It was like magic. People were asking me questions and looking up to me for once, not down. Any party, any gathering, any new situation, it's always there in my back pocket: a party trick or a spell I can cast. I can put a little bit of my soul into my larynx and send it out into the room, and if I'm lucky people really hear it and, for better or worse, get a peek inside of who I am. Usually, even if it's only half-good, they're at least impressed enough that I did it to win me a bit of respect or interest, and it's so much easier from there to move into some kind of understanding and relationship with people. It's a gift I can usually give any time, any where. So the rest of my time in Spiti, when the family was bored or sometimes when they felt like I was left out, they would ask me in English "Lara, singasong," and I would rack my brain for one they hadn't heard before and lay it on them. (this went much better once I started taking antibiotics for the sinus infection that I developed ;-)). My voice got me on the good side of Spitians, even after I entered in a wobbly, sick, foot.

I spent a lot of time playing with the baby, Lakpa, who the family was constantly trying to convince to say my name after my first day there he (maybe coincidentally?) happened to utter it perfectly out of the blue. I loved that he and I could communicate in grunts and "ah"s, which we did often; the two of us were the ones who could sort of figure out what people were saying around us, but couldn't really speak back to them. The day that Chhunit came back from Kaza with her sisters, she also brought home a little puppy in from the cold. I fell in love with her right away, and when Chhunit was off doing the puja for her uncle I took it upon myself to shampoo her in a bucket and comb her fur with a spare comb so that maybe Chhunit would like her more (I found out that Chhunit has a thing for cleanliness and the dog's very presence offended her). She said the dog was still dirty when she saw her (always peeing, she said), but she definitely pet her a little more, and the baby was suddenly allowed to play with her (and to feed her his boogers, as became the favorite game). After a week or so I asked Chhunit when and how and where I should bathe. She spoke quickly in Spitian with her sister and then told me "we go to green house." "Ok," I thought, "either we aren't going to bathe just yet today because we have scheduled a trip to the green house, or maybe there's some house that's painted green that has a good shower in it or..." About an hour later Chhunit told me "you get your clothes and your soap and we go to green house." "Yesss!" I thought, jumping up and celebrating inside that whatever this meant I was finally going to get clean. We walked through the chorus of "cha tung," once again towards the fields and finally approached a little white plastic green house. Inside there were a few flowerbeds with sprouts coming up, and in one corner a big cement platform and drain with a bucket next to it. I realized inside why people must have bathed here: it was the only place in a few hundred square miles where anyone might consider getting naked! It was hot! I took off my coat, asked Chhunit how the water-getting-process worked, waited while she showed me, stood there awkwardly for a moment, and then shrugged and got naked. So I washed and scrubbed while my nun roommate made fun of the way I shaved and dumped cold water over my naked body. "I will so never forget this moment," I thought as I laughed inside and sputtered outside, and I doubt I ever will.

Near the end of my stay, our friend Emily from the program came to stay as well. Just getting to Kaza to meet her proved to be a mission: we ended up hiking the long way (sans spen) to Kibber, giving me a hell of a migrane, and waiting for three hours for a taxi/jeep that never came. We finally clambered into the back of a pickup truck, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and sat on duffel bags, and leaned back against the cab as it drove the hour or so to Kaza. Chhunit recited mantras to herself under her breath while I watched the sky darken and the mountains criss-cross my view of it: like legs of a mother giving birth to the stars, I thought, and then: like a bird diving into the earth, and then: like ocean waves in a storm frozen in time while we drive through the over-sized crests and valleys.

Turns out Emily was late to Kaza herself: her bus had broken down, and the military van that had picked her and a few other passengers up ended up breaking down a few times too. As soon as she was with us (in yet ANOTHER relative's house in Kaza) I couldn't stop chattering with her. I was delighted that she found all of the same ironies and amazements as me: "what, Chhunit stayed up for three days in a row to help monks to a puja for her HEALTH?" "What's a spen? Oh my God how many people are in that basket in this picture??" Having her around once we got back to Chicham was great too. The family relaxed that there was someone there that I could communicate with, and that we could amuse each other to an extent. They had already started majorly warming up to me, but this poured a little kerosene on that process. She adjusted pretty quickly to the altitude, and soon I was feeling great also, so we could all take walks around the village and see the potato and barley fields and the "jungle," where they grazed the animals (interesting to imagine a jungle with no rain or trees...). We took pictures of the dusty village kids and their mothers who were endlessly offering us tea, and muttered our own English interpretations of what the TV show characters were saying in overly dramatic moments to each other, resulting in the family laughing at us laughing. One night we all dressed up in traditional Spitian dress and took pictures of each other, and then in "Ingee" [western] dress as well. Speaking of clothing, I found out from Chhunit around the time Emily came that most of the locals were under the impression that I was a boy when they first met me, until she corrected them. I suppose my hair is just enough past "nun length" now that I've entered boy-stage. I had a thousand layers on and no long hair to assert my gender: my friend Emily was assumed to be my wife, haha! I started calling her "wifers," and joking about carrying her up the big hills that we faced.

We finally got to go to a nunnery, where I had envisioned doing research all the while, but as it turned out, once we'd jumped through a hundred hoops and traveled a hundred Kilometers to get there, the nuns were away in a neighboring village doing a puja. It was still very enlightening to see the state of affairs there: the place was super run down and had 49 nuns living in 16 little rooms with leaky ceilings and sometimes barely enough food I was told. There is a project of building them a big new nunnery right next door, but the scarce funding has made building stop-and-go, and the big half-finished building sits there in the background now like a tease. It was a stark contrast to the monasteries in the area, where history and community generously support the men who wish to dedicate their lives to monastic education. If only the women had a tenth of the support! Even if and when that place gets finished, it will only provide these women with living quarters, and not with a prayer hall and library that they so desperately need. The nun who is in charge there took us under her wing and told us a bit about her life (at my inquiry), which is amazing. She gave us some million cups of tea and insisted that we be served all of our meals and eventually sleep in her room while she slept upstairs in a room that already had three or four other nuns in it, since they had no extra rooms or guest house. I left her some fancy tea and a light catcher and some rupees as offering, but I wished I could give them so much more. By the time the nuns got back I was alarmed to see how many of them were so YOUNG! So sweet and hospitable, though many of them too shy to talk to us. We went to morning prayer, which was abbreviated to let them study for their exams which are around the corner, brushed our teeth outside in our coats and sunglasses, took some more pictures, and were off back to Kaza and eventually Chicham. That was our last night there, and we had a great time with the family who said they would miss us and asked if we had any more vacation time left, and would we come back some day, please?

We journeyed for three days the on long road back to Dharamsala. The bus went way too fast but somehow stayed on the road. One of the places I know I have to go back and visit some day is Kinnaur valley; if there's a land where dragons fly: it's there. Twisted trees reaching up from huge valley walls, a collage of greenery and rock in a new pattern every where you look. It was raining while we drove through it on the way back, and the sun made every drop look like a jewel coming down into the haze all around us. Emily and I talked about how there are some places that are so beautiful that you literally get the urge to fling yourself into them, like you could jump off a cliff and die happily if only to dissolve yourself into the beauty all around you that makes you weak and hysterical and happy all at once.

