by Bruce Kirkby
PRAISE FOR BLUE SKY KINGDOM
“In Blue Sky Kingdom, Bruce Kirkby not only takes us far across the world and deep inside a rarely seen culture, but also allows us an intimate view of his family, all while writing with tender honesty, penetrating insight and a delightful lack of bravado. Kirkby gently reminds us to breathe, embrace the unfamiliar and celebrate even the smallest of moments.”
—Jill Fredston, author of Rowing to Latitude and Snowstruck
“Bruce Kirkby has lived the dream of the modern globe-trotting adventurer: crossing Arabian sand seas, sea-kayaking Iceland and Borneo, traversing Northern Mongolia on horseback. In Blue Sky Kingdom, Kirkby’s wife and two young sons join him for a different kind of journey—to an isolated Buddhist monastery, yes, but also to the elusive and fragile heart of wisdom that we all hope to glimpse in this lifetime. What a heartfelt, lovely and kind book this is.”
—Daniel Duane, author of Caught Inside
“Insightful and adventurous, Blue Sky Kingdom offers a road map on how to learn from the world… There is wisdom in this book. Open it and let your imagination soar.”
—Conrad Anker, acclaimed American alpinist
“In an era when countless demands make it increasingly easy to ignore people and engage instead with devices, Blue Sky Kingdom provides a much-needed call back to the physical world.”
—Darcy Gaechter, author of Amazon Woman
“A rollicking journey, full of insights on cultivating a nourishing, fully present life amidst so much noise and distraction.”
—Brad Stulberg, coauthor of Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox
“By any standards, it’s a big adventure to travel the slow way across the world to a remote corner of the Himalaya and live there for months in a spartan Buddhist monastery—but taking young children along ramps it up to another level. Written with zest and clarity, Bruce’s account is compelling, moving, funny and above all honest, sharing hardships and frustrations along with the joys and ultimate rewards.”
—Maria Coffey, author of Where The Mountain Casts Its Shadow
For the novice monks of Karsha Gompa,
Lama Wangyal,
and above all,
for Pitter, Big B and Tiny T.
PROLOGUE
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity…
—Simone Weil, Letter to Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942
Himachal Pradesh
Northern India
Lumbering trains carried our family westward across the Indian Plains. The terrific heat of summer had descended, and our days dissolved into a mirage of dust, tightly pressed bodies, greasy curry and children’s storybooks.
“Way too smelly,” our young boys would groan as the tang of perspiration and urine rose in unison with the thermometer.
So we surrendered our seats, choosing instead to stand before open carriage doors, braced together against the wind, watching the country race past: teeming streets, brick factories, rice paddies, water buffalo, egrets on the wing. And late each afternoon, just as the sun’s final embers drifted from the sky, I spotted dark clouds gathering on the horizon—looming a little closer each day, as if pursuing us.
But it wasn’t until we reached the foothills that the fever broke.
We were crammed into a dilapidated bus, bouncing up steep mountain roads scarred by rockfall, when a wave of cool air crashed over us. Moments later, heavy drops began hammering on the roof. With faces pressed against foggy windows, our boys watched as the surrounding hillsides were obscured behind silver monsoon curtains. In terraced fields, farmers scampered beneath umbrellas of oak and chestnut, and along roadside ditches, groves of head-high marijuana bowed to the deluge.
Inside the former British hill station of Manali, tarps were hastily yanked over market stalls. Horns beeped, dogs barked and foreigners in fluorescent jackets darted down cobblestone alleys, between trekking agencies, German-style bakeries and cybercafés. Overhead, thickets of hand-painted signs, satellite television dishes and tangled power lines obscured the hemorrhaging skies, so profuse they reminded me of rainforest foliage. Long before this deep valley became lionized as a stoners’ paradise, it was known among Hindus simply as Kulantapith—or “the end of the habitable world.”
It certainly wasn’t that anymore.
Exhausted and fighting the flu, the four of us took refuge in a stone cottage tucked amid the crooked temples and stooped shanties of Old Town, where orchards of apple and plum gave way to mountainsides of cedar and mist. Packed together into one small bed, we read aloud The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV while sipping ginger tea. Then Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World. Then Bill Peet’s Wump World. Outside an open window, the downpour intensified.
Long after our boys had drifted off to sleep, my wife and I worked beneath a bare lightbulb. Slowly and steadily we sorted a tangle of gear and supplies into two piles. The bigger mound—things we once thought we needed but actually didn’t—would be abandoned. The smaller pile held just the essentials: everything required to survive three months amongst the world’s highest peaks.
The next day, a minivan would carry us north, over soaring passes, toward an unmarked trailhead. From there, we would set out by foot, crossing the spine of the Great Himalaya Range and plunging into that swirl of summits and contested borders where China, Pakistan and India collide. Our destination was Karsha Gompa, a thousand-year-old Buddhist monastery barnacled to cliffs above the union of two great rivers—our home until winter.
In an adjacent room, door slightly ajar, both boys slept soundly with a fan blowing on them, cheeks flushed and sheets cast aside. Chestnut-haired Bodi was seven. Angular and lanky like a caribou, he was a thoughtful boy and exceptionally bright—hesitant around strangers and a stickler for routine. Three-year-old Taj was Bodi’s foil—blond, carefree and giggly. His easy manner had drawn others to him from the earliest days.
