Open Threads

I slept most of the way up the mountains to meet my nomad friends in Aba Prefecture last week. The evening before had gone fairly late into the night (or early into the morning) and in spite of the bumpy switchbacks I was asleep for the first five hours. I stuffed myself with twice-cooked pork and rice at the dusty roadside lunch stand. Further down the road I noticed the snowmelt that had run down the wooded hillside into the shadow of the lee of the mountain. In the colder air, the water had refrozen into columns of ice, still and static yet textured with the look of bubbling liquid motion. The rice from lunch put me back to sleep.

I woke to a completely different landscape. The firs on the green cliffs had been replaced by a treeless shallow valley, tan and rocky and unencumbered. Yaks idly grazed. The surroundings seemed high, although from every direction one could see only higher hills and distant mountains. The low clouds or the thin air gave off the impression of elevation, or perhaps it was mere association upon seeing the woolly beasts of burden.

The following morning I opened the curtain for sunrise. My watch read 8:15. Fat crystals of ice covered the glass. As the ocher rays bent across the hard grassland the frost began to break up on the inside of the window. The ice crystals became fuzzy at the edges. They weeped into dirty wet drops at the bottom of the panes, and refroze once out of the light into amber icicles beside the bed. I picked up Frank Kingdon Ward's In the Land of Blue Poppies, given to me for the moment by Mike to lend me "perspective on living out there:"

It may be remarked, however, that though there is a season set apart for harvest, yet there are always seeds; just as, in the ups and downs of the collector's life, there are always flowers.

The nomadic brother of the Sichuan director of the Bridge Fund, with whom I had been staying, helped me find a cheap truck to Drago's village. The monk I sat beside eagerly shook my hand as we parted ways in Longri Xiang, where I found Drago. For two days with Drago I enjoyed easy rural life. There is little to do in the wintertime on the plateau. Many nomads come out of the plains to wait out the cold months, with little else to do but collect yak patties to fuel the wood stoves. We walked around the small town talking. Brown and white were everywhere: dull tans and drowsy grays, and brown masquerading as green on the shrubby spruce. Near the small gompa, merely a sagging collection of wooden prayer wheels along a circumambulation route, we met a Belgian researcher and her Tibetan friend traveling from Xining in Qinghai Province.

She had been away from Europe studying nomadic folk music for years. She felt that because she had been in such a special cultural place for so long that she could in no way simply turn around and walk away from it. I thought of Chris in New Orleans and Michael in Nepal, and my students at the edge of Kham.

The time crawled through two nights. I missed the day's car to Hongyuan in the morning, and rode out midday on a postal motorcycle. We threaded through the open plain, flanked in by the low snowy peaks to the south and the rising northern grasslands. He let me off at the intersection of the Longri Valley and the Sichuanese road from Chengdu to Aba and Hongyuan.

A teenage nomad was sitting on the painted concrete sign that marked the roads and the town. He was from Xining, far in Northern Amdo, and had come to Sichuan to save money herding yaks. He said to me that he had no parents and had lived in Nepal. I told him about visiting Mike and the monasteries around Kathmandu. He offered me his mala, dark orange prayer beads made of thin plastic, and taught me to count the number of mantras by moving a loop of thread along the beads. As I searched for something to give him in return, I found a black cord, one of many blessed by Lama Wangdu and given to Mike in Nepal.

Earlier that day my Hindu bracelet from the Ganges River had broken. The red yarn threads had opened as I washed socks on the porch of Drago's familial home. Michael and I had gone to the Ganges at Haridwar in Northern India on August 29 last summer, one year after the New Orleans hurricane and one day before I crossed into Nepal for the first time. A young brahmin on the river said prayers as we made our holy baths, giving us blessed prasad and water from the river to be taken to the wife and children of Mike's deceased tabla drum teacher. Last month in Lelegaon, Nepal, our friend Shyem told me that having a string from a priest for that long is unusual. I had left it to fall off on its own. I had intended to throw the yarn from the Ganges back into a river when it finally broke, but the stream is frozen at ten thousand feet in the Longri Valley. I burned it instead.

Only a few hours the bracelet had expired, now suddenly replaced by a string of Buddhist beads. I deliberately hadn't bought beads while in Nepal. I didn't feel right deciding whether to own a holy item as a souvenir. I felt I should simply wait, and if any were given to me in the future to accept them humbly. That gift would be a sort of karmic indicator, the necessary temporal condition for starting to recite Om mani padme hums. On the other side of the road the land sloped down beneath the herds and faded to cloudy mountains at the dark foot of the valley. I took a ride in a white van with a handful of Tibetans.

My student's English name is Lisa, but her Tibetan name Lotus (Wanma in Amdo; Pema in standard Tibetan) is more fitting. Her family has a winter home outside Hongyuan, the namesake of an upper county in the Prefecture. The dwelling is framed with solid logs, its braced roof angled against the wind. The dry grass shook fiercely at dusk and dusty powdered snow began to fall.

Her parents offered yak dumplings, though Lotus isn't eating meat over the next two weeks--including the new year Losar--due to the death of her older maternal uncle. The days moved slowly. Her parents gave me a deep golden Tibetan overshirt, and collared with thick colored material. Their generosity impressed me deeply. Later that night the weather cleared, and in my Nepali touque, scarf, and wool coat quietly found Drako the Dragon between the two Dippers in the northern sky. Though half a world from Louisiana and Colorado, the winter constellations of the northern hemisphere do not vary along the latitude lines to China and Tibet. The evening before I left, Lotus's cousin Potala gave me a ceremonial strip of silk and an image of an instructive meditating dakini goddess.

Soon I will be going back to Kangding from Chengdu, and moving through to Kham to celebrate the Lunar New Year with other Tibetan nomads on the snowy grassland. I have had much time to reflect on returning to the states in the summer. I have relaxed a bit by being with new friends in Chengdu and Amdo, and curiously as I miss Louisiana less I become more confident on returning in half a year. I intend to be back at the Teacher's College by the beginning of March.