Chapter Thirteen

         June sixteenth, Thursday around one-thirty on another totally overcast. cloud enfolding, rain be-spattered day. The clouds broke up yesterday afternoon and I walked the two blocks to the lakefront and observation pier at the end of the street in front of my hotel. Distant gently rolling silhouettes of cloud enshrouded hills on the other side of this mirror to the sky. As the misty-ness condenses into light droplets, walk across the lakeshore green grass campground to a restaurant with South Indian masala dosa. Drizzle subsides, clouds part, sunlight falls to the streets and I head north up Lakeside street to get a feel for what’s along the way.

     A metal spiraling staircase to the first floor above takes me into the Babylon Café. Tanya calls me here, tall, smiling, lithe and spontaneously engaging, she beckons to me in passing to climb the spiraling staircase I have just that moment walked by without notice. Climb the stairwell and visit a magical place, she says. Somewhere in the middle of her middle age, this woman brings me up here with her smile and her voice. Tanya visits with her friend Prakash at a table overlooking the street. I climbed this stairwell fully intending to visit with Tanya, and sit quietly at the table for four across from her and Prakash, who are engaged in conversation, clearly with strong roots of personal caring. Babylon is not crowded, but everyone who comes up the stairwell seems to be part of a network of friends. There are some not-so-very loud speakers set into some parts of the ceiling, and one of the old original Beatles albums comes on. Song after song, the whole early repertoire. And there are a couple of guys working the pool table, and all I’m mainly doing up here is getting to know Tanya, her friends, and the place they like to be. It’s a down-home place, and these are down-home people to me. Raju is an extraordinary young man who is passionately trying to improve the schooling facilities and programs in the rural areas surrounding Tatopani, a village I remember from long ago.

     As afternoon settles into dusk and darkness, pool teams gravitate towards the table, and Tanya and Raju and I and a couple other fellows, including the owner-manager sometimes, go through quite a few rounds of next team plays the winner eight-ball. Pizzas are ordered, a beer comes out, and magical incense burns. Lots of little get-to-know-you salt and pepper conversations along the way. If you think the evening is over at eleven, you’ve got another think coming. A few blocks up the street is a like-it-like-that place called Orange House, where some extraordinary musicians from Australia – saxophonist and flautist – are performing tonight, although by this time, they’ve probably finished, but they are good friends of Tanya, so let’s go see them anyway. The Orange House patio is open to the lake, and a great swathe of darkness spreads out across the waters towards pinpoints of light from the occasional home in the distant hills. Altogether, a dozen or more people in our group. To me, all of this is basically Tanya’s party.

     Raju needs some teaching puppets for his Tatopani schools. Alsan the Russian juggler says that the key to juggling is to remain un-focused in your attention to what you are doing, and see more, such as what is going on within the range of peripheral vision. Focusing has its role, and so does un-focusing. The party goes on till around two. The owner-manager here is also a part of the circle of friends, and all formalities have been either liquidated, smoked-out, or both. Walk part of the way back with some of my new friends, along dark and damp and dimly lit streets, and through that last stretch of empty lanes between Babylon Café and my Little Tibetan Guest House. The dark morning hours of empty city streets are freshly rain-washed, while misty halos surround those occasional urban light bulbs. Puddles of fresh rainwater reflect those halos of misty pastel hues into the envelope of silence.

     Second night out in Pokhara and I’ve found my anchor through Tanya and her friends at the Babylon Café. From U.K. in her forties, Tanya is full of exuberant, positive, serious, and playful energy for everyone in this circle of friends. And seriously, she has been through a deep and complicated story I cannot here begin to tell, not least of all because I barely know it, but also, very importantly, because not all the stories people tell me are mine to tell. For all of what it was, she came out the other side, with a fresh resolution to see her life through to the fullest, and all of that has brought her to the Babylon Cafe in Pokhara.

     Raju, in his twenties, gives his heart to the educational development for small kids in rural Tatopani. Prakash is a sensitive finger picking guitarist. And one can only wonder who else will come up these stairs. Not much of a food menu: snacks and order out pizza from Godfather’s next door, soft drinks, tea, coffee, beer and liquor – and a free pool table that pretty much always has a game going across the felt. Pokhara is looking like a place to sit and get to know, and it is especially nice going to a little place where I’m talked to more like a friend of the family than as another customer.

     Cloudy, rainy Thursday morning after the party. Order up breakfast and wait for the clouds to lighten up, maybe even disappear for a while. Walk Lakeside north from where I’m at once more, looking for landmarks for where I was yesterday. Where is that spiraling staircase again? Closer than I think. Raju will be heading back to Tatopani probably tomorrow, and if I am going to come out and visit, the sooner the better, for these little rains we’re seeing these days are only harbingers for what is to come. The Jomsom – Muktinath idea might not be viable. Right now all I want to do is get the feel for Pokhara, and let my ideas for excursions grow and mature before I go jeeping down the road. More pre-game research and analysis is required.

