From Different Continents

It's been a while since I've posted anything. For the last few weeks, I have been traveling, celebrating, grieving, ailing, hugging, crying, contemplating, eating, and sleeping. My head is spinning. I have been in so many time zones, and places, and states of emotion. But now I have landed in Seattle and I get to stay put for a little while, screw my head back on, and remotely resume my work at the law school for the remainder of the semester. I miss the JSW students and the mountain, but it was so good to go to New York and be with all of my family there, and celebrate my niece's wedding while grieving my sister's death. Extensive emotional exercise. I am still processing it all.

And Jay is still in Bhutan, so I get to experience it through him for a while longer.

 

Before I left Bhutan, our friend Sangay suggested hiking up to a temple above the law school and lighting butter lamps in honor of my sister Barbara. It was a lovely thing to do, and Sangay had arranged for them to have real yak butter in the candles. Our friend David also came, and she arranged to bring two birthday cakes with us, to celebrate David’s son’s 30^th birthday from afar with the young monks who lived there. 

We had a very peaceful sit inside the temple after lighting the candles, and it was a lovely moment for me to just let all of the emotion and sadness and stress and distance I had been feeling for the previous weeks just wash over me. When I got up, I realized I had tears and long strings of snot dripping off my face, having purged a lot of what had been inside my head and heart. 

Then we got to eat birthday cake with a dozen or so young monks, who were thrilled to have big hunks of chocolate cake in their hands.

 

The day before I left was Teacher’s Day, which I didn’t realize is an important holiday in Bhutan. Students kept asking me when we celebrate Teacher’s Day in the US, and all I could say was, “um, we don’t?” The students worked many hours to plan this half day festival, with carnival games and prizes, and contests that the whole campus participated in, either playing or cheering raucously. I laughed until I cried at some of the happenings, especially watching some of the most somber faculty racing around trying to stomp the balloons tied onto each others’ ankles. And the eating contests! Brave teams of students and staff worked their way through kilos of watermelon, plates of hard-boiled eggs, packages of dry noodles, liters of soda, until I could barely watch them without wanting to throw up! I was impressed that the students got the kempo, the head monk of the campus, to be part of the hands-behind-your-back-eat-everything-on-the-plate-in-front-of-you contest. 

After all that, the students performed the dances that they had been practicing all week. They were good! I was very happy I got to celebrate this holiday (that we should also be celebrating in the US) with everyone.

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While I've been journeying, Jay has been continuing to teach, and explore. He sent this missive out last week:

One surprise our adventure, for me, has been how little bandwidth I have had for communicating, compared to my aspiration. And I miss it and find myself getting a little down when I am not communicating. But one way or another life fills up. It is a combination of work—I am after all teaching a class I have never taught before--and the extra time it takes to navigate life here—and my lifelong tendency to be ambitious beyond the obvious reality. 

Dori is back in NY with her family, as you know from her blog post. It hasn’t been that long, but that, too, has taken adjustment for me. We have spent countless hours debriefing about all things Bhutan, our students here, the older generation of Bhutanese that have a very different outlook on the world than the 20 somethings we get to hang out with. I miss my life’s journey partner right now.

So. I promised I would sit down and get something out to The Tribe, because I know it will fill me full of peace.

We have access to a car through the Karuna Foundation, who funded much of the cost of the beautiful library building here at JSW, and we can borrow their resident car when no Foundation folks are here. But that access is about to go away, so David and I, and our JSW colleague, Sangay, have gone to Thimphu last weekend and again yesterday (Saturday), to get away from Paro valley, enjoy food and broader shopping options in Thimphu, and to hike in the mountains surrounding “the city” - which is only about 100,000 people and gets by, remarkably, without a single traffic light. Sangay has lived in Thimphu for many years, and is a prolific hiker/trekker, so she is eager to show us her many pathways.

Last weekend we first hiked up to the monastery at Phajoding Sheydrup Ling Buddhist Institute, originally established in 1224. Like all monasteries in Bhutan, it is remote. A 3-mile hike one-way, and 3000 foot elevation gain to 12,000 feet. David and Sangay more accurately go on a “trot” instead of a "hike", as Dori has observed. When Dori was here, we would wander back at our own pace, looking at plants, flowers, and birds. I am now the solo caboose, which is fine. They trot I walk.

Once at the monastery, we met an extended family of locals who were there with a very shy four-year-old to celebrate his birthday. They invited us to join them for sweet milk-tea served by the monks, then we visited the temple itself (you will see no pictures of the inside of temples from our journey, as that is prohibited), and then accepted the invitation to join the same group for lunch, in a room off of the monks’ “mess”, where the monks (maybe a hundred or so) were having lunch sitting on cushions on the floor at long, low tables. Our lunch party was off the kitchen; the group had arranged to have lunch cooked by the monks because it is considered a particular blessing to have a meal cooked by monks. Very kind and welcoming group of folks, and the food was really good (and crazy spicey as usual), and milk tea was lovely. I am attaching a picture of the courtyard that I like. I wish I had taken a pic of our lunch, but that gets weird intruding into a natural act of graciousness.

The next day we took another hike (trot) to another monastery, Dodeydra Buddhist Institute. This place housed older monks—no little boy monks like the previous day—all of whom have learned the beginning rituals and chants that the boy monks learn in their first three years, and are engaged in the more serious study of Buddhist teaching. This was less of a vertical hike to a beautiful collection of buildings tucked back into a verdant valley, with only a glimpse of Thimphu town down below. Dodeydra was built in the 12^thcentury. Beautiful temples, and very magical setting. 

long-distance view of the monastery as we approached

one of the main temples; note the painting on the boulder that this particular temple was built into

On our way back, as it started to misty rain on us, we got to watch a tree full of gray langurs, a really amazing primate that has been spotted next to JSW as well. We got to watch them from maybe 15 yards away, clambering around in the tree with their little babies for five minutes or more.

So one of the trends here, you can see, is that many (maybe most) local trekking trails have a Lhakhang (temple/monastery) at the end of it. Which I think contributes to the culture of speedy hiking: most people are on the trail not to look at the trees, birds and plants; they are going to the temple to ask for a blessing or to make an offering and give tribute. It’s a very lovely thing; that trekking is bound up with the spiritual, and that is something, too, to write about. Everything here is bound up in the spiritual (Buddhist). Another time.

Yesterday, since we need to give up the car (and therefore give up the easy access to Thimphu and its more robust grocery shopping and great loaves of healthy bread), we went back to Thimphu Friday night, to get an early start on a morning hike, go shop again, and then return to JSW by Saturday evening. Instead of a Lhakhang destination hike, we went to the national park north of Thimphu, Jigme Dorji National Park. Sangay was hesitant to suggest it, because this venture had no destination, but it was wonderful, felt like home in the mountains of Washington. 

For a half mile or so on the trail along a river we would see folks happily having cookouts and such, but after that we were the only humans on the trail, on a gloriously beautiful weekend morning. Gorgeous river; I got to take a dunk in it, it was so sunny and warm. The river of course is snow and glacier melt at 9,000 feet. 

It is now my Sunday late afternoon, and I feel great having “talked” to you all. But I have work to do, and David, Sangay and I are going to take a walk further up the mountain before it gets dark (or rains, as is it threatening to do).

Peace and blessings to all