Reflection

This is a time of year when, like it or not, most of us look back at the past year and do a little reflection, maybe make a top 10 list or a few resolutions.  It’s been a big year for me, and yet I’m deliberately ending it where I started it, at Karme Choling in northern Vermont.  Over the past year I’ve…

left Boston (again), left a perfectly good job, spent around 6 weeks on retreat and 8 weeks overseas, trained to be a yoga teacher, tried to prioritize my life more wisely, and tried to be a better friend, daughter, sister and community member, and truer to myself.  I had the sense that 2008 would be a big year.  2009 portends to be even more interesting.

While so much of the New Year hype is, well, hype, I think it is valuable to sit back and think about what to leave in the previous year and what to cultivate in the new. This is an exercise I will be doing (and probably should be doing daily!) and would recommend highly.

Happy New Year, everyone!

“Today’s Tibet” cards

When I was in Kathmandu I printed a set of my favorite photos from Tibet and made them into beautiful greeting cards, with handmade Nepali paper and envelopes.  The stories behind these photos tell of my journey and local lives, each unique and changing rapidly with Tibet’s political, economic and cultural environment.

I’m selling these cards on my web site to raise money for future work in the Himalayan region.  See more information here.  With each card comes a description and/or stories of the photo.

new blocking

China is again upping the ante with western news:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Snowland part deux

I left Tibet a month ago, and am back in Vermont contemplating the existential questions of the meaning of “home”, and “purpose” and whatnot.  I’m also enjoying the fleeting ability to look at a usually-familiar place with somewhat foreign eyes.  Things that are accepted here seem unnecessary, and things that are expected here seem special.  This is especially clear to me, as I sit in a comfortably warm home in the midst of a snowstorm.

In Tibet, when it snows animals die and roads are impassible until the snow clears by itself — by wind or sun.  There are no plows, and if there were there would be no heavy machinery to drive them.  In Vermont, it snows for a few hours and then the road crews are out in force.  We are inconvenienced for a day, max.  And then we go skiing.  In Nepal, where I griped about the roads at least once, I saw not one truck or bulldozer, let alone a road crew equipped with more than a few women with baskets to carry dirt.

Roads, in most of today’s societies, are the stuff of life.  We take them for granted in the US but in most of the world they’re polluted, overcrowded, deteriorating, impassible, blocked by checkpoints, under constant construction, or simply non-existant.  Traditionally, we were insular and self-sufficient enough not to need to get around so much.  But that isn’t the case anymore, and many economic development plans wind up coming back to this basic infrastructure — which must be addressed before anything else can be seriously considered.  But the history and politics of road building are colorful and can be quite problematic.

I remember pontificating in my journal in Tibet about the arrival of roads to many of the remote villages and areas.  We were first to drive on a road that was built up to a far-away, high elevation monastery.  What does it mean, to a villager with little contact with the outside world, to have a road appear and then cars and trucks running through, easier access to a market and easier control from the government?  Especially if such a person does not have the means to travel themselves? In the US, a road is seen as such a thing of freedom, of being carefree, going to a new place, on some adventure.  They can so easily be mechanisms for control as well, and being one who can travel quite freely, I am now highly aware of these differences.

I am half a world away from the places where I saw these things.  It only takes a few flights to make the trip from one hemisphere to the other — too quick, I think, for proper adjustment to the change in culture.

Sub-continent to Continental

Monday night I was happily holed up in the mountains, attempting to learn Tibetan letters. Tuesday night I was on a bus, winding my way down the mountain from Dharamsala into the murky air of Delhi. Wednesday night I was on a plane, flying over central Asia, northern Europe and eastern Canada. I’m now at JFK, almost back to Boston.

JFK decorators have an evil sense of humor. On disembarking planes in the international arrival area, passengers walk a series of long hallways. Bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived. And what do they put along the way? Holograms. Many holograms. As if I wasn’t having trouble seeing clearly already!

Retreat time

The sun is not so strong here, at this lower elevation and with the winter coming on. I’ve been studying the Tibetan alphabet in a patch of sunlight on the front patio, bees buzzing around a mongoose picking up kitchen scraps from the meadow below, where they get thrown.

At home I have been studying Buddhism mostly in the Kagyu tradition, which is rather well-established in the West. The high Kagyupa lamas enjoy quite some celebrity among Westerners, as many Kagyu teachers have gone to the West and ‘planted the dharma’ there (as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said). Wednesday I went down to Sidhbari, a town below Dharamsala, which is the current home of His Holiness the Karmapa. Though he is mostly devoted to study and practice, twice a week His Holiness holds a public audience, at which westerners and eastern devotees attend and receive his darshan (blessing).

I laid eyes on His Holiness one other time, when he gave a public talk at the Waldorf Astoria in New York during his visit to the United States last Spring. In that venue, he held a crowd of hundreds, in opulence and with grace. It was quite some change for him, spending young childhood in Tibet and the past 10 years or so in India in intense monastic life. On Wednesday he appeared well, settled, and as always, bright-eyed.

Kagyu lamas and practitioners were out in force in Kathmandu when I was there, celebrating the enthronement of Urgyen Jigme Rabsel, the reincarnation of beloved teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, who passed away in the 1990s. The young tulku, recognized several years ago, is now 8. I attended one event, at Nagi gompa, the tulku’s monastery in Shivapuri Park on a hill outside the city. The monastery was in a festive mood. Reincarnate lamas as children are still children, yet often with a special calm and grace. Through great ceremony the young tulku sat, at one point with lollipop in hand. It was nice to spend the day in the presence of so many people who are there to wish the world well — and nice to have without so much Western dharma circus.

Pollution intrusion

I wrote about pollution in Nepal and Tibet just before leaving for India. Perhaps I spoke too soon, as the air quality the day I left Kathmandu was the worst I’d seen it so far. Thick smog hangs over the city and mingles with naturally-occurring mists. Arriving in Delhi, the cloud over Kathmandu looked like child’s play. Visibility was a few hundred meters, I’d guess, and exhaust, dust, and smoke clogged my lungs immediately. Dust hangs on every leaf. I don’t know what has made it so bad – the weather of global weirding or perhaps just this dry season? The dreadful combination of increased vehicles on the road (leading to more traffic) and low-quality fuels? Burning garbage? Whatever it is, lungs and throats burn at the first introduction, and the situation is untenable.

Journey continues

I’m slowing down for this last week on the subcontinent, and finally taking some time to process. I’ve been writing about some of the issues that I’ve been noticing as I travel, as much stream-of-consciousness as reasoned argument. One of the reasons I haven’t gotten more in-depth about foreign policy or infrastructure management or pollution is because I haven’t had the time to learn enough about all the complexities and challenges surrounding these very difficult problems. It would take a lifetime to become an authoritative source. Yet around the world, more and more people like me – privileged, educated, emphatic individuals are seeing first-hand what most of the world faces on a day-to-day basis. And that alone is powerful.

I am in India now, where the mood is rather somber following last week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Two years ago I visited some of the places that were targeted in the attacks, and newspapers here show pictures of what the places look like now, burned out and all but destroyed. Sentiments here seem to range from disbelief to cynicism, and a deep sense of fatigue with the constant possibility of terrorism.

From my perch now near Dharamsala things are peaceful – it is unseasonably warm, making it comfortable outside during the day and tolerable at night (practically tropics after Tibet). The drive up, uncomfortable and winding, always makes arrival feel like that much more of a blessing.