     Friday, June seventeenth early afternoon at Sweet Memories restaurant on Lakeside street, Pokhara. Best cup of Masala Chai I’ve ever had, in a large mug, at a bargain price. Good bowl of Thukpa vegetable noodle soup. Hot and sunshiny today. Got it in my mind to stay in Pokhara at least a couple of weeks. Throw in some excursions into outlying areas, and I can easily see a month going by. For sure, it’s got that feel of a place to stay and get to know. Walk south along Lakeside street to get acquainted with store fronts for coffee shops and restaurants and book shops. Maybe because its off-season, last couple of weeks before monsoon sets in, or maybe because it’s just that kind of town, mainstreet traffic is light, and the street horn music is negligible. Lakeside Serenity. German bakery by around four-thirty.

     Tanya, You have been living in this little Pokhara world you have created for yourself for quite some time now. Soon you will see the world through the eyes of fifty years gone by and wonder what that will look like. I’ve walked up the spiraling staircase to visit your magical world, Tanya. So far, it is you and I and Raju and Prakash and Shekar who are playing the primary parts for this story. Principal venues have been Babylon Café and Orange House night club. Orange House three nights out of the last four. It’s another night in Pokhara, and where do we go from here?

     Saturday June eighteenth at two-thirty afternoon at the table of my doorstep patio. Yesterday (Friday) began with a cup of excellent Masala chai and a bowl of Thukpa at Sweet Memories on North Lakeside. Sunshine and Blue skies. Walk by all the shops and restaurants of south Lakeside. Time to get a little sense of where is what, and what is where. So many choices for restaurants and coffee shops! At the taxi stand in the shade of a large banyan tree, take the path to the Lakeside promenade where many restaurants fronting Lakeside street extend themselves with patios and gardens into panoramic Lakeside views. Find a shady spot under a small tree to enter that space where the calm water and blue sky and grayscale horizon blend into each other and that is all that is in my mind. Walk to the German bakery on North Lakeside for good chocolate cake and black coffee. Climb the spiral staircase of Babylon Café around five-thirty, and shoot a few rounds on the green felt with Prakash. Others come up the spiral staircase as the hours roll slowly by, including Raju, and Tanya and Shekar and MataMa. The pool table is always busy with different team combos playing round after round of eight ball. As our teams wind down and others take over, get down to a circle of seven on pillows around a floor table, including Tanya and Raju. Tanya asks about my book. I bring my two copies out, and she and Raju and I sit at an end of the table reading through the verse on the first page very closely. Raju is verily enchanted with the phrases he reads aloud and his enthusiasm enchants me. The other copy circulates around the bar and the pool table. Raju wants to translate into Nepali, and Tanya, Raju and I spend time talking about Nepali equivalents to my phrases, such as The Spirit of the Earth. There is a Nepali word for that, MataMa our Earth Mother, who happens to be sitting at our table.  It’s like pouring all of the pieces out of a jigsaw puzzle box and watching them all fall into their perfect interlocking places. The whole world, you know, passes through the Babylon Café in Pokhara. At the top of the spiraling staircase of Babylon Café is indeed a magical place.

     The party moves over to the Orange House again (still Friday). Prakash has his guitar, and there is good music and singing in the darkness under the occasional flashing lightning bursts of the lakeside night sky.

     Midnight between Saturday and Sunday. Sandeep, Sunder, and Matty. Electric Bass, electric guitar, full set of drums, put it together at the Orange House tonight. At the last table for the night, Sunny puts together some graceful pickings for our table, including Tanya, opposite Eric, Raju and I. Tanya, Raju and I take our table all the way to lights out, and sit in darkness and ambient light for several minutes.

     The (Saturday) evening began upstairs at Babylon with Shekar and I one-on-one across the table for some basic getting to know the family time. Tanya and Raju arrive at dusk in their helmets and slickers, having ridden through some rain on their return trip from a day in the surrounding hills. We sit together for awhile, each with a fresh large bottle of Tuborg beer, and gravitate towards the pool table for a few rounds with partners with Shekar or someone else around who wants to get in on the action.

     Gets to be time around nine or so to be getting over to the action at the Orange House. Raju’s scooter gets he and Tanya and I on down the street to where we want to go. The house is not crowded and we get a table up front where we can watch close how the musicians work their instruments. Tanya’s reasons for choosing our table works for me. Eric comes to join us not long later, and then after a bit, is called up to the stage by the guitarist Sunder who hands Eric his guitar, who then plays through a whole lot of jamming with Sandeep and Matty, and it is all very good. Almost like a family of musicians who like to share what they’ve got going on that evening.

     And so it goes - a little dancing, a little smoking, and a little beer drinking - till the guys who brought their instruments here begin to pack them up. Then it’s move to the rooftop for a more open air and small table relaxed conversational setting. Until the lights go out, and we sit in the dark, and walk through the maze that leads to the empty midnight street.

     Tanya showed me her poems. I read them aloud from her i-phone screen across the blue-checkered table cloth overlooking the quiet street. She is indeed a real poet, with a sensitive and fiery heart. Not so abstract as to be un-sensible, but metaphorically suggestive in clear emotional language. She has no thought about publishing these in a booklet. That’s not why she wrote them. Here is a feeling that comes from the heart, so that I might understand myself better, so that I can see the Beauty in the waves crashing onto the rocks, bursting into clouds of misty spray. And to share with others, one at a time, a message from a place that is not often seen.

