Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [122]
I unpack my luggage in the Thimphu guest house, shop for supplies to take to Kanglung, drink thick bitter coffee at the Swiss Bakery and write in my journal. The sky turns milky white one morning and heavy clotted snow flakes begin to fall. By early evening, the town is ghostly white, and a hard, lean moon hangs in the pale wintry sky. I return to the guest house and am startled to find an American woman in the kitchen, boiling water for tea. Her name is Julie, and she is visiting her cousin, an engineer working in Thimphu. We sit in front of the electric heater, watching steam curl out of our mugs, and I tell her about my trip to Canada.
“I can see how you would feel displaced after here,” she says. “It’s so beautiful and so quiet. It must have been a shock to the system after two years.”
It takes a long time to find the true words, to put them in order, to tell the whole story. It is not just this or that, the mountains the people, it is me and the way I can be here, the freedom to walk unafraid into the great dark night. It is a hundred thousand things and I could never trace or tell all the connections and reflections, the shadows and echoes and secret relations between them.
The snow melts the next day, water dripping everywhere in the brilliant light. Julie asks if I will come with her to visit a monastery at the north end of the Thimphu valley. We ride out in a taxi, past the dzong and the walled palace of Dechencholing, around a mountain to the end of the road where we sit on a rock by the river beneath Cheri monastery. The sun warms our cold stiff fingers, and a raven in an oak tree calls to its mate. There is something magical about the place, Julie says, it reminds her of a wishing place she knew as a child. We try to figure out what makes it so: the end of the road, the bluegreen river, the narrow path that leads north through forested valleys to the snowpeaks, the temple built into the face of the mountain, the deep and complete silence of the rocks, the earth, the trees. I pick up a small blue stone and examine it, smiling to myself. “I wish to stay in Bhutan,” I say, and I see Tshewang’s face exactly.
“Really?” Julie says. “Do you think that will happen? I mean ...” She takes a big breath. “Look, Jamie, I hope you won’t mind if I say this, but I don’t think that’s a very wise thing to wish for. For one thing, you’ll never really belong here. Even if you got married to a Bhutanese, even if you stay here for years and years. It won’t ever be your place, if you know what I mean.”
I don’t. “It’s home to me now,” I say.
“Well, yes, it might feel like that, and I know I’ve only been here a few weeks, and you’ve been here for two years, but it seems to me that this might be a hard place to belong to, I mean really belong to. I think you would have to change profoundly in order to live here.”
“People emigrate all the time,” I say. “They leave their homes, their identities, they pack up and start new lives in countries far away. People do it every day. They leave their homes, go forth from their countries, the sons of the Buddhas all practice this way,” I quote from a Buddhist prayer.
“No,” she says. “People don’t emigrate here. At least not that I know of. The way you feel now—well, I can understand the way you feel now, because it’s so beautiful and it’s so different from where you came from, but that feeling won’t last, and then—”
“Why shouldn’t it last?”
“How can it?” she says. “Someday, you will wake up and