"Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you
And all the things you do"
-Coldplay
There are so many events and happenings and thought constructs that, at the time, seem to warrant whole pages and detailed descriptions, theories that branch out into sister theories and what ifs...but time passes and they become bullet points or footnotes due to this or that unfolding of time. I left Mirge the morning before last...I would have written sooner but due to computers crashing (and taking with it a decent chunk of the work I had done on the final exams for the kids), 14 hour power outages and poor health, it has taken a little longer. I am still pretty out of it so forgive the rambling, weak writing and poor excuses for transitions...for there will be much I am sure. This may come out in the form of an interesting spatter pattern to be organized and analyzed at some later date.
My last few weeks in Mirge were difficult and satisfying...full of miscommunication, little celebrations, illness and hidden tears (some happy and some sad), new discoveries, painful realizations, arts and crafts, and music...there were very few, if any, moments where one clear emotion held sway...everything seems to have been painted with swift and passionate brushstrokes...where the bristles had not been washed clean of the previous three colors...a piece of art that seems, even now, the work of another, though the brush was always in my hand. The sickness in my body has been felt in the mind, and the pain in the mind has taken its toll on the body. With as much vigilance as I can muster up, I await a clear sign to guide me to the breaking of this vicious cycle.
Surendra took me to a "Love marriage" (as opposed to an arranged marriage) in Mirge the other week. (There must have been a wedding every other day...January and February is wedding season in rural Nepal.) I would have liked to see the ceremony but I only really caught the party end of it...people passing by the seated bride and groom who had the grueling task of sitting for hours in the sun while hundreds of people threw rice at them and tried to stick it to their forehead (a symbol of future prosperity). Four or five generations sitting on straw mats in a field, eating Dal Baht, the older men playing a native drum made of animal skin and wood, the younger men dancing to modern Nepali music...the token drunk, jumping about the circle to some disoriented beat all his own. I told Surendra that it was only the second wedding I had ever been to...he looked pretty surprised. I ended up getting followed around by three young boys for a while until I had had enough of that and told them I'd be back later and went wandering off on my own for a bit.
I discovered two of my favorite things to do in Mirge in the last ten days there...which I could have been frustrated by since I might have found out about them a lot sooner if I had been able to wander about on my own a bit more, but I was glad to have found them, since they were both pretty magical. I was mostly referring to these two activities when I made my earlier reference to events that warrant pages, etc...but these few lines will have to do for now. The first of the two is what I have come to call "The galaxy on the hillside." One of the things I have missed most about the LA (I know, missing LA, who'd a thunk?...but along with the physical sickness and exhaustion has come some homesickness as well, though I am not saying that the former is the necessary condition of the latter) is sitting in the Planetarium at the Griffith Observatory or the IMAX theater at the Science Museum...leaning back in my seat and taking a ride through the stars...experiencing the vastness, the infinity of the universe, which mirrors and is one with the infinity in our own minds. I discovered that Mirge had its own version which required no fancy machinery or calculations...only mountains, light bulbs and a starry sky overhead. You see, in the planetarium...you only have a half-sphere to look at...and even if you are out in the desert, you have to lie on your back or crane your neck upwards...but in Mirge...it is dark enough to see the starry sky overhead...and in addition to this...all of the opposing hillsides are smattered with little villages and houses and markets, each structure across the valley with a single light bulb out in front, each one a star for him with just a little imagination...and so I had a starry sky and a starry hillside, Coldplay in my ears, and the constellations were mine for the naming...there were a pair of fallen soldiers, Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest), various little animals and abstract shapes for which I could invent no story or name but was satisfied just to observe...I'm sure someone with a more vivid imagination than my own would have come up with much more. When the power went out, I just lay back on the roof of the health post and looked up and that too was satisfying.