     Sunday afternoon. Having met Raju at Babylon Guest House, I ride with him on his scooter to Laila’s Bar and Restaurant, basically a south side version of Babylon Café, a place to shoot a little pool and sit quietly with a beer or chai. Later go on back to the Babylon Guest House rear balcony facing the lake. Tanya arrives, and we three go through Raju’s computer pictures from his village. As darkness settles in, Nepali dinner with Tanya at the family place across the street. Later that evening at the Babylon Café, Alsan the Russian who has lived in the Maldives, gives a long and exquisitely eloquent charade for how to sail a rig, and how to become so one in tune with the wind and the wave through the ropes one holds on to, how one adapts one’s weight, and pulls tight or lets go slack, and how much, and when . . . into the dance of “automatic error correction” to become one with the wind, sailing, sailing, sailing . . . across the water.

     Monday afternoon. Calendar of Days, counting from another new beginning. Not counting the first afternoon and evening of arrival, day number six in Pokhara. Starting on the first day with the walk up the spiraling staircase to the loft of the Babylon Café. Small bar, short menu, one pool table, two sticks. Half a dozen foursome seating arrangements, three low tables on the floor with cushions, and three sets of wooden tables with chairs.  Two tables are at the ledge with the street overview, and there you have it, the Vortex. Virtually  most everything that has come around these last five days has been through the Babylon Café and her sister a couple of blocks up the street, the Babylon Guest House, and the Orange House night club for jazz jamming and special musical arrangements, and its beer garden wooden table feeling for the organic.

     Tanya at the crossroads between the horizontal and the vertical. When it came down to the choice between “do away with it all” and “Live like you’ve never lived before.” So here she is!, inviting me up the spiraling staircase to the magical room where foot-trails from around the planet circle the green felt, then take rest at a chair or a cushion before moving on to somewhere else. Raju is staying over at the Babylon Guest House, and is searching for one hundred dollars to buy a set of sock puppets so he can tell stories and teach his kindergarten school children in Tatopani. Prakash helps behind the bar when necessary, and keeps track of his shot on the pool table. Also very nice with his fingers on the acoustic guitar strings. Shekar, chief manager for both the Cafe and the guest house, perhaps thirty, beautiful wife and baby boy just nine months old, and is always a good man to have on your team around the felt. Alsan, the Russian – Maldives sailing man and juggler. There is my inner circle. I’ve got an anchor in Pokhara. Some little movement has been set into motion - the flutter of a butterfly’s wings – and every day the sail will unfurl to see if there’s a wind. And when the sail catches the wind and you’ve got all the ropes you control well in hand, you become the wind across the water.  That is one of the places to which one can go on the loft at the top of the spiraling staircase  – Babylon Café.

     Passing through midnight between Monday and Tuesday, twentieth and twenty-first. After noontime chai at Sweet Memories, it’s up the spiral staircase where Prakash is housekeeping and Raju is working the green felt with one of his friends. Raju and I sit for a little while and I get a facebook invite. Around two, walk up to Babylon Guest House to meet with Shekar and tell him I will pass by his offer of a streetside hotel room. I’m going to stay with my garden deluxe at the Little Tibetan. Shekar and I together in his living room are served plates of fresh made spaghetti from his smiling wife. So we’re all down, and I walk back to the German bakery for a chocolate cake and black coffee, before return to the hacienda for quiet time; then take in a great veggie burger from Sweet Memories before heading up the spiral staircase as nightfall begins. Business is good tonight, some tables going in conversational circles under the dim but illuminating light. As the evening stories unfold, my primary attention is with Tanya, Raju, Prakash, and Shekar. There is a nice flow of visitors climbing the spiral staircase  to the magical loft, hanging out a little while at a table or shooting pool, then going back down to the city sidewalk. Tuborg is the preferred beer, and I take my turns around the green felt in continuing rounds of eight ball. Tanya is in the game, Raju is in the game, Prakash is in the game, and Shekar is hanging close to the bar and keeping his eyes on the tables. All the way to closing a bit after eleven. And all the final goodnights on empty wet black asphalt shining under occasional street lights are spoken, and all of our wishes for seeing each other again.

     Tuesday morning. Frederick from Norway has the room next door at the Little Tibetan. There is no hurry, and nothing is happening. Tuesday afternoon. Meet with Frederick at Godfather’s. Share a couple of beers and pizza. Frederick is just back from a couple of weeks trekking in the Annapurna range. In Pokhara for an overnight and flies out tomorrow. I guess Frederick to be in mid-twenties or early thirties. Lean, athletic outdoorsman, this has not been his first trek and won’t be his last. We cover a lot of ground conversing through mutual interests. I finally get around to giving him a copy of my book, and he is interested in how I explain what I put in there, and how long I have been carrying it.

     Getting it down in Pokhara. Wednesday morning on the patio with Frederick who is in a frustrating pickle because of visa complications that will seriously interfere with his precisely planned itinerary from Pokhara to Delhi to visit with his friend there and then on to Bangkok to visit with another friend before flying back to Norway. Totally balled up because of one of the so-called clearly stated rules and regulations. Well, if it had been clearly stated, Frederick certainly wouldn’t have bought the e-visa, now worthless and non-refundable. To which bureaucrat shall this be explained? The final answer will always be: What can I do? in the tone of fateful helplessness. For Frederick, it’s pick up the pieces and reconfigure the plan for how to get to where he wants to go within a workable and comfortable time frame. Bus to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi looks like the way. Like cruising along the freeway after a long stretch, getting tantalizingly close to the destination, and running into a total roadblock and convoluted detour. Nothing to do but do what you need to do.