We had our audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama the day after we returned; got all dressed up in our best traditional dress and had a Q and A session with him for nearly 57 minutes: extremely rare for any audience. We asked well-thought-out questions and he said he was impressed. He's technically our "honorary professor," though the first thing he said when he walked into the room was "So I am your professor then? I always say: useless professor!" He spoke so articulately to the fine points in the philosophy that we had been wrestling with all semester that a few of us (especially our boys!) were brought to tears. I myself felt calm and peaceful during the time we spent in his presence, though everyone's experience was starkly different. We were all really satisfied and humbled, though. He's truly something: it's hard to explain. He put us at ease and got us looking deep within ourselves all at once. A tough thing to do simultaneously, especially with a group of college students, I think. After the audience we had a big reception/dinner with our teachers and Gen-las. We chatted and took pictures all dressed up. Some people gave small speeches of thanks, and I offered the poem that I had written in Spiti that completed my eighth poetry notebook. Now we're all preparing to go up tonight to a place in the mountains where we'll be having our end-of-the-program retreat. Most people are leaving in three days or so, though I'm staying here to do some intensive writing for two weeks after that. I think I'll live in a guest house near a waterfall around here where some friends stayed while I was in Spiti. It's a gorgeous place owned by a family that lives there and also rents out rooms who told all my friends to treat it like home and taught them how to make really yummy Indian food. I visited yesterday and it seemed like the perfect place to write and decompress.

Loving you all and thanks for getting to the end of that big blog entry!

My friends the geckos think that jumping in the Ganges is a swell idea...

Sorry, guys: this is gonna be a long one ;-)



So since I last wrote I’ve had a much more eventful couple of weeks than most. First off, right before spring break, my friend Lauren and I decided to finally grow a pair and cut our hair off. We both braided our hair into tiny little braids, went out onto the balcony in the yellow light of the setting sun (it was so appropriate) and had our friends take turns snipping them off! People made wishes or said little prayers, but mostly just snipped away! Once our hair was neatly tucked away into ziplock bags and what was left on our heads was a strange set of uneven mullets, we went inside to Michael’s room where he shaved our heads into a bucket. The power adapter kept screwing up, so in glitchey intervals, slowly but surely, the rest of it came off. He shaved it on a 2, but once he was done I felt my head, and knew it wasn’t short enough. I wanted that spiky feeling, not the soft one, lol. So I went back into the bucket after Lauren to make it even shorter. It felt amazing (except for the tiny pieces of my hair that were stuck in my shirt and bra for the rest of the night). Then we left for our last nights in our host families. My host Ama-la and lil’ sis were waiting anxiously to see, and made me pull off my hat as soon as I walked in the door. Dechen (Ama-la) said it suited me, and Tsomo squealed and rubbed my head. When our 89 year old Mo-Mo-la came in to sit and eat dinner with us, I pulled my hat off and leaned over to show her. She doesn’t have very good eye sight, so at first she chuckled and put her head against mine. I laughed and put her hand on my head, and then she said “Ohh!!! Yakpo du!” (very good!).

Me, Lauren, Emily, and Genny took off in a taxi the minute our philosophy exams were finished the next day. It took three hours in the car to get to the town where we could catch an overnight train to Delhi. We were giddy and sleep-deprived from our crazy academic schedule the week before. On the train we discovered that Genny has an uncanny ability to communicate with cock-roaches and have them do her bidding. There was this man who snored like a car race was going on in his sinuses, but I cheated and slept soundly with my ear-plugs in, hahaaa!

We got into Delhi before dawn and our train to Agra didn’t leave until two that afternoon. We whipped out the trusty travel guide and found a Sikh temple nearby (a running theme for many of us on the program has been “what would we do without the Sikhs?”) We took a rickshaw over to it, spent about an hour trying to check our bags into a locker (they thought we wanted a room there), and finding the ladies’ bathroom (where we gratefully took the opportunity to wash our gross sweaty faces), and finally sat inside for a while as they woke the holy book with song. The trusty travel guide informed us that there was some hotel nearby that served breakfast starting at seven thirty, so we jumped on that and headed over.

So it came to be that we stumbled into another world for breakfast. The place was crazy—huge and magnificent and full of artifacts and pictures from all over the world. Every table was a display case for items from some different theme or location, and there was an antique car-turned-buffet that was serving breakfast. We ate some way-too-expensive eggs, toast, and breakfast buffet items with our coffee in the dimly-lit and confusingly over-mirrored corner where we set up shop. We sure were a sight for the handful of hotel guests that trickled through—four travelers with all our stuff at the table with us, wrapped in blankets, two of us bald and two of us curly-haired, cracking jokes at the crack of dawn.

We marched back into the now-blazing sunlight of Delhi caffeinated and ready for the next adventure. Turns out the Gandhi museum and memorial are right near the train station we needed to leave from, so we spent the afternoon there. Beautiful places—both of them; the memorial is simple and stunning with a clean-cut lawn and flowers on the stone-and-water monument. Met lots of friendly people there who got their pictures with us and asked the standard questions like where we were from, etc. Walking into the museum we saw a gaggle of Indian girls who—upon further inspection—were actually men! I was psyched and waved and said “family!” as soon as I figured it out. (I guess I’m starved for queers in this part of the world). We found out later that in India there are these wandering cross-dressers who are thought of as very mysterious and powerful by people. They’re considered good luck if you give them money and bad luck if you don’t. It’s one of the best options available here for gay males who don’t want to live a life in a married closet.
Anyway, the Gandhi museum is definitely worth seeing if anyone is ever in this part of town—tons of historical pictures and inspiring quotes, as well as a lot of paintings and artifacts from Gandhi’s life. I was beat, though, and glad when we made it to the train platform where we plopped down and waited for the train. It’s still hard for me to be faced by the little kids and crippled men and women who consistently beg for food and money in train stations. We’ve been told by many people that encouraging begging by giving, especially to kids, is probably a bad idea, and that it can also be kind of dangerous in places where you can attract a swarm of beggars like in a train station. We gave a bunch of oranges to some kids who were following us around, and I’m in the habit of at least giving change to people who you can tell really need it—but it’s such an uncomfortable position to be in: the position of choosing who that is. It just always makes me feel guilty and kind of sick. I try to breathe in the suffering all around me and breathe out light whenever I’m confronted with it, but it still gets to me.

