Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [80]
I dream more often of Bhutan itself. I am walking through narrow green valleys with rivers rushing through them. The mountains rise up so steeply on all sides, I have to look up and up to find the sky above. I walk through forests at night to a ring of dark-fringed fir trees, to a rocky pool beneath a waterfall, to open spaces where I can see the stars thrown across the deep blue-black sky. In my dreams, clouds climb down from the sky, fill up ravines, melt into fields, darkening the green of the rice and the maize. I watch the mist and tell myself I am dreaming, the world cannot possibly be so beautiful, but I wake up and it is.
We walk through the forests and fields around Kanglung, Shakuntala carrying a sketch pad or camera, I my journal. I am enraptured by the space, the size of the mountains, the stretch of the sky. I am always wondering what is beyond the next ridge. It is only about 150 kilometers as the crow flies from the Indian border in the south to the snowpeaks in the north, and yet it would take years to get to know the lay of the land by foot, to learn what is hidden in the folds of these mountains. I want to see what the crow sees.
We turn off main trails, following narrower tracks into forests, through fields. I am no longer dismayed at the way a wide, worn trail can splinter into a dozen smaller paths, one of which winds down a slope and disappears at a log. We climb over the log, slosh across a stream and another path picks us up, carries us through rice paddies, to someone’s backdoor. A dog chases us around the kitchen garden into a forest, where a path brings us to the road. There are always large stones to sit and rest on, trees to sit and rest under, there is no restricted place, no lines and bars separating what clearly belongs to someone from what belongs to everyone.
We pass through villages where the entire community is at work in one family’s fields, or where everyone has gathered to help build a house, plastering the woven bamboo walls with mud. Each village seems a world unto itself, a tightly knit, closely related, interdependent community, with an elected gup who as acts the headman, settling minor disputes and keeping whatever community records exist. A wealthier family may have paid for the grinding stones to extract oil from mustard seeds, or a manual threshing machine, but these are often used by everyone. Everyone knows what everyone else has—their belongings, their business, their plans, their problems. It is not possible here to close your doors to your neighbors, to live in tiny isolated units, nodding impersonally as you pass each other. In fact, the privacy that we so zealously guard in the West would be fatal here, where a mountain stands between one village and the next, between one village and the nearest hospital, wireless office, shop.
We emerge from an oak forest one afternoon into the courtyard of a very old temple. The paintings in the vestibule have darkened with age, the reds and blues becoming deeper and richer instead of lighter. The door is padlocked, we cannot go inside, but we circumambulate the temple clockwise, turning the worn prayer wheels built into a bracket along the outer walls. The prayer wheels are inscribed with Om Mani Padme Hum, Hail Jewel in the Lotus, the mantra for the benefit of all sentient beings. You accumulate merit by turning the prayer wheels—if you do it mindfully. I spin the wheels but my mind usually spins off elsewhere.
Scattered readings and occasional attempts to meditate will not make me mindful. I read the theory and I think yes, this makes sense, but my life—my mind—goes on as usual. While I am actually reading the texts, I think I understand. Nothing in the world is permanent, everything changes, breaks down, dies, and this is why attachment to things in this world causes suffering. The Eightfold Path is the way to nonattachment. Then I pick up an anthology of Romantic poetry,