     Meanwhile, over at Babylon last night, Prakash is out of town to Kathmandu for two days. Tanya and I are working with Raju’s computer on putting together a Resume / Curriculum Vitae for Prakash, so he can apply for a water salesman and delivery position in Dubai or some such place. Prakash is twenty-six. His experience is five years as Bar Manager here at Babylon. His mother has just been diagnosed with a treatable cancer, and Prakash wants to work where he can make money to pay medical expenses. Prakash also has people helping to see if there are opportunities for him in either Germany or Spain. What is so agonizingly frustrating is that he will have to leave his mother’s side during this critical time while he is earning money to care for her. This Dubai opportunity is fresh, so we’ll see. Meanwhile, another night at Babylon.

     Wednesday night into Thursday morning, halfway between sunset and sunrise, Twice-a-Day-Dawn, unraveling a story that went by today. One small colored pencil drawing. Watch Frederick be confronted with his itinerary crisis, face it with decisive action, and be off and on his way to a bus to Kathmandu by one.  Lots of drizzling going on throughout the morning and afternoon. Type notes and drink coffee on the downstairs patio. Sweet Memories for veggie burger and chai after six, and up the spiraling staircase to find Shekar alone and awaiting tonight’s flow of visitors. I’ve got the perfect view of a red and orange and violet tinted sunset over the distant hills beyond the Mirror to the Sky. Raju comes up and gets into a pool game with one of his friends. Tanya arrives with friends Matias from Austria and another fellow. Alsan shows up and he and I have been having conversations about balancing and movement. The juggler who sails through the wind over water and who describes the movements one makes while paragliding to catch the currents as you feel them going by. Conversing with Alsan is such a stimulating experience as we wind our way through convoluted but sensible and ultimately simple descriptions of what we see and how we experience everything out there, including and especially those other people, or, as Mali would say, “There are no Others.”

     Sometimes sitting on some floor cushions at a low level table with Alsan and Matias, sometimes circling the pool table looking for my best shot. All the way to the end, after closing the bar, laying the sticks on the table, and finishing those last beers, winding our ways down the spiral staircase to the quiet street with soft light. Raju’s original intention to be on his way to Tatopani continues in this state of postponement as he persistently tries to figure a way to get some puppets for his schools.

     Between Thursday night and Friday morning, the twenty-third and the twenty-fourth. Continuing the log for the Babylon café. Ran into a group of Global Vision International volunteers sitting on the cushions around one of the floor tables.

Americans, Europeans, Australians, young twenties or younger fulfilling an educational requirement with this overseas volunteer work. So they come and hang out with the orphan kids for a few weeks and then go home to their American, European, and Australian homes, and the kids are left with another hole in their heart. Someone who comes into your life and shows you love, so that you can then show your own love . . . and then the visitor disappears, and here is a fresh hole in your heart. How many times does this happen in this child’s lifetime? How many people will he see come and go, will she see come and go? This perspective from Tanya, and I’ve heard similar stories.

     All of that aside for the generous volunteers who put their hearts into what they are doing. As I sit down at the next table, friendly faces turn my way, and we connect around their table. We get around to the symbol on my T-shirt, and to sacred geometry with Rachel on my right, so I bring out my book, and Rachel is very interested. Rachel turns the pages very slowly and refers to the stanzas as hymns. Such a lovely thought. The first time I’ve ever heard that thought, and I go immediately in my mind to Sanskrit chanting, and I don’t know exactly what Rachel is hearing, but the idea, regardless of the language and the style, is enchanting, complimentary, and inspiring. Rachel was absorbing those stanzas, those lines, those phrases, and she heard something.

     June twenty-fourth at noon. Day ten in Pokhara. Nothing to Say. Break time. Just let those thoughts think themselves out until something comes along that says it wants to be written.

     Sixes are Dicks. Fours are Whores. A drinking game through a deck of cards and there are so many rules; every card that is turned over has a rule that says who takes a drink.  Not wanting to get sloshed, I sit and watch and listen and laugh along with the table of seven volunteers turning the cards and making the calls.

     Circling the midnight hour between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. Saturday becomes Sunday and there will be a new adventure. Today was blue sky sunny after a misty beginning, and south along Lakeside is my path for as long as it takes to reach a turn around point. A continuing line of shops of every sort, coffee cafes, and hotel fronts, along one side of the street, and a continuing, lushly green park alongside the narrowing lake on the other. A sculpture garden of granite stonework, arranged like small megalithic standing stones, or fallen stones, all carved with intent to convey a connection with the ancient, the primordial, the organic. There is a carved stone face, one eye open with sun wheel within, the other eye closed, almost, into a knowing wink. Listen to the message in the Stone.

     A whole new crop of G.V.I. volunteers, including Holly whom I played Casino with the night before, and Lorraine from Wisconsin, and Brittany from Dallas. Prakash is returned from his Kathmandu visit, and may have to visit there again. Alsan is here at the bar. Raju is not here tonight.