After about an hour we piled into the train and I let my iPod, my poetry notebook, some dried apricots and some almonds cheer me up. We read joked and sweat for another few hours and got into Agra in the evening. We’d gotten a tip from the guidebook about a decent, inexpensive hotel that had a rooftop restaurant with a view of the Taj Mahal, so we hurried over and tried to check in before sunset. We caught the last rays of light on her white domes and ate some awesome Indian food. Genny spotted a girl that she recognized from some party she had gone to years ago, and it turned out they had an awesome mutual friend, so she and her traveling companion sat with us and told us about how they were on their way to a program to teach English as a Second language. As soon as the darkness set in, this crazy music started from the streets, and we ran to the edge to see a bunch of floats, animals, lights, and musicians preparing for a big parade. Turns out that was the first night of a nine-day Hindi festival, so there was a big party that night. We joined in and discovered gigantic camels, very enthused and adorable kids, crazy floats with moving, lit-up depictions of deities, and a cacophony of sound. I stayed as long as my headache would let me, and then turned in before the rest of the crew.

In the morning, we woke up super early, brushed off the pieces of the ceiling that had fallen onto the bed, and set out on our one-day sight-seeing adventure we had panned for Agra. We hit the Taj Mahal, did the standard photo-taking and walking around there, and laid down in a nook for a while finding shapes in the swirls in the marble above us. We felt much more intimate with the Taj after finding about four old man faces and a sea otter in it. We found a place to have lunch in a standard hole-in-the-wall place that had two secrets: Number one, it faced a sign that read "MUNNA" in big silver block letters (which, for those of you who don't know, is what all of my grandmother's grandchildren call her) and number two, the best Thali we've had in India. The family that worked there plus a few friends from down the street came and helped in the production of feeding these four hungry Americans who had chosen to eat at a slow time for business. The cooks outnumbered the guests, and the food nearly killed us with its goodness. We caught a rickshaw to the Red fort, looked around, tried communicating with these nice women who invited us to come to South India, and laid under a tree for about an hour with our heads resting on each other's stomachs, laughing at the way our heads shook every time someone else laughed. When we left, we wandered around in this market we found that was away from the touristey part of town. It was full of people selling rubber, tarps, and equipment-very different side of India. We liked the genuine feel we got, and eventually got lost but didn't care. We wandered down this street where there was a huge procession that we thought was a wedding procession. When we got close to it, all the kids came running to us, shaking our hands and introducing themselves, asking where we were from, etc. They were adorable. Slowly the rest of the people noticed and began approaching us. We found out that they were doing a religious procession actually, for Shiva I believe. By the time the young men started swarming us the energy had shifted a little, so we grabbed a rickshaw and headed towards the Baby Taj. At that point it was so hot and we were so exhausted that we didn't stay long and left to get our stuff, get organized, and head towards the part of town that had our train station in it. Since the train didn't leave until about 11 that night, we asked a rickshaw driver to take us to a movie theater nearby which happened to be in the mall. We walked around inside for a while--twilight zone, I swear. It was super chique and upscale--much more impressive than most malls I've ever seen in the US. The polarity between classes in India is really extreme, and we felt strange and out of place in our dirty mis-matched clothes with all our stuff. Girls in tight jeans and women with trendy-looking kids made sideways glances at us while I bought a T-shirt, Genny got a scarf, and we retreated to the theater. We watched Aloo Chaat, a cute little flick with enough pivotal lines in English that we could definitely follow the plot.

We finally got on the overnight train to Varanasi and settled into our beds. It was hott and sticky when we arrived, and we trundled over to the Guest House that Cynthia had recommended to us. It's a family's home with several extra rooms that they rent out. Cynthia has been going and staying with them every year since 1983. We got along with the family right away--meeting first the Mother of the house, her two adult daughters, and eventually two adult sons when they came home from work. One of our rooms overlooked the Ganges, which was already stunning even before sunset. We hung out on the ghats and tried to befriend some of the kids that were trying to sell glitter and postcards for way too many rupees, and then and ate that first night at a hotel that had a great view. Then we went to see the fire Puja which was remarkable. Some Brahmin priest gipped us into a pretty shady personal puja ceremony that involved us repeating phrases after him that we didn't understand. Eventually he was saying things like "om shiva shankhaiiii...four hundred rupeeeees." To which we would repeat...."ONE hundred rupeeeees." and then he would hit us on the back and say we needed to invest in prayers for the long lives of our parents. It was really pretty comical.

The next day I was feeling really sick so I stayed in bed. I made friends with a gecko that lived in the room and alternated between a really hot half-dreaming state and a really hot state of sweaty boredom. That night I felt up to going out so we went to the Dolphin again to play it safe--nice clean restaurant rather than the awesome Dosas we'd had on the streets before which I was suddenly weary of.

Day after that I was out and about again. We explored, shopped, went on boat rides, talked to locals, wandered to different parts of the city, etc. It's a really amazing place, Varanasi. The burning ghats were especially striking--twenty four hours a day the fires are used for cremation. We watched more than one body be burned and a few get thrown into the water. They don't burn children, pregnant women, lepers, or holy men, and we couldn't get a consistent answer why. Women aren't allowed at the burning ghats either--some say because it's too hot for them, and others say it's because they might jump into the water and kill themselves out of grief. We were the only women there watching when we went, but they seemed used to tourists. The dogs at the ghats are mangy and desperate since they're usually there to pick at the bones--for some reason watching the dogs was more powerful than watching the corpses.

We met up with our friends from the program and some friends that they had met in Varanasi (one of which was a traveler who happened to be friends with Lauren's brother--small world), hired a boat to take us out for about an hour, got some kids to bring all the candle offering thingies they could (around a hundred), hired a sitar player and a drummer to come out with us, and had a little boat party of making continual candle offerings on the Ganges. Way sweet.

The next morning was Lauren's 20th birthday, so we woke before dawn and took a boat out for sunrise at her request. We wove downstream and then back up to a part of the city we hadn't explored yet. After hours of watching the locals bathe in the water, Lauren felt ballsey enough to jump in, so she and Genny did so after listening to the Birthday Song by the Beatles (Emily and I were the photographers). We went to shore and met up with Courtney--our TA-- and her friend for lunch, and then made our way back towards the hotel for the massages we had scheduled.

I'm used to going in for a full body massage, having someone dim the lights and leave for a while, instructing me to get under the sheet after I've undressed, them carefully exposing one limb at a time for work. This woman just looked at me and said "Ok," and motioned for me to undress. So I just stripped down while she watched in a bored manner and then proceeded to do a full Ayurvedic massage. It was super relaxing, and she put this awesome oil on my head that tingled for hours afterwards.

We visited Sarnath, where the Buddha first gave teachings, which was gorgeous. It was super hot out, but we liked the place well enough to have fun. I liked the inclusiveness that I felt there with so many different sects of Buddhists coming to pay their respects and see the place of ledgend. It was so peaceful--like re-entering a secret world that we'd left when we'd re-entered "real" India away from the Tibetan community in Dharamsala. Then we planned for our adventure at Bodhgaya the next day, which is the place where the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.