The second of the favorite things was going to a local graveyard with Surendra the weekend before last, and then again the day before I left, when we took Pramod as well. It was a thirty minute walk or so from the school, across the village and up a little hill...it over looked valleys and hillsides terraced up for hundreds of feet, you could hear a small river down below. A lama's house stood adjacent to the grounds and scattered all around on different steps were stone structures marking the cremation sites of the last however many generations, decorated with Om Mani Padme Hum and other mantras carved on slabs. There were tall stalks of bamboo (which were climbed adventurously by the four young boys we met on our second trip there, with whom we shared our sugar cane plant and bananas) and grass growing out from between the bricks on the little stupa-esque constructions. There was a ruined school beside the yard which added significantly to the feel of the place, which could be described as "Gothic," though it would have to be a very different Gothic than that described in the west...in fact, most of the defining characteristics of the Gothic style: the emphasis of the natural in the man-made, the allowance for light and space, the relationship between personal and divine and on...seem far better suited to what I saw in that graveyard, and in most of rural Nepali society...it is effortless for them whereas, we as a "civilized society" have to strain to remind ourselves and each other that we are part of nature...we seem to think that its some kind of an artistic statement or hippy sentiment to be one with the earth, it borders on a "white man's burden" mentality toward the planet ...but when you look out at the way that they farm and build and live...when we farm we flatten everything, turn the soil with our enormous gas guzzling machines until it turns to clay, and then we call in Monsanto with their cancer causing GMO's...when we bury our dead we do it in big gaudy caskets that could double as bomb shelters trying at all costs to prevent our participation in the richness of the soil, denying source...but they accept the shape of the earth, the quality of the soil...they work with her, all the way up the mountainside...they know the temporary nature of the body, and though they may weep for a time when it separates from mind or soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it...they give their ashes back to the soil and mark the would-be graves with words of compassion and happiness...no names, no dates...for these are forgotten, the only real legacy we can leave, it seems to me, is how far we traveled toward and brought about peace in our lives and in the lives of others. I spent some time alone there both times...to read and to sit. Adding to the surrealness of the experience was reading a section of Red Earth & Pouring Rain while sitting among the old rocks, death and new life...it begins with a conversation between Sanjay (our main character) and Yama (the god of death):
'You again,' Sanjay said. 'Yama, I despise you still.'
'I am your friend.'
'You are nobody's friend.'
'I am your's.'
'I don't need you.'
'But we meet again and again.'
'Yes,' Sanjay said. 'I know I will be reborn, that there is no escape from you. I know my life well and I know that I have not found liberation. I will have to come back to you. But remember when I die, I do not give up to you, I renounce this world. This world in which nothing is clear, where there is horror at every turn, I am sick of it. I know I will be reborn into it. Since you say you are my friend, I will ask you a question. Does it get better?'
'The world is the world. It is you that makes the horror.'
...
They walked on, and now they were among mountains, among steep black cliffs of rock, and there was a river ahead, a stream that was swelled by the rains into a roaring current.
'I leave you now,' Yama said. 'We will meet again.'
'I have no doubt of it,' Sanjay said.
When he looked back all he could see were thick banks of mist, and so he walked on alone; he followed the sound of the river until he found a flat rock poised above the gorge, and there was a tree that grew over the rock, its branches hanging in space. Sanjay sat there, crosslegged, and the rain fell on him, the water fell on him from the leaves above, and as he took breath in and out the sound of the water grew so loud in his ears that it receded into a kind of silence, and in this pool of silence he gazed until he saw his childhood, his friends, his parents, and then he saw his youth, how he knew passion, and he saw all this and then he gave it up, he let it go, and he felt it leave like a spart from the top of his head; and then he thought about his enemies, the ones he hated, and how he despised them, and he gave that up too and it flew away from him; he remembered his crimes...and his offences clung to hm but finally with a sigh he let it all go; and one by one all the things that tied him to life dissolved and vanished and he felt his soul floating unfettered and close to the white frontier of death, but still there was something, it held him back like a thin chain; and suddenly he remembered the student's face from London, the thin boy whose name he had asked, and he cried into the water, you children of the future, you young men and women who will set us free, may you be happy, may you be faultless, may you be soft as a rose petal, and hard as thunder, may you be fearless, may you be forgiving, may you be clever and may you have unmoved faith...may you be neither this nor that, may you be better tan us, I bless you, may you be happy; and then he felt the last cord break, the last spark of desire leaving him, it was the hardest, but the bond of pride then vanished and he was free.
The pale body under the tree leaned forward, and then it slipped to the side and toppled down the slope into the spray of the river, and the water took it speedily down the curving course, and it turned over once, and then it was gone.