     Monday the twenty-seventh mid-morning. Yesterday was for sitting in. My first floor window faces an ancient stonework wall three feet high, lush with green moss and small ferns, and over the wall is a back yard field of tall and flowering corn stalks. Easy place to sit and watch the sky go by. Go to Sweet Memories for a chicken sizzler and chai at six, then on to Babylon for this evening’s story. Special guest this evening is Brendon from Ireland, age fifty-one. From the street, Brendon sees that there is pool at the top of the spiraling staircase. I have already played some Casino with Shekar, and am turning cards over in solitaire, when Brendon arrives looking for a game, so he and I go a few rounds. We set the sticks down, passing them on to the younger crowd now gradually climbing the stairs and making the place hum. Tanya comes in and she and Brendon have a rousing good across the bar conversation about all the British and Irish things they know so well. Prakash is running the bar, and Alsan is close by, and he and I experiment with ways of handling playing cards. Different teams walk around the table. For me, it’s mostly sitting at the bar going through some beer with Brandon. Schlantza.

     So what I am actually Doing in Pokhara is hanging out in restaurants (Sweet Memories), Coffee bars (German bakery or Himalayan café), and the Babylon Café and Bar for beer, eight-ball, and making friends. Masala Chai and Tuna veggie salad for lunch at two. Hot sunny out there and unless I want to work up a sweat, no need to go walking very far. Countdown for Tanya’s birthday is zero minus two weeks. Can’t help but wonder how that is going to fly.

     Tuesday the twenty-eighth.  Into the first row of hills surrounding the lake. With Alsan my guide, on the back of his scooter up some winding rocky paths first to visit Alexander, who speaks Russian and Hebrew, and writes satirical poetry in Russian, and then translates into English, but translating poetry, as we know, is more than slightly difficult. Then Alsan and I go along another rocky path to meet with Birin, native Nepali, Anne from Russia, and their eight month old son Agestay, i.e. Rishi. Lovely overview of the lake and the City by the Lake. Alsan gets into an elaborate explanation and demonstration in mime of the paragliding experience. So when am I going to try it? Not just yet.  Meanwhile, back to Sweet Memories for a one o’clock masala chai and plate of Aloo Pakoda, i.e. potato wedgies deep fried. What are the most memorable experiences in my life? Thank you Prakash, for that question. There are a lot of ways to think about that one! Alsan gets a copy of my book over at Alexander’s. 

     Frozen in a state of repetition. Drink beer and shoot pool at Babylon every night for the last two weeks. Breakfast on my patio, delivered by Sarita: porridge, fried eggs, potatoes, toast and coffee: every morning between seven and eight.

Visit Sweet Memories restaurant on Lakeside every day, sometimes twice, for Masala chai and something to eat. Everything else is peripheral. In depth local color at the Babylon Café. Play it for all its worth in this circulating circle of local friends, people who either live here, or leave only to return. The blossom unfolds of its own accord. Here is a matrix where I fit in. Leave it to my guides to show me the way. You stay long, you meet people who stay long. You don’t be in a hurry to go someplace particular right now. Here again, it is all about who you meet along the way. It is about finding my conversations. One for what I’m talking about with myself, and the other for what we talk about together, you and I.

        Thursday, June thirtieth at eleven-thirty morning. Cloudiness prevails so far. Boudnath, Kathmandu was for circling the great stupa every day, all fifteen hundred years of it, right where it always has been. Over here in Pokhara, it’s the Babylon Café and Bar, one spiraling staircase above the sidewalk, where the circles go round, and particularly those circles around the green felt. I’ve fallen into a story and all I have to do is tell it. Raju and Tanya have been off to visit Raju’s school in Tatopani the last three days. Up in the loft it’s been mostly Prakash, Alsan and I focusing around the bar, and Prakash and I will sometimes team up to challenge a round at the green felt table. Prem is also there last couple of nights with his guitar.

     Rode with Alsan on the back of his scooter thirty kilometers down the road southwest of the city. One destination turned into another and every bend in the road led to another winding path that offered the question, what is around this corner? Till we get to the end of the map, the edge of the paper where the road no longer goes. Lunch in the village on the edge of the known world, and then follow a little walking trail down from the road to a crystal clear mountain stream rushing through clustered boulders.

     Two weeks now its been in the city, hanging close to a small world between the Little Tibetan Guest House, the Babylon Café and Bar, Sweet Memories restaurant, and a couple of coffee house bakeries, besides which the grocery store for juice and peanut butter, that’s it, and I wonder about what is beyond the city limits, knowing full well that it’s not all that very far to the great peaks, and there cannot be a hurry. The day will come, just like yesterday came, and the road was there, opening again and again, through one curve into another, to places that are always there.

     Saturday, July second. Here we are. Middle of the year, mid-morning.

Looks like cloudy all day, if it’s anything like yesterday. The kind of cloud that settles over the lake and into the streets with hazy gray presence. The raindrops perpetually hang, drift and fall through the misty atmosphere, as the lake and the city and the sky merge into a soggy wetness. The let-up yesterday came just before noon. I walked over to Sweet Memories for a veggie burger, fries and chai, sat through another downpour, at the streetside open air table under the canopy, where I can reach my arm out into the lake falling into itself. And the cloud takes another breath, inhales after the sneeze, withdraws to gather herself again. Pedestrians emerge one by one into the mist, the opening in the cloud. Walk the block and a half and across the street to the German bakery for black coffee and chocolate cake, and a front table chair in an empty shop where I can watch through the wide plate glass the passers-by. Watch for who glances through the window, through the open doorway, to this old man sitting at this table reading a book.