That night, Genny woke us up to say that Emily might have to go to the hospital. She had a terrible fever and felt aweful. We stayed up with her until she felt comfortable trying to sleep until morning. Genny stayed with her and Lauren and I took off on the trip, instructing them to let us know what the doctor said and if anything important happened we'd come right back. Bodhgaya blew my mind. It was so hott that when I took off my sandals to enter the courtyard where the main temple is, my feet got burned as I ran from shade to shade. We followed the signs to the Bodhi tree, and when I came to it I felt immediately moved. I sat down, weary and overwhelmed with the serenity I felt, and actually teared up a bit. Hearing the wind blow through those leaves gave me the feeling that a huge cycle of my life had come full circle. I felt immediately restless and at peace, wanting to do a million spontaneous prostrations and also sleep for days.

We stayed there sitting, catching Bodhi leaves that fell from the tree, and circumambulating a bit, and then the headache that had been creeping up on me took hold and I told Lauren that I needed to lay down in the shade. I know when my headaches are going to get bad, and this one was acting like it. Lauren didn't want to leave me, but I demanded that she go and see all the temples in the area- she was a religious studies major in Bodhgaya after all. She relented and left me passed out behind a meditating monk in the shade. The headache intensified and I started to loose consciousness. I had a really rough episode of being in and out of my body, and every time I came back to it the pain intensified. I felt like my skin was on fire. My arms and torso were hot to the touch, and no matter how much water I poured over my now-bald head I couldn't feel cool. I eventually sat up and tried drinking some water and eating some of the oranges that Lauren had left me with. My hands shook so badly that I couldn't really peel the orange properly, and then I started to feel really sick. These young guys came over to me at that time and started asking me the regular questions--where are you from? What's your name? Is this your first time in India? Do you like it?" etc. I humored them for a while with half-hearted answers. One of them told me he was a Christian. "I am Christian and live in India!" I replied "hmm. Well, I'm Buddhist and live in America. What are the odds?" He then asked if he could take a picture with him. I said no, I didn't feel like it. He wouldn't leave me alone about it, even when I said I felt sick and this wasn't a good day. When he tried to get his friend to just take a picture anyway, I blocked the photo with my hand and asked him why he'd asked me a question if he didn't care what my answer was. He kept pestering me until I flicked them off and walked away. I really disliked that they'd managed to make me feel so sour in such a holy place. The next shady place I found was much more public, and after about an hour of being stared at by passing crowds, I was glad to retreat to the four hour car ride home. I was so exhausted when we got back to Varanasi that I literally didn't think I would leave the bed at our guest house for days. Lauren had started to feel sick by that point, too, and we decided to go to the hospital the next day to do some tests since the doctor Emily had gone to had basically forced her onto a lot of IV antibiotics and been kidna disrespectful in the process.

The hospital was really one of the strangest experiences I've had here. To sum it up, when we went back to the hospital for our test results later in the afternoon, the power had gone out. We asked a nurse where we could get our test results and we were directed towards the Lab in the basement. It was pitch black down there. By the light of our cell phones we found a body in the dark and after questioning him were instructed to sit and wait. He said if the power came back on, maybe we would get our results back in half an hour. The doctor had agreed to stay late to prescribe something for us if necessary before our train ride, so we were a litle nervous. The lights miraculously flickered on ten minutes later to reveal the entire Lab staff sitting in the waiting room on the couches where we couldn't see them before. They looked around and sheepishly went back to work. At that very moment we noticed a gecko scurrying into the lab equipment in the next room behind the glass. Lauren and I decided that it was times like this when you just had to sit back, laugh, and think "I love India..." The doc drugged us up on antibiotics to treat the annonymous infection Lauren had and the E Coli that I had. (yaaay for India!)

The next day we had to say goodbye to the family that had taken care of us and shared their stories with us. We had become especially close with the women of the family, who stayed home all the time and did amazing artwork when they weren't working and helping their Mom (thus the henna we had gotten on our hands!). The mother of the house had opened up to us deeply about the hard times of her life--the arranged marriage that had left her feeling empty at times, the back surgery and heart surgery that she had undergone, and her general longing for a life of her own. When we were saying our goodbyes she broke into silent tears and it broke my heart to leave her.

The train ride was longer than expected--almost 24 hours. We got back in the morning, brought our stuff to the hotel, and went immediately to Sarah for our last night of spring break. Chhunit and I chatted and joked as usual. I'm really going to miss having that place to retreat to. It's so peaceful and I feel so at home there. It's strange to me that at once it felt so foreign and scary. We got to observe the Nechung oracle go into trance at Sarah because they had just recognized the incarnation of the late IBD principal who was murdered some time ago. It was a once in a lifetime experience to watch and be blessed by such a powerful spirit in bodily form. Definitely gave us chills.

Anyway, now it's been a week back in classes. Lots of work and lots of fun. We all live in the lodge together and I've put pictures on my wall from home. I'm terrified and nostalgic all at once when I think of home. I doubt I have to explain much why.

Until next time, remember: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." -HHDL

Spit, Vomit, and Fun

Oy. Life has continued to be pretty cool in McLeod. My home stay has grown on me as I've bonded a bit with my host mom (though I call her Aja-la, or older sister, seeing as she's only 30), po-po-la (grandpa) and mo-mo-la (grandmother, though this one is a great grandmother), and a LOT with my lil' sis, Tsomo. Classes were all over the place last week with the uprising day and the teachings and so forth, so I really didn't have the sense of time passing at all. The day after my last entry we attended a teaching from His Holiness. We were listening to a live translation over little radio headsets in the audience outside of the monastery--pretty sweet how the translator could do that on the spot. It was a great teaching that pertained completely to our course-material. He spoke directly to some of our questions about the nature of mind, emptiness, etc. For the rest of the week we were super busy completing this mapped history project--mine was covering the journeys that Tsultrim Allione, my spiritual teacher/Lama, has undertaking in this part of the world and the major events that occurred along the way.

On Friday night I went and hung out with my host family, reading and watching TV for a while. Saturday morning I slept in to the ripe hour of 7:30, read a little more, and then embarked on a mission with Eleanor to find a yoga class. We found one that was being held down a steep hill on a rooftop by this guy whose legitimacy we definitely questioned until he went into full locust like a bad-ass. It was such a great class--great to get moving again after so much sitting, reading, and drinking sugary milk tea--definitely inspired me to get my yoga certification and get to teaching! After that I went and ran a bunch of errands before heading back home. Tsomo and I ended up performing some pretty dramatic make-overs. At one point she actually covered both of my eyelids with liquid eye-liner and proceeded to wipe it all off with a wet cotton ball which I eventually realized was actually moistened by her own spit. So after hours of being gooped, essentially licked, powdered, and re-gooped by her, and returning the favor (a bit more skillfully I might add), we took a bundle of pictures and she amused herself by dressing up in a tinker bell nightgown and having me film little videos of her speaking English. The next day we convinced her Ama-la and Po-Po-la to let her come with me to Sarah, where we were going to celebrate an early birthday for Bhuti (Chhunit was unfortunately away). As soon as we walked out the door she was buying sugar products, which she slurped and munched all day. I knew she was over-doing it, but I figured she'd learn best the hard way. We ran some errands around town and had lunch with some friends at a restaurant before we left (she devoured a strawberry milkshake and picked at a tomato pizza). Sarah was gorgeous as usual. We had some tea with a few friends and talked about the hilarity of sparkley sweaters that are proudly worn by the men here (their wives make them for them). We had some birthday cake and I taught Tsomo and Bhuti how to make hemp necklaces. Then we walked down to the river and Tsomo and I walked upstream on the rocks sticking up above the low water (ever careful to avoid the gross river-scum). We ran back to the cab and Tsomo continued to munch and slurp her goodies until McLeod, where she proceeded to throw up as soon as we got out of the cab. She perked right up afterwards, though, and I said "Ok, no more sugar then?" She nodded. We went on a mission to find beads for more necklaces, as most of mine are too small to fit on hemp cord. We went to this cool precious stone shop where the owner had a big box that I deemed the "graveyard of jewelry." We dug through it looking for cool beads with big holes.

