by Kim Dinan
We reached the village of Upper Pisang in the late afternoon. A wall of prayer wheels marked the center of town. I dropped my backpack and stared up at the snowy peak of Annapurna II. A mighty giant of a mountain, it blocked the dropping sun.
Behind me, a weathered old woman walked clockwise around the wall, reciting the Om mani padme hūm mantra and spinning the wheels. Turning, I watched her for a moment. She looked up at me, and her dark eyes settled on my face. They were warm eyes, and kind, but I felt like an intruder and looked away. It seemed to me that out here you could not tell where spiritual practice stopped and life began because they blended together so completely. The act of living was devotion. I wanted my life to be more like that.
The village of Upper Pisang clung to the mountainside in tiers. Ahead of me, Brian climbed an uneven stone staircase toward a scattering of teahouses. Hefting my backpack onto my shoulders, I followed.
At the top of the stairs a woman, her cheeks a ruddy pink against her dark Tibetan skin, swept the stoop in front of a single-story building. “Seven hundred rupees,” she said. We paid her and dropped our backpacks in our windowless room, then climbed a set of dusty old steps even higher above town to a five-hundred-year-old gompa to watch the sun set. Brian settled onto a bench—a plank of wood nailed to two tree stumps—and I sat down next to him and looked out over the village toward the mountains beyond.
“It’s so beautiful up here,” I said in the same revered whisper I’d used at the Mani wall. The sky behind the mountains dripped in cold blues and purples. I zipped up my coat and buried my chin inside for warmth. A biting wind had begun to blow, and a strand of prayer flags whipped from the top of the gompa.
“I know,” said Brian. He closed his eyes and held his face up to the sinking light, then shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. “It’s incredible.” He dropped his voice and said, “I never thought I would be here.”
“How so?” I asked, unsure if he spoke literally or metaphorically.
“Well, you know, I grew up in the suburbs in Ohio. Everyone I knew lived in Ohio. My family vacationed in Indiana, and sometimes, if we were traveling far, to Michigan. I didn’t know anything about the world.”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d had a similar childhood, though my family had not really vacationed at all.
“When we moved to Oregon I remember that I could physically feel the distance between me and everyone I had ever known. Oregon was as exotic to me as landing on the moon.”
“Yep, me too.” We’d discussed this all before, our origin stories.
“But now we’re in Nepal, sleeping in beds that smell like sweat in rooms without electricity, shitting in squat toilets, and walking through some of the oldest civilizations in human history. And the world feels smaller and less scary to me now than it did back then when the entire boundary of my life stretched from Ohio into Indiana.”
That was the irony of travel. The bigger the distance between you and the familiar grew, the smaller and safer and friendlier the world felt. As I sat there among the Himalayan Mountains, it wasn’t the first time I’d considered how grateful I was that life could be so much bigger than our own confining perceptions of it.
When the sun disappeared, we reluctantly made our way back down the steps toward our teahouse. Candles flickered in the common room where other trekkers sat sipping tea and talking in low voices. Brian went to join them. Lingering in the doorway, I turned my face toward the sun’s soft afterglow and watched until the stars emerged like torches in the sky, offering light until the sun returned again.
That night we huddled down in our separate, single beds. Our room was so void of light that I could not see my hand though I held it inches from my face. There was something I needed to say, something I should have already said. The darkness made it easier to say it.
“Brian?” I whispered.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What?” he ruffled around in his sleeping bag and rolled his body toward mine. “For what?”
My eyes scanned the darkness searching for his, though it was too dark to find him. Earlier in the day, I’d walked a good number of miles thinking about the devotional singer on the airplane to Delhi, how he’d so easily and sincerely apologized to me when he’d wrongly guessed my age. When I was wrong my stubbornness often kept me from admitting it. But I wanted to be the kind of person that apologized when I hurt people. “For everything I’ve put you through,” I said. “I never wanted to hurt you. You’re the person I love the most in this world.” My voice cracked. “It’s not fair that I hurt you.”
Tears formed in my eyes and I buried my head in my sleeping bag. I wasn’t looking for sympathy, and I knew Brian would try to comfort me if he thought I was upset.
“Are you crying?”
“No.”
In the darkness I heard Brian unzip his sleeping bag and take four quick steps across the room. He settled on the edge of my bed and I scooted over to make room for him.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m not mad about it, okay? I know you were only doing what you needed to do.” His hand probed the bed like a blind man’s until it landed on my hip. “The truth is,” he continued, “I needed that time too. I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask for it, but I needed it too.”
“Yeah, but…” I swiped my sleeve across my eyes. “I forced it on you. I forced this entire trip on you.”
“Yeah, you did. And you know what? It’s the best thing that I’ve ever done. I’m grateful that you insisted on this trip. I’d never have done it on my own.” Swallowing my tears, I waited for him to continue. “Listen, we both hurt each other. Okay? We had our own ways of doing it, but both of us are to blame.”
I shook my head against my pillow; it was the only sound in the room. Since our reconciliation in India I’d been carrying around a question that needed answered. “Brian?” I swallowed hard. “Why didn’t you just leave?”