     Currently eighty pages into The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen, from 1978, about his trip in 1973 through Pokhara and around the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri ranges, where I walked through in 1970. Peter and his friend then went much further west and north into Himalayan Nepal, quite rough country to be walking through as he so vividly describes, and he weaves the story of his personal journey through life into the narrative, so there are at least two stories going on here. First time I’ve read this piece of writing, this set of interwoven stories. Reminds me of what I think I’m doing. This year long sabbatical I’m sleepwalking through, dreaming my way through the world I walk through, deciding who and what and where and when everything all goes together in making up the story I live with. Here is how it looks like from inside the cave.  

     Now down to nine copies of the English version of my Pondicherry published edition of The Gathering (another Title?), and four copies of the French version.

I can imagine it not being very long before I find interested parties for eight of those English copies, which leaves me with my demo copy, and the option of looking for another offset printer. Say for a hundred books, and I could hang around Pokhara just like I hung around Pondicherry and hand them out to likely readers. But I’m not going to be in Pokhara all that long, and I can’t be carrying a load of books off to Leh. Baggage weight will be a critical factor on that trip, however I choose to carry it out. I’ll just hand out what I’ve got till I run out, less my keeper, and then maybe make some more in Leh. For it is fun sharing my book with people I meet along the way, other travelers, residents, like-minded people, sharing interests in the way we see the world. It’s my answer to the question, what do you do? or, what have you done? Alternatively, who have you been? or, who are You? And so on.

     So I sit in the German bakery, and watch a little more rainfall; another break comes along, and it’s walk back to the guest house, where I can watch the rain resume through the ongoing opaque afternoon. Two nights away from the Babylon. After every night for two weeks, since my first afternoon in this City by the Lake, it’s two nights away from the beer, the green felt table, the greetings in friendship, and the ayurvedic, medicinal, alchemical smoking recipes that pass by. It’s been two nights off for reflection time. The question lingers about how long to continue in this city, when to leave, what route to take, how to prepare, and even whether or not I will get much closer to the mountains of Nepal this time.

     My sense for what I’m doing here revolves around meaningfulness and completion. Whatever it turns out to be, whoever it turns out to be about, myself included, there will be a departure. The idea, “See You Again,” will hang in the misty cloud above our heads as we wonder, will who we have been together happen again?, or, is who we have been together who we always are to each other? In either case, it is always fun to reconnect when two hearts feel it true.

     Sunday, July third, eleven-forty morning. Sunshine and blue sky to start the day off, although I won’t be surprised if the gray clouds roll in. Returned to Babylon yesterday evening. Touch base with Prakash around the green felt. Starts off he and I the only ones there. Tanya climbs the stairwell, now returned from her few days over in Tatopani at Raju’s school playing guitar and singing songs to kids. Always smiling Prem comes up, and a bit later, Alsan is here. Then a couple of other Nepali young men, Ballu and Ram. Teams are chosen and rounds of eight ball go down. Thing about the teams is how changing partners flows between games and sets of two or three games. So that during the course of an evening, given six players, each person will likely as not have paired up with each of the others. Alsan never plays pool, although he often watches as closely as everyone else what is going around on the table. The  Nepali guys, Ballu and Ram, eventually call it an evening and head down the stairs, and then this group of five carries on with what is like a little reunion for Tanya returned from absence to her treasured presence. A couple or so more pool games, some juggling with those illuminated-from-within balls that change colors. There is no red ball, or blue ball, or green ball, and yellow and violet are also in there, as each color fades slowly through its glowing aura into another color. Some partnership teamwork juggling between Alsan and Prakash. Both Prem and Prakash take turns with the harmonica I brought up, Alsan has his harmonica, and Tanya plays guitar and sings with her strong voice. Back stretching and bone-cracking exercises for whoever is inclined. All things considered, a rather fit group of yoga practitioners. Way past the closing hour, and Prakash, in charge of the place, has to keep hushing our voices so we don’t disturb the downstairs neighbors. Tanya, Alsan and I finally make it down the spiraling staircase. Alsan scooters Tanya north to her guest house, then returns to scooter me south to my guest house. These are really short, walkable distances, and basically, all that is really going on here is a small group of people who like sharing time with each other, and making our lives, for all of whatever it is that each of us is dealing with, a bit easier. Take a break and laugh a little, and ride through the dark, empty and silent streets of Lakeside Pokhara on this friend’s extra scooter seat. Thus day nineteen in the City by the Lake. Through the slowness of evolutionary development, another day is here.

    

In every hue of gray they gather,

Merge dark and light into each other

Through lightning flash and thunder rumble

Towards the storm impending.

Begins the Rain

Through final soft gray light of dusk

Falling into darkness,

Our darkness not yet here,

So let us linger in this gray light,

Listen to the falling water,

Soft and steady falling,

Falling from however far above,

Straight down from sky the droplets fall,

Into the Lake, onto the Earth,

Into the branches of the trees,

Where the white bird sleeps.