There is so much more there but it will have to wait.
On our way back toward the school (where we actually stopped at a second graveyard, very much like the first but in a valley instead of on a hilltop) we passed a group of slender trees for which Surendra couldn't remember the name in English but said that they were called "Uti" in Nepali...he said that they were always found at the site of landslides for some reason, though he didn't know why...and then he told me a little native story (to which I have added a detail or two since there were tiny gaps due to the language barrier). Once upon a time, in the winter, Uti's father told him that it was time to marry and that he should go ask for Rhododendron's hand in marriage. Uti did has his father said and went to Rhododendron...but as it was winter, she had not bloomed and at the sight of her simple and undecorated form, Uti said that he was not interested and went home. A few months later he was told that he must try again, that if he did not, he would be cut off and that would be the end of him...so he sulked over to Rhododendron again...but now it was Spring and she shown bright and beautiful and full of life...he fell for her right then and there. He asked for her hand, but she had not forgotten the insult from the winter, she did not forgive Uti's shortsightedness and shallow interests...and she denied him. In his despair, Uti jumped from the cliff. I guess this is how Nepalis explain the appearance of this kind of tree wherever there is a landslide...reminds me of many of the old Greek myths. I liked it...it might have just seemed special and magical due to the day.
Moving on. Grades three, four and five gave their concert and did me proud...they were a little nervous but they sang it out and did their little hand motions (I never thought I would put hand motions to Blackbird but they are ten so cut me some slack...plus it was cute) and every one seemed to like lyrics to the new Laligurash song...and here they are:
We all love our school Laligurash
It sits beautifully on the hillside
We all love our school Laligurash
We will carry our knowledge far and wide
A place for learning
A place for growing
A place for playing
To exercise our bodies and minds
We are the happy students of Laligurash
Where the teachers are so sweet and kind
We are the happy students of Laligurash
Where we come to fill our hearts and minds
A place for learning
A place for growing
A place for playing
To exercise our bodies and minds
We all love our school Laligurash
It sits beautifully on the hillside
We all love our school Laligurash
We will carry our knowledge far and wide
I took video so if my phone makes it back in one piece or if I learn how to get a video up on facebook you will be able to see it. There are many many pictures from the past couple months which I hope to start putting up when I cross the border back into India soon...but I will not be traveling until I feel better...I had wanted to be in Bodh Gaya by the 14th of February after spending a couple of days in Nalanda and Rajgir each but there are priorities. The trip from Mirge to Kathmandu would have been almost unthinkable if it hadn't been for Surendra's support on the busride.
Here is the link to the website that Mahesh and Dot and Lynn have set up for Mirge volunteering if anyone is interested...plus there's a picture of me on my first day with some of my fourth graders putting garlands around my neck.
http://www.volunteerruralnepal.org/
I have added "The Land of Rhododendrons" and "The Fall" to my repertoire of original songs...along with "The Laligurash Song" (but all credit there really goes to the fourth graders of Laligurash Bright Future Enlgish Boarding School). There are a million snap shots and sounds that dance around in my mind still...endless hours of ping pong with Nikesh, Surendra, Pramod and all the other teachers, the first time that fourth grader who never knows the answer underlined the auxiliary verb and did his homework (seriously had to choke back tears on that one), when the third graders remembered how to define a preposition...and when we were singing Blackbird and a blackbird landed on the tree next to the classroom, when I took the kids outside on the afternoon when it hailed and we talked about meteorology, the Indiana Jones bus ride down the mountain, the endless noodle soup, all the colorful clothing and the women who carry huge loads by way of a strap around their foreheads, the little "dirt children" (as my sister Rachel would call them) who followed me around and said "Namaste, what is your name?" over and over again...so many others...there is so much more...
I meant to write a bit about my health situation and about some of what has been going on in the past 48 hours but maybe I will get to that tomorrow...and I can let you know where I am at with regard to my travels then as well...not sure about Sri Lanka yet...silly visa nonsense with India. Oh, bought a plane ticket back to the states too...a bit strange...a bit soon...but there is much time in which to learn and journey as well. I have been in a difficult place but I feel better now...for the first time since arriving in Kathmandu...so thank you for reading and supporting in your own way.
May you be happy.