At home her family seemed tickled that we were both so happy and that Tsomo had so many stories to tell them. We sat down and made necklaces which miraculously occupied Tsomo's hyperactive self long enough to give them even more rest after our day away. It was pretty legit.

Circumambulations and Declarations

How do I sum up the time that has passed? Once again, it's been quite some time and so much has happened.

The long weekend I spent at Tso Pema (Riwaltzar) was amazing. I took the bus with my friend Emily and we rocked, rolled, and swerved our way through the mountains on narrow dirt roads, dodging elbows the whole way. We switched buses in Manali, and the crowd in the second bus actually going to the lake was much more subdued and friendly. There were very few seats and I ended up holding onto this old woman next to me for the two hours of that bus ride so she didn't tumble over every time we made a right-hand turn. Someone in the front handed out biscuits. We got there and were blown away in our delirious state at the view of a gorgeous small lake being circumambulated by an assortment of people with a HUGE statue of Padmasambhava perched on the hill and reflected in the water. Our roommates soon attacked us with hugs and walked us to the monastery where they had a room already set up for us. We basically spent three days meeting people that Chhunit knows from her village in Spiti and her nunnery, Drolma Ling. We spent the days circumambulating the lake with the rest of the people there. Chhunit and Bhuti pointed out which people were Nepalese, Spitian, Ladakhi, or Tibetan--either from Kham or Amdo etc. You can tell mostly from the traditional dress of the women. The hair, scarves, and chupas are different. Chhunit's best friend was there whose name is also Chhunit, lol. She also has an aunt who lives in a house on the hill (up a mountain of stairs!) who I visited twice. The first time I went with Chhunit for an afternoon. She hiked up all those steps with her four year old niece on her back (who had refused to leave her side. She's the favorite of all small children she meets, I've noticed). I couldn't really talk to her Aunts and relatives since their dialect isn't the Tibetan I'm learning but the Spitian dialect, but we made due with broken English and they insisted on feeding me lots of tea and tsampa before dinner (which I proceeded to make a mess of, of course, since tsampa-eating is a skill I have not mastered). They all kept saying I was "so pretty, like actress" and insisted on taking pictures of me. I never felt more looked at in my life! There I was unshowered and towering above all these little women. It was adorable. The second time I went to the house Emily and Bhuti came as well. We ate some toasted barley while the women knit on the floor and the nuns were in and out of the little room preparing for dinner. I was in the middle of writing a card when Chhunit called my name and beckoned me into the kitchen. I walked around the corner to the tiny room where her tiny self was making dinner on a tiny stove. I had mentioned to her that I wanted her to teach me how she cooked when I went to Spiti, so she decided to start now. She showed me how to make the veggie, potato, noodle dish she was making. I asked her when she started cooking. She said when she was ten years old. That's how old she was when her Dad died, see, so she had to cook for her younger sisters while her older sister and her mother worked in the fields. She would also cook the rice and dal in the morning that she and her sisters would race home from school at lunch to eat. She said "we only have t'irty minutes for lunch every day. So we run run run up the hill and eat very fast. Sometimes my sisters are not coming fast enough, so I am in trouble when I go back to school and my teacher..." *she made a hitting motion above her hands*. "He beat your hands?" I asked. "Yes, he beat my hands. And one day, I am so naughty, he puts stick on my hand and I.." *she closed her hand*
"You grabbed the stick?"
"Yes, he is so small but very mean. So I am grab the stick and I" *she scrunches up her face and pulls at an imaginary stick* "everybody says to me 'Chhunit, what you do???' But I don't care. But then he take me to principal and...then I am caring." We both laughed, she at the memory and me at the thought of an even smaller Chhunit making that face at her teacher. She's full of fire, that's for sure. No one can mess with her.

Many Bollywood TV shows, cups of chai, dinners in Indian and Tibetan resturaunts, circumambulations, and 5:30 am mornings later (the later due to the songs that come from the Hindu temples and the chants that come from the monastery before the sun can break the horizon), we headed back to Sarah. We had one week left on campus. In that time, we had regular classes, tried to spend extra time with our room mates before taking off, and somehow managed to pull off performing a huge 3 hour long talent show for the Sarah students. They put one on for us when we came, see, so since our group turned out to be super creative, we decided to return the favor. We did an a Capella rendition of "Always be my baby" with a 4 parts on top of the main singer, performed a skit making fun of ourselves entering the monasteries for the first time (doing mock-confused prostrations and such), and many other fun acts. It was a blast, and I ended up bringing my Jimbe to the canteen afterward where a big group of us took turns playing while a bunch of us sang and danced.

I'm really going to miss the Sarah campus. Not only am I obviously super close with my roommate, I had also gotten really comfortable there. Oh, well. On to the next adventure I suppose.

We came up yesterday (Monday) to McLeod Ganj and moved in with our home stays. My hostess, Dechen, is a housewife with two kids, one of which is in boarding school and one of which is at home: Tsoma. She also lives with her father, Geshe Pempa Dorje, who actually used to teach Tibetan and co-teach Philosophy for my program in years past, and his mother who is very sweet and quite old. She fills the room with a warm presence and thus far I've only really observed her sitting, spinning her prayer-wheel and thumbing her mala. Geshe Pempa Dorje speaks very eloquent English, though I'm trying not to take advantage of that. Dechen is super friendly and makes great Thukpa, and Tsoma is a ball of energy who can't hold still and is always dancing and buzzing around. The fact that I have a drum and know Disney songs has already won me some points with her. I sleep in the living room which is beautiful and sunny (and unfortunately where the TV lives, but oh well). There's an AMAZING view (that makes up for the maze of steep stairwells that I will be climbing every time I go home) from the balcony where the dog lives--he's a cutie himself. We met our hosts over tea and then went off to our houses, only to return to the Lodge where our program has set up camp a few hours later for a talk with the president of the Students for a Free Tibet organization. That was SUCH A REFRESHING TALK. We're so used to receiving frustrating answers from people who don't really understand our questions. This guy is from India but lives in New York now, and really spoke to soooo many of our curiosities. One of the most interesting he said was in response to the way that many elders have scolded the younger generations' hopes for independence as being disrespectful of the Dalai Lama's simply seeking autonomy. He said that in fact, he feels that his generation is much closer to His Holiness than his parents' could ever dream of being. They tried to see him at least once in their life and would go on pilgrimage to Lhasa to catch a glimpse during a teaching if possible. On the other hand, the children in exile had a lot of access to him. They had many talks with him and saw him frequently. He said that much of the youth feel that he is like their father. They feel so intimate with him, in fact, that they are comfortable disagreeing with him. Just like when a child disagrees with a parent, he said, it doesn't compromise their respect.