     Monday, July fourth, at ten-thirty in the morning. How is the cloud doing this morning? How many words are out there for how many shades of gray are out there, all the way across from every horizon to every other horizon, drifting through each other into new configurations? Lunch yesterday at the Chinese restaurant I see across the cornfield through my window. Paper red lanterns dangle across the upper floor patio looking over the quiet side street. Name of the place written in large black on white Chinese characters. Outdoor blackboard menu with specials of the day is all in Chinese. This might be the real McCoy, or should I say, the real Lao Tzu? Every dish of the page-after-page menu has a picture with a Chinese and an English name, and I go with the fried tofu and vegetables in hot sauce with a bowl of white rice, and the bottomless glass cup of green tea is provided. Here across the cornfield from the window to my room, my window to the sky, and the bird taking wing.

     Evening rain clouds gather. Another night apart from Babylon. Whether it’s raining or not, I want the night off. I love the Babylon crowd, and feel more at home here than anywhere on this entire trip since November. I sit here on the threshold of the Himalayan massif bonding with my family. These are the people I’ll be coming back to when I return, including my host family at The Little Tibetan Guest House. I can take a bus west to the town of Beni, but I have seen a thirty-second video clip Tanya took from the rear of Raju’s scooter as they rode along the rocky path from Beni to Tatopani, and that’s what it is, a rocky path.

     Every day it rains, the dirt gets a little soggier, and when and where the next landslide will strike is anybody’s guess. So it’s like I got to be settling into myself, while my self is settling into Pokhara, and not fretting about the sogginess of the season, but rejoicing in it, watching with wondrous amazement the unfolding and unrolling the day’s sky story.

     Happy Rainbow Family day!

     Tuesday, July fifth, still in the morning, getting on towards noon. Another cloudy day at the opening, with no apparent movement in the air except for that wide wing-spanned bird gliding aloft in circles after circles after circles without a single movement in those wings, just gliding, and gliding on whatever invisible currents she turns through.

    The days are all the same. Every day is different. Returned to my newfound favorite Chinese restaurant yesterday for that same tofu and vegetable dish from the day before. My system likes this change in diet for whatever this Chinese chef is putting into his sauce.

     Returned to the Babylon last night before nine. Shekar, Prakash, Alsan and Tanya are around the short, curving bar, along with a younger British fellow who is considering his career choice alternative. He thinks maybe accounting because it pays well, but the rest of us here are encouraging him to think along more exciting lines. Like maybe Airplane Pilot. Tanya was a pilot when she was in her twenties, and gives first hand encouragement and advice for pursuing this idea. Some pool games get started, Ballu and his friend come up, teams are shuffled, and everyone except Alsan goes at least one round. A group of five young Chinese come in, two girls and three guys, and sit around the low table next to the bar where the rest of us cluster, so before long the two clusters are sharing words. These five are from the Hong Kong area, and are on a south Asian jaunt for several weeks. This is their first night in Pokhara, and they climb the spiral staircase from pure intuition or some such thing. Walking down the unknown street, and here’s a spiral staircase, so let’s climb and see what’s there!

     For one thing, I get into describing the geography and ethnography of New Mexico in a more detailed way than I have in a long time. Albuquerque, a not so very large city, surrounded by vast empty and wild areas of dry desert and forested mountains, nurtured by the great river that slices through terrain in some places and curves slowly through green forested lowlands in others. Here has been my home in the cultural matrix of the ancient pueblo peoples, and the traditional and not-so-traditional Spanish and Anglo peoples. For the young listeners from Hong Kong. Perhaps one day they will go and see what I have described.

     The night winds down, and the night winds on, till in the final hour, long after closing, it’s Alsan, Tanya, Prakash, and I sitting around the low table next to the bar under the light of the green and the red Chinese paper lanterns.  

Chapter  Twelve

     Sunday evening, June sixth, after dinner, sitting in my room at the Shechen monastery guest house near the dome and stupa of Bodhnath on the Eastern edge of Kathmandu. Taxied over here from Bhaktapur early Friday afternoon. The highway all the way in from the ancient city I’m coming from is a multi-lane river of the complete assortment of vehicles on any major Indian artery. The Marg . . . they don’t call it that, but it reminds me of the Gangtok central shopping zone . . . is a circle of Tibetan paraphernalia shops . . . Thangka shops, and every other kind of Tibetan craft shop, interlaced with coffee shops, and small local restaurants and monastery gateways, and narrow streets branching off in all directions, winding their ways to who knows where, also lined with little craftshops, and confectionaries, and vegetable vendors, and three-table restaurants. Everyone at the circular Marg walks in the same direction – clockwise – none of this two-way traffic or a helter-skelter thing. Closer to the center are the more prayerful, at the periphery are the shoppers and the coffee samplers and the folks on their way to somewhere else. Between the inner ring and the outer circle is a line of park benches facing the center. Not facing both ways like the two parallel rows of benches, each row facing one side of the parallel rows of contemporary paraphernalia shops and restaurants and coffee shops in the Gangtok Marg. File in one end of the Gangtok Marg and file out the other end – funnel in one end, and funnel out the other – as the rivers of city streets branch out into the surrounding hills and valleys. Over here at Bodhnath, we all move in the circular same direction, or sit on one of the benches in between and face the inner circle.