Look how they shine for you
And all the things you do"
-Coldplay
There are so many events and happenings and thought constructs that, at the time, seem to warrant whole pages and detailed descriptions, theories that branch out into sister theories and what ifs...but time passes and they become bullet points or footnotes due to this or that unfolding of time. I left Mirge the morning before last...I would have written sooner but due to computers crashing (and taking with it a decent chunk of the work I had done on the final exams for the kids), 14 hour power outages and poor health, it has taken a little longer. I am still pretty out of it so forgive the rambling, weak writing and poor excuses for transitions...for there will be much I am sure. This may come out in the form of an interesting spatter pattern to be organized and analyzed at some later date.
My last few weeks in Mirge were difficult and satisfying...full of miscommunication, little celebrations, illness and hidden tears (some happy and some sad), new discoveries, painful realizations, arts and crafts, and music...there were very few, if any, moments where one clear emotion held sway...everything seems to have been painted with swift and passionate brushstrokes...where the bristles had not been washed clean of the previous three colors...a piece of art that seems, even now, the work of another, though the brush was always in my hand. The sickness in my body has been felt in the mind, and the pain in the mind has taken its toll on the body. With as much vigilance as I can muster up, I await a clear sign to guide me to the breaking of this vicious cycle.
Surendra took me to a "Love marriage" (as opposed to an arranged marriage) in Mirge the other week. (There must have been a wedding every other day...January and February is wedding season in rural Nepal.) I would have liked to see the ceremony but I only really caught the party end of it...people passing by the seated bride and groom who had the grueling task of sitting for hours in the sun while hundreds of people threw rice at them and tried to stick it to their forehead (a symbol of future prosperity). Four or five generations sitting on straw mats in a field, eating Dal Baht, the older men playing a native drum made of animal skin and wood, the younger men dancing to modern Nepali music...the token drunk, jumping about the circle to some disoriented beat all his own. I told Surendra that it was only the second wedding I had ever been to...he looked pretty surprised. I ended up getting followed around by three young boys for a while until I had had enough of that and told them I'd be back later and went wandering off on my own for a bit.
I discovered two of my favorite things to do in Mirge in the last ten days there...which I could have been frustrated by since I might have found out about them a lot sooner if I had been able to wander about on my own a bit more, but I was glad to have found them, since they were both pretty magical. I was mostly referring to these two activities when I made my earlier reference to events that warrant pages, etc...but these few lines will have to do for now. The first of the two is what I have come to call "The galaxy on the hillside." One of the things I have missed most about the LA (I know, missing LA, who'd a thunk?...but along with the physical sickness and exhaustion has come some homesickness as well, though I am not saying that the former is the necessary condition of the latter) is sitting in the Planetarium at the Griffith Observatory or the IMAX theater at the Science Museum...leaning back in my seat and taking a ride through the stars...experiencing the vastness, the infinity of the universe, which mirrors and is one with the infinity in our own minds. I discovered that Mirge had its own version which required no fancy machinery or calculations...only mountains, light bulbs and a starry sky overhead. You see, in the planetarium...you only have a half-sphere to look at...and even if you are out in the desert, you have to lie on your back or crane your neck upwards...but in Mirge...it is dark enough to see the starry sky overhead...and in addition to this...all of the opposing hillsides are smattered with little villages and houses and markets, each structure across the valley with a single light bulb out in front, each one a star for him with just a little imagination...and so I had a starry sky and a starry hillside, Coldplay in my ears, and the constellations were mine for the naming...there were a pair of fallen soldiers, Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest), various little animals and abstract shapes for which I could invent no story or name but was satisfied just to observe...I'm sure someone with a more vivid imagination than my own would have come up with much more. When the power went out, I just lay back on the roof of the health post and looked up and that too was satisfying.