As I gazed at our sleeping boys—mouths open, dried drool on their cheeks, so perfect, so trusting, so fragile—a fleeting shadow passed inside me. Tomorrow would mark the point of no return. What dangers lay ahead? Was this journey really in their best interests? Or was it fuelled by my own ambitions? I glanced at Christine, but said nothing. I knew she worried too, in her own ways.
Wearing a sweat-dampened tank top, blonde hair tousled, my wife was trying to coerce toothbrushes, baby wipes and hotel shampoo bottles into an uncooperative stuff sack. Sensing my pause, she pointed to the jumble of filmmaking equipment at my feet.
“I really don’t think you need that stuff. We are already overloaded. And making a film is just going to be another distraction.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, but…”
I wasn’t about to ditch the film project now. I’d already invested thousands in new equipment—Steadicam, slider rails, wireless microphones—and after training myself to use it, I’d shipped it all to Manali at great effort, with plans to make a documentary about our time at the monastery. Stubbornly, I tried to cram a bulky tripod into an overstuffed duffel, without success.
“Seriously, you should just ship it back home,” Christine said. Then she added with a sigh, “I’m sick and tired of cameras.”
“This will be different,” I promised. “It’s only me.”
But even as I said it, I knew I’d already asked too much of her.
A crew from the Travel Channel had been following our family since the day we’d left home in Canada twelve weeks earlier, filming us from dusk till dawn.I Most were kids in their twenties with tattoos and nose rings, wearing flat-brimmed ball caps and skateboarding shoes. Selfishly, I had agreed to the television project at the last minute, viewing it as a way to advance my freelance writing and photography career—as well as an opportunity to pay bi
lls during our six-month absence. An introvert by nature, Christine had been lukewarm about the idea from the start. Her greatest concern remained how it might affect our boys.
But the end was nigh. The next day most of the entourage would jet back to Los Angeles, leaving just a skeleton crew to accompany us on foot across the Himalaya. Those stragglers would leave us in peace upon reaching the monastery.
“It’s your choice,” Christine eventually shrugged. “But I think you should scrap the film stuff and concentrate on our boys.”
* * *
Half a year earlier and half a world away, in the stillness of a December dawn, I sat between Bodi and Taj at our kitchen table in Kimberley, British Columbia. A scattering of cereal boxes and an empty milk jug lay before us. In the wood stove nearby, a fire crackled to life, and as the house warmed, timbers popped and groaned. Upstairs, Christine remained in bed, exhausted and puffy-eyed—an over-stretched mother clinging to a rare moment of reprieve. Outside, snowflakes the size of butterfly wings spiralled down in darkness.
Absently spooning granola to my mouth, I scrolled through Facebook, my phone casting an eerie blue light over the boys. Of course everything that floated across the screen was trivial, mindless crap. But I kept on digging, driven by the same urge that draws the beachcomber to the ocean, or the gold panner to the river; the eternal hope that somewhere amongst all that crap might lie a treasure.
“DAD!” Bodi screamed, interrupting my trance. “Did you hear a single word I just said?”
“Bo-Bee!” Tiny Taj shouted, stabbing a rubber spoon overhead and spilling Cheerios across fuzzy pyjamas, celebrating fathomless love for an older brother who increasingly ignored him.
Pushing the phone aside, I tucked a strand of hair behind Bodi’s ear and kissed his silken cheek. “Tell me again,” I whispered.
Painstakingly, Bodi enumerated the distance to every planet in our solar system. The numbers were almost certainly accurate, as Bodi has a mind for such details, but as I listened, I grew aware of a deeper truth—I hadn’t heard a word he’d previously said, despite the fact that he was sitting right beside me and despite the fact that he stood among the most precious things in my life.
With unsettling frequency, I seemed to be drifting through life with my consciousness untethered. I lost track of conversations. It was not uncommon to drive somewhere, only to find myself unable to recall anything of the journey. In the supermarket, I wandered the aisles, unsure what I had come for. I had even lost the ability to read several consecutive pages of a book without Googling something. My brain felt constantly ravenous, its capacity for concentration and contemplation gone. The result was a state of never quite feeling caught up, of permanently fractured awareness.
The situation had worsened following the purchase of an iPhone. Now instead of reaching for my wife at dawn, I reached for the bedside table. Ungodly stretches were passed in the privacy of the bathroom, scrolling through Twitter in private, while large portions of my work days vanished into email and Internet wanderings. At the playground, I flicked through Instagram in the company of other preoccupied parents while my boys dangled hopelessly in swings.
On top of that, since the birth of our children, both Christine and I had grown increasingly socially isolated. Between sleepless nights, runny noses, emails, business trips, mortgage payments and all the other tiny, imperceptible assaults of modern life, it felt like we were slipping underwater. And while our marriage itself wasn’t in threat of capsizing, it wasn’t all smooth sailing either. We bickered, went to counselling, and then bickered some more.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard famously noted, and while I worried about our deteriorating situation, modern malaise is unremarkable. Inescapable, some might suggest. And we had more immediate concerns.