Afterwards, we finally went to our new homes to rest. Last night I was way too tired and had a head ache, so I didn't have the most positive experience ever, but I could tell that I was in a great household nonetheless. Plus, Chhunit ended up staying there as well so she could be at McLeod early for Uprising Day which is...

TODAY! I went around 9 to the Dalai Lama's speech at the monastery. I went with my friend Jessica and her host mother, seeing as mine was busy taking care of her daughter and father. It was super crowded and I actually ended up sitting with two children and half a woman in my lap, reaching up from time to time to make sure this woman next to me kept her balance in the shifting, sardine-tight crowd. I couldn't hear a word of what was said, but a bunch of brochures were handed out with the statement that the Dalai Lama was making written inside. Very interesting speech, and nothing super new to report. He's very good at being compassionate while expressing his frustration. He expressed gratitude to all of those who have helped the Tibetan community in exile for the last fifty years and explained the history of his middle-way approach of seeking Autonomy.

Afterwards, there was a massive march from McLeod down to lower Dharamsala. Tibetan flags were everywhere, and the crowd zig-zagged for hours down the mountain roads. The call-responses were generally "Long live...Dalai Lama!" "China China China...out out out!" "Stop the killing....In Tibet!" "Tibet belongs to...Tibetans!"

I met a cool traveler named Julia afterwards, and she shared a cab with us back up to town where we all had lunch on a rooftop restaurant. She's from Austin and we're planning on going to yoga tomorrow with my friend Genny. Now I'm just killing some time before dinner with my family and maybe some more chill-time with Chhunit. Tomorrow there's a big long teaching from His Holiness which we're all really excited about.

Until next time

Bliss in my Home

In case anyone is wondering, Ani Tenzin Palmo is one of the coolest people on the planet. She’s a British nun who spent 27 years in a cave and then came out and opened a nunnery where she is presently educating 50-some nuns and is trying to re-establish this yogini lineage.

The minute we entered the room we felt we were in a great presence.I was one of the last people in the lineup, so I squeezed into the back after offering my khata. Ani-la has very large, wide-open eyes that seem to pierce right through you and smile into your deepest core while the lines on her face make her expressions severe. She sat in a rocking chair with her office filled to the brink with us. We talked about emptiness, the nunnery, her experiences on retreat, the importance of including children in the dharma, scientific studies about the effects of meditation on one’s happiness level, and many other interesting subjects. She told us that she found it interesting that we humans spend so much time and energy making the spaces we live in nice; it seems that we understand that our environment has an affect on us. But we don’t live in our houses, she said. And we live in our body for a time but not forever. It is our mind where we really live, and yet we fill it continually with junk! She noted that she was shocked at the level of junk-consumption that she has observed when visiting the West to give lectures. It was like junk food for the brain! Not just the over-sexualized and exceedingly violent images that are prevalent, but also the cheap and senseless material that people somehow seemed to know was a heap of garbage and yet continued to consume regularly anyway! Our minds are our homes, she said, and who we are and how we act depends so much on what we fill them with. That’s why meditation is so beneficial in the long-term for our happiness levels; why science has observed that meditation seems to be the only thing that raises our base-line happiness level and keeps it there: it’s like cleaning our minds and making the space nice to live in. It’s not about becoming a Buddhist, she said; it’s just about clearing our minds.

She blew us away for a couple of hours and then we toured her nunnery. What a gorgeous place!Nestled in the lush, green fields that surround Bir, a short bumpy jeep ride away from Sherab Ling Monastery—where we had set up camp for the weekend in the guest house—the place was astounding. Everyone was cleaning for Losar, getting down and scrubbing all the nitty gritty nooks and crannies around the property, and they all looked so happy! I told the people walking near me “I don’t think I’ve ever seen people cleaning look happier.” There is a building just for people on retreat that has an open court-yard supposedly where they can go outdoors and see the stars but not be seen themselves. There’s about four nuns on retreat presently. A lot of it is still under construction as well, and she’s in the process of raising funds with her lectures and awesome books—among them a personal story called "A Cave in the Snow" and a dharma book called "Reflections on a Mountain Lake."

The rest of the weekend was similarly amazing, though none of it really compared to meeting her. We went to the home where the remains of a much realized yogi was being preserved in a shrine room. Some of us sat in there and meditated for a while, and man I was blissed out! Incredible energy. There were also pictures of the rinzel that had appeared in his ashes in the form of tiny little perfectly shaped conch shells. This was the man that was going to give the empowerments to the women who wanted to take the path of the yogi-ma lineage, for he was the only one that Ani Tenzin Palmo knew of that had the empowerment himself. The rest of the yogi-ma (the female yoginis) are gone or wandering in the mountains of Tibet making themselves quite scarce. Now that he’s passed they don’t know how thye’re going to go about getting the empowerments for these women, but they’re working on it.

Days passed with many monastery visits and me sneaking away to sit in on the puja more than once. I continue to have really blissful meditation sessions here, probably because I’m in such power spots and also because I’m swimming in a constant pool of philosophy readings and lectures. It’s great, though I’m trying to not get attached to the super ecstatic feeling. One of the mornings my friend Lauren and I woke up early to go to the puja for a few hours and then take a walk. Every time we went to puja we were served tea or soup or whatever they were having at the time. The monks who were serving would come around to us sitting in the back on our little rug and give us paper cups and serve us from the big buckets that they’d brought around to all of the monks and nuns. People glanced over at us often and sometimes giggled, but it felt like it was out of curiosity and not scorn. At one point during a dinner puja I saw one monk holding out this bag of Indian hot-sauce to a monk in the row behind him. The second monk looked at it and gave his friend a disapproving look like “really?” but eventually he took it. The monks passed it around adding it to their soup and looking sheepishly giddy. They looked at us to see if we’d noticed and I smiled but tried to act like I hadn’t. After a while a few of the monks were nudging each other and pointing to the back corner. I looked and saw this big monk who was one of the two playing the gigantic horns holding up a bag of chili next to his face and grinning proudly. It was hilarious. But anyway, that morning we had some sweet tea and then went on a walk before breakfast. We went to this ridge that had countless prayer flags stretching on and on. It was gorgeous. Then we circumambulated the 7 white stupas that are all lined up down the road. Walking there past a few old grinning monks and a Tibetan girl walking with her dogs while the sun was rising, I felt like I’d entered heaven. I know I’m not walking through Shangri-La; I know there are problems here just like there are anywhere, but in that moment inside of myself I was completely at peace.