The second of the favorite things was going to a local graveyard with Surendra the weekend before last, and then again the day before I left, when we took Pramod as well. It was a thirty minute walk or so from the school, across the village and up a little hill...it over looked valleys and hillsides terraced up for hundreds of feet, you could hear a small river down below. A lama's house stood adjacent to the grounds and scattered all around on different steps were stone structures marking the cremation sites of the last however many generations, decorated with Om Mani Padme Hum and other mantras carved on slabs. There were tall stalks of bamboo (which were climbed adventurously by the four young boys we met on our second trip there, with whom we shared our sugar cane plant and bananas) and grass growing out from between the bricks on the little stupa-esque constructions. There was a ruined school beside the yard which added significantly to the feel of the place, which could be described as "Gothic," though it would have to be a very different Gothic than that described in the west...in fact, most of the defining characteristics of the Gothic style: the emphasis of the natural in the man-made, the allowance for light and space, the relationship between personal and divine and on...seem far better suited to what I saw in that graveyard, and in most of rural Nepali society...it is effortless for them whereas, we as a "civilized society" have to strain to remind ourselves and each other that we are part of nature...we seem to think that its some kind of an artistic statement or hippy sentiment to be one with the earth, it borders on a "white man's burden" mentality toward the planet ...but when you look out at the way that they farm and build and live...when we farm we flatten everything, turn the soil with our enormous gas guzzling machines until it turns to clay, and then we call in Monsanto with their cancer causing GMO's...when we bury our dead we do it in big gaudy caskets that could double as bomb shelters trying at all costs to prevent our participation in the richness of the soil, denying source...but they accept the shape of the earth, the quality of the soil...they work with her, all the way up the mountainside...they know the temporary nature of the body, and though they may weep for a time when it separates from mind or soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it...they give their ashes back to the soil and mark the would-be graves with words of compassion and happiness...no names, no dates...for these are forgotten, the only real legacy we can leave, it seems to me, is how far we traveled toward and brought about peace in our lives and in the lives of others. I spent some time alone there both times...to read and to sit. Adding to the surrealness of the experience was reading a section of Red Earth & Pouring Rain while sitting among the old rocks, death and new life...it begins with a conversation between Sanjay (our main character) and Yama (the god of death):
'You again,' Sanjay said. 'Yama, I despise you still.'
'I am your friend.'
'You are nobody's friend.'
'I am your's.'
'I don't need you.'
'But we meet again and again.'
'Yes,' Sanjay said. 'I know I will be reborn, that there is no escape from you. I know my life well and I know that I have not found liberation. I will have to come back to you. But remember when I die, I do not give up to you, I renounce this world. This world in which nothing is clear, where there is horror at every turn, I am sick of it. I know I will be reborn into it. Since you say you are my friend, I will ask you a question. Does it get better?'
'The world is the world. It is you that makes the horror.'
...
They walked on, and now they were among mountains, among steep black cliffs of rock, and there was a river ahead, a stream that was swelled by the rains into a roaring current.
'I leave you now,' Yama said. 'We will meet again.'
'I have no doubt of it,' Sanjay said.
When he looked back all he could see were thick banks of mist, and so he walked on alone; he followed the sound of the river until he found a flat rock poised above the gorge, and there was a tree that grew over the rock, its branches hanging in space. Sanjay sat there, crosslegged, and the rain fell on him, the water fell on him from the leaves above, and as he took breath in and out the sound of the water grew so loud in his ears that it receded into a kind of silence, and in this pool of silence he gazed until he saw his childhood, his friends, his parents, and then he saw his youth, how he knew passion, and he saw all this and then he gave it up, he let it go, and he felt it leave like a spart from the top of his head; and then he thought about his enemies, the ones he hated, and how he despised them, and he gave that up too and it flew away from him; he remembered his crimes...and his offences clung to hm but finally with a sigh he let it all go; and one by one all the things that tied him to life dissolved and vanished and he felt his soul floating unfettered and close to the white frontier of death, but still there was something, it held him back like a thin chain; and suddenly he remembered the student's face from London, the thin boy whose name he had asked, and he cried into the water, you children of the future, you young men and women who will set us free, may you be happy, may you be faultless, may you be soft as a rose petal, and hard as thunder, may you be fearless, may you be forgiving, may you be clever and may you have unmoved faith...may you be neither this nor that, may you be better tan us, I bless you, may you be happy; and then he felt the last cord break, the last spark of desire leaving him, it was the hardest, but the bond of pride then vanished and he was free.
The pale body under the tree leaned forward, and then it slipped to the side and toppled down the slope into the spray of the river, and the water took it speedily down the curving course, and it turned over once, and then it was gone.