He sighed and shifted his weight at the edge of the bed. “I almost did,” he said. “But when I thought about it I realized that I love you, and we’d built this whole life together, and if we were able to work through the mess that our relationship would, hopefully, be better for it. Things were bad, but not so bad to quit. Because that would be final…” His voice trailed off before he said, quietly, “and I wasn’t ready for that yet.”
Patting the bed next to me, I unzipped my sleeping bag and spread it over us like a blanket. “Lay down.” I burrowed my head into the pit of Brian’s arm and spoke into the warmth of his skin. My words were muffled, “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I just need to say it.”
Brian tightened his arm around me. “I’m sorry too.”
Chapter 15
The village of Manang had one road, a handful of teahouses, and five skinny horses that milled about. Though it had a population of only six thousand five hundred people, it was one of the largest cities on the entire Annapurna Circuit. Other trekkers told us that Manang had at least one teahouse with hot showers and a bakery that served real coffee. It sounded like the perfect place to take a break.
We were celebrating an important day. Exactly one year ago I’d attended my last day of work. From the dusty streets of Manang we squinted upward and could just make out a splash of color, Praken Gompa, perched like an eagle’s nest against the Tibetan brown of the mountains. A holy woman lived there. Those that made the effort to visit her received a blessing for the bargain price of one hundred rupees. It seemed like the perfect way to mark the occasion.
The trail up to the holy woman was so steep that we had to bend forward almost ninety degrees or risk falling backward. My calves screamed at the effort. “So much for a rest day,” said Brian when we stopped to catch our breath.
We trudged upward in the thin air. I kept an even pace, breathing so intensely that I could feel the full capacity of my lungs as they expanded inside of my b
ody. As we climbed, I was aware of every tendon, every muscle, and the blood that pumped with purpose through my veins.
A weathered wooden gate eventually greeted us, cracked as though expecting our arrival. The gompa was carved from the mountainside, like a cave, and a white stupa stood proudly in front, prayer flags waving in the wind. The view from up there was tremendous, the Annapurna range snow-covered and mighty, and the village of Manang looked like a miniature model of itself far below.
We ducked beneath a low door frame to enter the gompa and climbed a flight of uneven stone stairs toward a small room. At the top, we took off our shoes in silence and peeked our heads inside. A woman, a Buddhist nun wrapped in a crimson robe, waved us in. She motioned for us to sit on the floor across from her.
She offered us warm tea. The air in the room was spiced with incense. There were no sounds but my breath, Brian’s steady breath beside me, and the clinking of our teacups as we placed them on their saucers. Because silence was a state so clearly natural to her, I felt at peace. Had it been a year ago, I would have tried to take control of the situation. I might have said, “Hello, we’ve come because we heard that you give blessings.” But now I was content to wait and watch, to let things unfold without my intervening.
An altar filled the southern wall of the room, overflowing with burning candles and photos of the Dalai Lama. Gifts from around the world were piled near it: a calendar four years out of date, a clock in the shape of Australia, and, inexplicably, a navy lanyard with the name of a corporate conference printed in a serious white font.
The holy woman sat cross-legged in front of a rustic table. How strange to live on a mountainside, I thought, sitting in silence, waiting all day for people to arrive. Was she alone up here? Was she lonely?
After some time, I broke the silence. “Do you get many visitors?” She said yes and gestured to the altar and then to a metal bowl that sat on the table, filled with folded rupees.
“People come a long way to see you,” I said. “We have come a very long way.”
She only nodded.
We fell into silence once again. When I finished my tea I set it beside me on the floor. Seeing that my cup was empty, she called me to the table to receive my blessing. As I kneeled in front of the holy woman she tied a colorful string around my neck. Her lips moved, chanting a prayer, and her hands held a holy text. She reached out and touched it to my forehead while pointing to the string around my neck. “For good luck,” she said and waved her hand in the direction of the mountains. “This keep you safe.”
“Dhanyabad,” I replied. Thank you.
Exactly one year ago I packed up my desk and bid farewell to my coworkers. Certainly I prayed for good luck that day, anxious in my office chair, perched on the very edge of changing. Then, I couldn’t have guessed that with a full rotation of the earth I would be here, on my knees before a holy woman on a Himalayan mountaintop. “Good luck,” she said, and they were the same words I received from my coworkers a year before as they paraded me out the door with cupcakes and email addresses and tokens of safekeeping, the same words that Michele and Glenn had written in their yellow envelope letter. “Good luck,” they’d said. “Good luck,” she said. I bowed my head in reverie to receive it.
• • •
We walked for days, rising early with the sun, eating banana porridge and Tibetan bread, smearing zinc onto our noses to protect us from the sun. All of the days were the same, and all were different, as we put one foot in front of the other.
Sometimes we talked and talked, about our life back in Portland, or the people we gave yellow envelope money to, or our trip and what we hoped for when the trip ended. Sometimes we did not talk at all, but the silence between us was so different than the silence that had haunted me in South America, the silence that had screamed you’re lonely and had only served to illuminate the great distance between us. This silence was warm and filled with understanding. I am here, and you are here, and between us is a place we both belong.