We decided to stay an extra day at Sherab Ling so we could go and see the Cham dance last Monday. Picture a huge courtyard filled with dancers in super colorful attire and tantric masks on and big swords, dancing around a mandala altar with gigantic statues of tantric deities against one wall and two stories of lay and monastic onlookers sitting on the ground and standing on the balconies. Chanting, horns, symbols, and drums accompanied the dance in a monotonous, scary-sounding rhythm, and at one point a Lama slayed a large demon-cake with bug eyes and an erection to symbolize overcoming desire. I’m no Cham scholar, so my understanding of the whole deal was limited, but it was definitely a sight.

We took the jeeps into town and stopped to see a gorgeous Hindu shrine on our way out of town where they were having some big festival. Lots of people were dressed in their best waiting in line for hours to see the Shiva Lingam that’s the main sight in the temple, and there we were in our four-day-old clothes all sweaty from the jeep ride. A few of us wandered off to get cold drinks and snacks, and once back in the jeeps we feasted on oranges and Indian sweets (which are always a little too sweet) and exchanged iPods.

Well yesterday was our one day of classes for this week, because today is the first day of LOSAR! Losar la Tashi Delek, everyone! It’s the Tibetan New Year! We had a group meeting last night to decompress after our adventures in Sherab Ling, and then ran off to bed because this morning there was 6:30 puja. This year’s Losar is not really going to be celebrated. In protest after last March’s atrocities in Tibet, many people are honoring those who were mistreated and killed by not celebrating. There’s also a hunger strike in McLeod. This is happening both in Tibet and in exile. Losar usually includes lots of parties, but this year it’s only the religious parts—the puja and the prayer-flag hanging, etc., so we all trundled down early in our Chupas to the temple. The first day of Losar is usually spent indoors with family. We’ll visit with our teachers and classmates in the dorms and try not to run into any inauspicious circumstances. In my and Emily’s case, though, we’re going to McLeod for a few hours to wrap up some loose ends before our trip tomorrow. We’re going to Riwaltzar (sp?) for Losar—this beautiful lake near Padma Sumbawa’s cave. Ledgend has it the lake formed when someone tried to light him on fire. I’m sure I’ll get a better run down of that story when I go there. Anyway, Chunnit and Bhuti are already there for Losar weekend, and so Emily and I are leaving at the crack of dawn tomorrow to meet them. It’s about a 7 hour bus ride, and then we’ll have a long weekend of a last shebang with our roomies before our last week at Sarah. We’re all feeling pretty sad about leaving—getting back to campus after Sherab Ling felt so good, we realized that this campus has really become a second home to us. The home stays are just around the corner, though, so we’ll just have to tough it up and head on to the (hopefully) next good thing.

Signing off. Sending love. Happy Losar!

"My inflated sense of self is extremely gratified by doing my laundry in a bucket"

Friday was intense. We went to McLeod and talked with Ama Adhe--an amazing woman who spent 27 years as a political prisoner in Tibet. She endured greusome torture and terrible conditions but lived to tell the tale. At one point she was in a prison camp where they literally were fed maez powder sprinkled in water 3 times a day for food. 300 women went into the camp. 4 came back out. She was one of them, and this she attributes to the fact that she prayed to Tara every day. She prayed even though they tied her to the ceiling and beat her and made her kneel on sharpened pieces of wood and told her if she cooperated they'd let her go back to her 3 year old son and infant daughter. She knew they were lying (and when she got out she found out that indeed, what they'd told her for years was rubbish) so she prayed and refused to give them the names they wanted of people who were involved with the resistance. She swore if she survived she'd go to the Dalai Lama and tell him everything. And even though when she was released (during the "soft period" in the 80s) her children told her "Ama, you have had nothing to eat for years but the leather from your own shoes--now you do nothing but sit and eat and pray and we will provide for you," she knew she couldn't stay. She escaped to India and kept her promise. The Dalai Lama listened to her whole story and told her not the hate the Chinese because most of them were following orders. He told her to spend her time now educating people. Though she's illiterate she's had a biography written which is published in 11 languages, including Chinese. She has also traveled to 10 countries to speak about what she's seen and lived through. Intense.

We went from there to go and have dinner and a movie with our roommates--a weekly ritual. Seeing as we'd had some pretty depressing movies in the past, this week we saw "Planet Earth," the desert portion. They were definitely impressed. When the part on Arizona came up I told Chunnit that I drove through that desert between school and home. It was kinda crazy sitting in the Himalayas and remembering that drive, not so long ago.

I was told that Valentine's day is pretty much not a thing in India. As an American, though, I got wished happy Valentine's day last Saturday probably more times than I ever have been at home. People here are fascinated by the taboo topic of a day of affection. Everyone was asking us if we celebrated it. And you know, even though I wasn't with any kind of sweetie, I had a pretty epic day.

We trundled down to a late 8:30 breakfast on Saturday (yeah, that's sleeping in here) and found little valentines on our places. Cynthia, our program director and probably one of the happiest, most positive people I've ever met, had stayed up into the wee hours of the night making overly sparkly cards for us. Adorable. After a breakfast of porridge, toast, and hard-boiled eggs, I went back to my room to wrangle up the troops for our valentine's day mission. Chunnit, Bhuti, Emily and I had decided to head to Kangra Fort.

We started out on a journey to Gaggle--the little town nearest our rural campus--me with my backpack strapped on carrying our essentials. On the way a cab driver asked us if we'd like a ride for 10 rupees, so we took that offer. Gaggle's a bustling bundle of intersections, little shops, advertisements, and fruit stands. We wove through crowds of cows, shoppers, beggars and stray dogs and caught a bus. We crammed into the front--Chunnit and I squeezed into open seats at the front while Bhutti and Emily sat on the platform next to the driver. We bumped and swayed our way to Kangra with the two of them holding our seats for support with every turn and laughing when they started to tip over. Every few minutes a whistle blew to announce someone's wanting to exit. It's funny to me how personal space feels different here. There was a guy practically sitting on my back for part of the ride, but I didn't really notice until I saw someone looking strangely our way. It's funny how fast you get used to that stuff. My roomie Chunnit stood up so a woman with a baby could sit in her seat. Cutest baby EVER.

From Kangra we haggled with a corner full of rickshaw drivers for a few minutes until one of them agreed to take us to Kangra Fort for 70 rupees. We took pictures and videos along the way and everyone tried on my big "American" sunglasses. Emily said she liked rickshaws better than taxis and I agreed--it's easier to see the countryside slide past when it's open air and not windows dividing you.