There is so much more there but it will have to wait.
On our way back toward the school (where we actually stopped at a second graveyard, very much like the first but in a valley instead of on a hilltop) we passed a group of slender trees for which Surendra couldn't remember the name in English but said that they were called "Uti" in Nepali...he said that they were always found at the site of landslides for some reason, though he didn't know why...and then he told me a little native story (to which I have added a detail or two since there were tiny gaps due to the language barrier). Once upon a time, in the winter, Uti's father told him that it was time to marry and that he should go ask for Rhododendron's hand in marriage. Uti did has his father said and went to Rhododendron...but as it was winter, she had not bloomed and at the sight of her simple and undecorated form, Uti said that he was not interested and went home. A few months later he was told that he must try again, that if he did not, he would be cut off and that would be the end of him...so he sulked over to Rhododendron again...but now it was Spring and she shown bright and beautiful and full of life...he fell for her right then and there. He asked for her hand, but she had not forgotten the insult from the winter, she did not forgive Uti's shortsightedness and shallow interests...and she denied him. In his despair, Uti jumped from the cliff. I guess this is how Nepalis explain the appearance of this kind of tree wherever there is a landslide...reminds me of many of the old Greek myths. I liked it...it might have just seemed special and magical due to the day.
Moving on. Grades three, four and five gave their concert and did me proud...they were a little nervous but they sang it out and did their little hand motions (I never thought I would put hand motions to Blackbird but they are ten so cut me some slack...plus it was cute) and every one seemed to like lyrics to the new Laligurash song...and here they are:
We all love our school Laligurash
It sits beautifully on the hillside
We all love our school Laligurash
We will carry our knowledge far and wide
A place for learning
A place for growing
A place for playing
To exercise our bodies and minds
We are the happy students of Laligurash
Where the teachers are so sweet and kind
We are the happy students of Laligurash
Where we come to fill our hearts and minds
A place for learning
A place for growing
A place for playing
To exercise our bodies and minds
We all love our school Laligurash
It sits beautifully on the hillside
We all love our school Laligurash
We will carry our knowledge far and wide
I took video so if my phone makes it back in one piece or if I learn how to get a video up on facebook you will be able to see it. There are many many pictures from the past couple months which I hope to start putting up when I cross the border back into India soon...but I will not be traveling until I feel better...I had wanted to be in Bodh Gaya by the 14th of February after spending a couple of days in Nalanda and Rajgir each but there are priorities. The trip from Mirge to Kathmandu would have been almost unthinkable if it hadn't been for Surendra's support on the busride.
Here is the link to the website that Mahesh and Dot and Lynn have set up for Mirge volunteering if anyone is interested...plus there's a picture of me on my first day with some of my fourth graders putting garlands around my neck.
http://www.volunteerruralnepal.org/
I have added "The Land of Rhododendrons" and "The Fall" to my repertoire of original songs...along with "The Laligurash Song" (but all credit there really goes to the fourth graders of Laligurash Bright Future Enlgish Boarding School). There are a million snap shots and sounds that dance around in my mind still...endless hours of ping pong with Nikesh, Surendra, Pramod and all the other teachers, the first time that fourth grader who never knows the answer underlined the auxiliary verb and did his homework (seriously had to choke back tears on that one), when the third graders remembered how to define a preposition...and when we were singing Blackbird and a blackbird landed on the tree next to the classroom, when I took the kids outside on the afternoon when it hailed and we talked about meteorology, the Indiana Jones bus ride down the mountain, the endless noodle soup, all the colorful clothing and the women who carry huge loads by way of a strap around their foreheads, the little "dirt children" (as my sister Rachel would call them) who followed me around and said "Namaste, what is your name?" over and over again...so many others...there is so much more...
I meant to write a bit about my health situation and about some of what has been going on in the past 48 hours but maybe I will get to that tomorrow...and I can let you know where I am at with regard to my travels then as well...not sure about Sri Lanka yet...silly visa nonsense with India. Oh, bought a plane ticket back to the states too...a bit strange...a bit soon...but there is much time in which to learn and journey as well. I have been in a difficult place but I feel better now...for the first time since arriving in Kathmandu...so thank you for reading and supporting in your own way.
May you be happy.
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