One afternoon we came across an old monastery, set so inconspicuously off the dirt road that we almost missed it completely. But the makeshift fence caught my attention, and I wandered over to take a look. “There’s a sign that says all are welcome. Do you think we can go in?”
“It doesn’t look open,” Brian said, peeking through a slot in the wooden fence with me.
He pulled back from the fence and surveyed our surroundings. I turned too but saw no one, just a chalky, vacant road that disappeared into the horizon. Brian made up his mind. “It wouldn’t hurt anything to go in,” he said, and then stepped through an opening in the fence where a board hung loose. He disappeared completely behind the wooden barrier before I stepped through the slats after him.
The floor creaked as we walked into a cavernous, musty room. I blinked in the low light, trying to make out the shadows around me. Above me, red and blue textiles hand-stitched with the mantra Om mani padme hūm waved hauntingly from the ceiling. A giant golden Buddha sat cross-legged behind glass in the back of the room, and large, framed photographs of the Dalai Lama hung on the walls. Candles burned in iron goblets and cast jumping shadows on the ground.
“Brian, come look at this,” I said, turning to wave him over to the glass case I faced. Inside it were stacks of documents bound by wooden blocks and weathered string.
“I wonder what they say?”
Behind us a smooth voice responded, “Those are ancient Tibetan prayers.”
Brian and I both jumped at the unexpected sound and turned to see a young monk standing ten feet away from us, barely visible in the shadows. He stepped into the center of the room, moving as silently as a ghost.
“The Dalai Lama stayed at this monastery sixty years ago when he fled Tibet,” said the monk. “He escaped on foot through the mountains. And those documents were smuggled out of Tibet with him.” The boy gestured toward the north. “Today the journey would take five days in a jeep.”
Brian and I both nodded, stunned by his presence and feeling awkward about our trespassing.
We stood dumbly in our puffy coats and hiking pants and stared at the monk. Staring back at us, the monk, in his orange robe, stood like a dancer—straight and light. “I’m sorry we came in without permission,” I said finally. “Is it okay that we are here?”
The boy smiled. “This room is where we pray every morning. You can come tomorrow and pray with us if you’d like. We begin at 6:00 a.m.” He paused before adding, “Everyone is welcome here. We are glad you have come.”
I looked up at the boy and studied him. He was perhaps fourteen years old with glowing skin, sharp cheekbones, and deep brown eyes. His black hair was cut into a stubbly buzz. Around his neck hung a black bandana printed with white skulls and crossbones.
When Wendy and I were on our whirlwind tour of India we’d visited Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile. We’d been lucky, arriving, by accident, just two days before Tibetan Uprising Day. On the day of the celebrations, a sea of monks dressed in orange robes had gathered in front of the Dalai Lama’s monastery. Up on a temporary stage, a group of men clutched Tibetan flags, gave speeches, and sang songs.
Many of the monks pulled out cell phones and iPads to snap photos, and I’d been surprised and a little sad that the modern world had encroached upon such ancient traditions. But I did not get to decide who withheld from modern conveniences and who partook in them. Monks could have iPads just the same as a girl from Ohio by way of Oregon could board a plane and find herself at the home of the Dalai Lama among a sea of monks.
Over his orange robe this young monk wore a striped knockoff sweatshirt that I’d seen sold at the tourist shops in Kathmandu. He was a twenty-first-century teenager living a fifth-century tradition. And just as I’d been at the Dalai Lama’s monastery, I was struck again with the sense of how little I knew about the world and all of the lives that are li
ved within it.
“Do you live here?” asked Brian.
“Yes, I do.”
“And you study here?”
He nodded. “Our monastery is five hundred eighty-two years old. For hundreds of years, monks from the Mustang villages studied here. But over time the monasteries closed and the monks had to travel to Kathmandu or India to pursue their spiritual studies.” The boy walked into the center of the room and pointed toward the door. “And once they left most of them did not return. But two years ago we built a school here. Now the monks do not have to leave.”
“Is this where you learned to speak English?” Brian asked.
The monk nodded again, and his cheeks flared pink, clearly pleased and suddenly bashful. “Come upstairs,” he said. “I have something to show you.”
We climbed an old wooden staircase and stepped gingerly onto the sagging clay roof of the monastery. “This is the best view in the village,” said the monk.
“Oh, wow,” I uttered as I walked to the edge of the building. Beyond me, colorful prayer flags flapped in the crisp evening air, frayed and dulled by the relentless mountain wind. The stone houses of the village below looked miniature from our vantage on the rooftop. The Annapurna and Dhaulagiri Mountains rose up in imposing beauty toward the south. And to the north sat the sweeping expanse of Tibet, lost now and maybe forever to the churning wheel of China.
Brian walked to where I stood and looked out over the village with me.
“I have never been anywhere so magical,” he said. We stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the light play on the mountains. Brian put his hands in his pockets and produced two pieces of candy. He handed one to me, and a silent knowing passed between us.