This time last year I trekked the Everest Base Camp trail in Nepal.
There are no words for what’s happened to Nepalis the past few days. Not only have they lost homes, a way of life, and their livelihoods––their culture and history have been leveled too. The loss, too big to process, will take time. It will be up to each one of us to find beauty in this devastation. Unearthing it will take “small steps,” like my guide Kalyan would tell me on the trail. “Slowly and slowly,” he’d remind me when I lost my breath. When I got tired he would say to walk ten steps and breathe ten times.
Slowly and slowly. Step by step. Forward. Sure. One foot in front of the other. With gratitude that my friends in Nepal are all alive, I dedicate this post to them. The mountain to climb now is very different. You can’t climb a mountain in one day. It takes time. It’s important to know what trail to take. To listen to your body. To go slow, and to eat. Rest when it all gets to be too much. Celebrate the twists and turns and have faith. Trust and believe that we will always have enough. Just enough. Enough light to get to the next day. Enough strength to make the next decision. The wisdom to know when it’s time to rest. This is my prayer.
This time last year the largest disaster on Everest to date occurred. An avalanche took the lives of sixteen sherpas. We witnessed the grief of the sherpas and their families as Kaylan’s life-long friend was among the missing.
4/24/14
Today when I walked on the suspension bridge for the first time. I felt like I was flying. My heart is light and the experience felt so beautiful that I thanked God for His creation, even as the avalanche brought about so many needless deaths. The eyes of the stupa remind me to awaken. To let the old ways go. The ways that no longer serve me. The key will be love, light and liberation.
4/26/14
We found out today that the Nepali government decided this year would be a black year. For the first time in history no climber will be allowed to summit Everest this season. There is a steady stream of helicopters airlifting the climbers from Base Camp to Loukla. We’ve been constantly flown over by helicopters shuttling climbers out, and there is a consistent parade of Yaks carrying supplies in one direction, down the mountain—back to Loukla. Once hopeful climbers now taking flights back to Kathmandu.
In the center of Kathmandu there is a statue of the first female sherpa who summited Everest only a few years ago. On the descent she died. When she got into trouble on the mountain the weather got bad and nobody could get to her for nineteen days. She died of exposure.
I’m trying to put the pieces together of such things. Great victories coupled with great sorrow. The answer to the riddle lies in the balance of nature, the balance of life. Life’s duality. It seems as though the Nepali people I meet believe they brought on the avalanche somehow. A people who won’t kill chickens in the shadow of their holy mountain. A mountain no one is allowed to climb because it is believed that a god lives under it and to walk on the mountain would be like walking on his head and this would anger the god and visit bad luck upon them. Prayer wheels here invite you to spin them in order to purify your soul. And I ask myself what a purified soul would look like. Is it ever really free of the evils in the Buddhist Wheel of Life — ignorance, anger and lust. Does Buddhist purification mean to know in one’s soul that even the gods are transient and that is why the Wheel of Life is held in the claws of the god of death?
As I put one foot in front of the other on the Everest Base Camp trail I am meeting myself. A self who now knows that magic originates and blossoms inside of myself and that home is wherever my heart is. No longer any particular place. I am, it seems, at home in the world. The very top of the world.
LOVE
-Namche Bazzar 4/27/2014
Love is the wind
It might fade,
But always blows
There’s no containing it
No stopping it
And it can choose to
Blow in different
Directions.
4/27/2014 Khumjung
Meeting the grieving widow of one of the sherpas and her children and their grandmother was overwhelming. Now, with her husband dead, they have no way to make a living. After the Puja, a prayer ritual, they will take her husband’s ashes––the cremation has already happened high in the Himalayas––and fashion sacred Buddha statues out of them. We briefly helped keep a vigil with the widow in her home, in a room alight with candles. So many candles. The candles are lit to purify her husband’s spirit so that he might find peace in heaven. This is true love. A home filled with happy memories. The death of such a love overwhelms me.
As I hugged her, in that moment when I briefly shared her pain, giving what I could to help ease it, a strange sense of peace washed over me. True love never dies. Life is beautiful and joyous and I prayed for the day when she can smile again. I pray for them to get through the next few days and ask for God’s help to help them survive.
Pray for Nepal.