Three years earlier, on a blustery November afternoon, Christine and I had taken Bodi to a child development center in a neighboring town, where in a cinder-block basement, behind a soundproof window, we watched our son endure a battery of tests. Later, a hushed team of specialists gathered to deliver an opaque diagnosis of PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified. It would take years for me to grasp the full implications, but the synopsis was clear—Bodi experienced the world differently than most.
In the intervening years, Christine and I had tried everything we could, enrolling him in a palette of interventions, including social skills coaching, behavioral therapy, speech pathology, counseling and occupational therapy. Like all parents, we wanted to provide our son with every opportunity and possibility we could, helping him grow into everything he was capable of being. But despite these relentless efforts, I remained haunted by a vague sense we were somehow losing ground.
But it wasn’t until that quiet winter morning, as Bodi bawled and Taj sprayed Cheerios across the table, that I saw the years slipping past and our boys growing older. I sensed a million opportunities lost and I recognized the role my own lack of attention was playing. And I understood that if there was to be any hope of truly connecting with my eldest son, of deciphering all the opaque messages he left scattered in his wake and bringing to light all the beauty concealed within, I needed to be goddamned present.
Something had to change.
For years, Christine and I had batted around the idea of taking our family to live in a Himalayan Buddhist monastery—we envisaged somewhere far from the tentacles of modernity. But it had always been a sort of fantasy, something that might happen someday.
Well, on that midwinter morning, as butterfly wings fluttered against the dark windows, I sensed that someday had arrived.
Christine—a truly amazing woman—required almost no convincing. She once spent an entire winter in the basement of a Calgary community hall, studying the complex rituals and iconography of Tibetan Buddhism, and ever since had harbored a desire to experience the ancient tradition first-hand. Within days, plans began taking shape.
Friends and family suggested we were overreacting. Dragging two young children halfway around the world, to live in uncertain (but certainly rudimentary) conditions, because of a vague notion that we all might be better off for it? Why not something slightly more normal? A cruise? A few weeks at a Mexican all-inclusive? If it was adventure we sought, what about a month in Costa Rica, where we could recharge in comfort and safety. Fair enough; I saw their point.
But our journey was never meant to be an escape. Nor for that matter was it a search for enlightenment. Our plans were simply driven by instinct, by self-preservation. It felt as if we had slipped into the ocean’s depths, and our only choice was to swim for all we were worth toward a distant, obscure light—something we hoped was the surface.
* * *
It was past midnight when Christine finally clicked off the bulb in our Manali cottage, and we crawled together beneath the thin sheets of a hard bed. I held her for a time, before humidity and heat drove us apart. In the stillness that followed, wind rattled panes. A gecko darted across cinder blocks. When sleep came it was fitful and plagued by the recurring sensation that I was falling. At some point Bodi screamed in the darkness and Christine leapt up to comfort him.
Two duffel bags sat beside the cottage door. Inside we’d stuffed a few warm clothes, a tent and sleeping bags, headlamps, toiletries, a first aid kit, two small stuff sacks crammed with Lego, two child carrier backpacks, a bag of school supplies, a handful of books, one small camera and our journals.
Everything else we left behind.
I. The resulting series, Big Crazy Family Adventure, aired on the Travel Channel.
1 THE SHALLOWS
As we embrace technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service.
—Michael Harris, The End of Absence
1 UNTETHERING
Kimberley
British Columbia
Like a tiger stalking prey, t
hree-year-old Taj slipped into our bedroom before dawn, stealthily crossing the squeaky floor without a sound. Then he pounced. Christine’s yelp raised Bodi, who appeared softly at the door, like a mouse.
“Can we do our screen time?” he pleaded, referring to the pair’s daily thirty-minute allotment.
“Puh-leeze?” begged Taj.
“You know this is the last time, right?” Christine demanded. “We are leaving in a few hours. And I don’t want any arguments when I say it’s time to turn the TV off.”
“OK, Mom. Thanks.”
Christine clicked on the television, and the pair settled in our bed—a sea of duvet separating them, because Bodi couldn’t abide Taj’s fidgeting. As I hurried downstairs to brew coffee, I was aware that neither had any idea what was coming. How could they?
Of course Christine and I had discussed our approaching journey with them, but comprehension of such distance and time remained beyond their grasp. Their only foundation in the months ahead would be us.
The television crew soon arrived, paper coffee cups in hand, frustrated they’d missed our rising. They’d landed in Kimberley three days earlier, alongside the first robins of spring, jetting up from Los Angeles as snow receded from the local Purcell Mountains. Young and enthusiastic, they’d trampled purple crocuses behind our home while smoking cigarettes and drinking bottled water. For most, Canada represented their first trip abroad.
There were sixteen in total (a shocking number to us): three camera operators, two audio technicians, four producers (“Pro-douchers,” an Aussie camera operator whispered during introductions), two production assistants, a data manager and four doing who-knows-what. Wes, a young Australian, was in charge. Although he looked like the front man for a boy band, with gelled hair and dashing looks, I genuinely liked him, for he radiated enthusiasm.