At Kangra Fort a sign read "Local admission: 5 rupees. Foreign admission: 100 rupees." It's only $2 but WOW. Kinda crazy. I managed to pay for everyone at that stop. The 4 of us are always wrestling with each other to try to pay or wash our tea cups or lunch bowls. My victory at that moment was minimal seeing as I was only really paying 10 rupees for our local friends. We walked up the road to a little shop and bought chips and mango juice while Chunnit joked in Hindi with the shop owner.

Kangra Fort's pretty epic. We climbed stairs stairs stairs, and I felt like we were in the Lord of the Rings. It's a really old fort that survived an earthquake and is still being restored. We sat on a cliff at the top and watched specks in a line of mules being led across the river and the huge birds flying next to and below us. The green on the other side of the river was stunning and the sun was HOT! I couldn't believe it was February. I showed Chunnit that youtube version of "Umbrella" on my iPod and told her it's our song. (For those unfarmiliar with the lyrics, the chorus goes "When the sun shines we shine together. Told you I'll be here forever. That I'll always be your friend--took an oath and Ima stick it out 'till the end. Now that it's raining more than ever, know that we still have each other. You can stand under my umbrella. You can stand under my umbrella). She didn't really catch the words so I wrote them down for her. She said "A-le!" (An addictive Tibetan phrase roughly equivalent to "I see!") Then Emily and I busted out the fancy American chocolates that we'd splurged on for the occasion. (I forget what they're called--those awesome little chocolate balls with all the layers that are wrapped in gold foil...sweetness!)

A few hours of picture-taking, sun-basking, and laughing and we headed back down. We stopped in Gaggle for Chai and I was once again amazed at Chunnit's charisma. She knew so many people passing on the streets, and she joked knowingly with the Chai shop owner, who makes GREAT treats too, we found out. She stopped and got some green beans and red carrots for a friend of hers who had asked her to pick them up as a favor, and Emily and I got oranges for our rooms. (Oranges are the only "safe" fruits for us to eat since we can peel them ourselves and therefore don't risk eating stuff washed in local water. Pretty silly but supposedly pretty necessary).

Back at Sarah finally I treated myself to a hot bucket shower and did some laundry. Dinner was at 5:30 and then Chunnit whipped out her volleyball. We played (or tried) for a while. She's an all-star, I swear--her skinny little self flies across the court in her maroon robes and little black shoes. Some other students and a hand full of kids joined our game, during which we spent just as much time chasing the stray ball as we did actually hitting it. Then the ball actually flew into the drain. It's a big open pit that's easy to see the bottom of, and Emily and I offered to jump down and get it. Unfortunately the sun had just gone down and some bats were flying in and out of it. They all said "careful, they''ll bite your EARS!" Man, I don't know if they were kidding, but we backed off from that hole PRETTY quick. We decided to brave the hole the next day when we had sticks and zero bat-problems. Then the basketball came out! Even though it was dark and the court had no light, me and Chunnit played well into the evening. We didn't make many baskets, and when we did we usually couldn't tell since we couldn't see a damn thing and the hoop has no net--but we didn't care. It was a blast. We got some Chai in the canteen by the court with a friend of hers who lives downstairs. (p.s. the Chai here is served in the smallest cups imaginable, so having 5 cups of Chai a day isn't quite like it would be in America. a cup = like 4 gulps) Her friend's a sweet heart and speaks great English; she had actually partnered with me earlier in a Tibetan class when we were being taught commands like "sit down," "stand up," and "put your hands in the air." Now she drilled me about Valentine's day in America. I told her my Valentine was dressed for the occasion and put my arms around my red-robed roomie, which they thought was hilarious.

I worked the rest of the weekend on my own rendition of the "wheel of life"--a creative project for our philosophy class. I decided to depict the 6 realms within the relationships that women have with their bodies (hungry ghosts as women with eating disorders, animals as those struggling to eat at all, humans as athletes--the potential to do so much good and so much harm to their bodies, etc.) It took me forever because I'm creatively a perfectionist. I had fun, though, and I'll present it tomorrow with performance poetry and a hell of a poaster collage.

So yesterday we met with Palden Gyatso. He's a 78 year old monk who was born in Tibet and because he happened upon the uprising in 59 got sent to a Chinese prison. And because he refused under interrogation to "confess" that Tibet has always been a part of China, he remained a political prisoner for 33 years. 33 YEARS! Like Ama Adhe, since escaping into exile he has made his mission educating the world about what happened inside of Tibet in the prisons--the story that China still doesn't tell. He went to a huge concert in San Fran, for example, and told everyone about the treatment he endured. He brought cattle prods and other things that the Chinese had used to torture him and other prisoners. These things are brutal--one shock and you're out cold usually. They used to bury men alive when they went unconscious if they were trying to get rid of prisoners to make the food spread around more. One day when he was affirming Tibet's independence under interrogation, they said "you want independence? We'll give you independence." They took him to the other room and put the cattle prod in his mouth. When he woke up all of his top teeth were falling out and his tongue was burnt. He took out his false teeth and showed us the scars on his tongue while he told us this. Our translator couldn't contain his tears. He also told us that though it wasn't proper for a monk like him to talk about such things, since it was an important fact he felt obligated to inform us that they also used these cattle prods in women's vaginas. Nun's vaginas. Nuns don't even use tampons. That bit really fucked me up.

He said that he doesn't hate the Chinese because he understands that most of them were working under fear of being punished by the government. Ama Adhe had told us that the Dalai Lama had instructed her not to hate the Chinese but that she hated the government nonetheless. This man, though--though he claimed like the Dalai Lama to be a simple monk who was mediocre in the practice of compassion and wisdom--genuinely expressed his love and compassion for the Chinese. He said that he thinks it's really important for us to go to Tibet if we can because foreigners visiting puts pressure on the Chinese government to make reforms in their treatment of Tibetans. He also advised us that many of the cheap goods that are made in China are made by Tibetan prisoners who stay up all night in order to complete their impossibly numerous tasks so as not to be punished. I asked him if there were any arenas within Tibetan studies that presently need more attention since we are all going to be choosing research topics soon. He suggested the Dalai Lama's plans for autonomy, the recent cases of brutality inflicted upon Tibetans, and a few other interesting topics.

More than anything, this man's presence was most striking. He had a face so worn that you could picture his skull beneath the deeply-creased skin, but his expressions were so jolly and his bloodshot eyes were filled with so much light that you couldn't help but smile when looking at him. He kind of glows. His little apartment has pictures of the Dalai Lama, one of him & Richard Gere and one Tanka on the plain white walls. It's itty bitty and we all sat on top of each other on the seats and the floor in order to fit. He said that he bought the place with the help of foreigners like us, so we were welcome any time. When we go, he said, we should think of it as going to our own home. He blessed our khatas and the malas that some of him presented us with and we took our leave.
Not your average Monday night.

We're going for a field trip on Thursday and I'm sure I'll have plenty to write after that. Stay well and be grateful--every breath is a miracle.