     Shechen is one of fifteen or so monasteries nestled all around in the immediately surrounding spaces between the shops along the lanes – flat, gray stone paved lanes, easy to walk on, easy to sweep clean. Some of the monasteries are small, and Shechen is one of, if not the, largest. It’s been a year April since the earthquake, and most of the debris has been picked up and set aside in many places throughout the city. The pinnacle of the main circular fixture of Boudnath tumbled, and scaffolding cages the new construction. Like something is being re-born up there. It will probably look just like the one that came down, but all the regulars who live around here and have been walking around this circle for years, will be watching this rebirth, and I’ll bet there will be a collective sense of awe and wonder at the becoming of this re-incarnation of their guiding light.

     Krishna in Bhaktapur recommended Shechen, and this guest house is an isolated enclave with its own restaurant and garden. I’ve got a spacious corner room, two sets of windows, altogether simple and clean, and the clientele, like myself, are looking for a quiet place to breathe.

     Saturday morning, went out for a walk to get a taste of what is out there on the other side of the gate, to the street where the taxi dropped me off on Friday.

The gateway is between the Tibetan enclave, and the whole rest of Asian - Western civilization out there. Head in the direction going towards the center of the city, with no idea for actually going that far, but do get in about two kilometers, hanging with the main street all the way to the Pashupatinath Hindu temple grounds and Deer Park. Once I get the kinks out, the walking is smooth and brisk as I negotiate my path through the ebb and flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Reminds me of the busy Chennai neighborhoods and avenues I walked outside the YWCA Guest house enclave. Kathmandu is a plenty big enough place and the motorcycle invasion is as thorough here as I guess it is all over Asia. I don’t recall any such thing as this many motorcycles out here forty-five years ago. After sitting quietly at the Deer Park temple grounds, hire a taxi for the return. Initiation stroll across the terrain is enough for today, and the rest of the day is for walking the big circle a couple of times, stopping off for tea, and getting back to my room and the garden, and the open bookshelf – I’ll call it the Library – of a couple of hundred mostly English, German, French, Chinese and Tibetan books, unorganized but neatly lined up, including dharma books, travel books, novels, and miscellaneous. A quiet room sized alcove upstairs on the first floor, with walls of windows for readers to feel at home within. Looks like a promising collection.

     What with moving from one place in the valley to another, and diving into this entirely new world of shops and circumambulations and pedestrian crowds and motorized traffic and immersion into the maelstrom, it’s all day Sunday between the garden and the restaurant and my room, with time off between getting to know the library.

     Courtyard of Nostalgia for the Way Things Used to Be. Kathmandu is a big city, as noisy and as congested and as nerve-rattling as any other city of this Asian peninsula hanging like a tear drop from the Himalayan glaciers. What will happen as the monsoons shift in intensity, timing and direction? The entire peninsula from Kanyakumari to Varanasi could become the lost civilization of a great desert. For now, so far, the rains have fallen briefly in the morning. Take a taxi Monday into the great interior of the Kathmandu wilderness. Near the center is the Courtyard of Nostalgia for the Way Things Used to Be. The Courtyard of temples and shrines where no motorized vehicle is allowed. Take a look through the gateway into the Heart of Silence where He or She, Deva or Devi, are there to Inspire or show a Guiding Light. The hawkers with their strings of beads and amulets walk their circuits through the day, looking for that visitor with a loose wallet. Part of the background ambiance, as I look for a stone ledge or step to sit on after I’ve walked my own circuit, climbed steps, read the gestures of the guardian deities carved in wood, and snapped pictures of ferocious stone lions. The Living Goddess Kumari lives in her own temple home with an old carved wooden window frame from which she might look out from time to time. Blessed are those who notice. All of this is the way things once were, nothing to do all day but worship the Devas and the Devis, and sip dark Java in a Starbucks subsidiary. Step out from here through any gate and enter the maelstrom of pedestrian and automotive traffic that requires precision alertness and reaction time from my taxi drivers.

     Once I’ve spent my late morning and early afternoon in the courtyard, and made the return journey to my monastery guest house garden enclave, I wonder about what would motivate me to return to the ancient Katmandu courtyard. In Bhaktapur, I lived across the street from and had a direct overview of the Ancient Courtyard and its temples. It was my backyard stroll every time I walked out of my hotel. The “Freak Street” area branching off of the Kathmandu courtyard may very well have been the neighborhood I lived in for a few days back in 1970. A narrow sidestreet of built-into-the-wall hotels and little shops along the way. So I’m kind of back to where I was before, in the exploratory, whatever comes next, kind of place. Twenty-six year old meets seventy-one year old walking towards each other on “Freak Street.” How do we notice each other? Does the twenty-six year old recognize the seventy-one year old? Here is an image of my future self. Do I know who you are? Would you recognize my voice? What does the older man remember about what that younger one was thinking? A mirage of places and people go by, all of those I met along the way between then and now, and the younger one merges into the older one and I am back to where I am now, Right?! Durbar square of Kathmandu in a day: The Courtyard of Nostalgia for the Way Things Used to Be.

     Tuesday, June seventh, evening at nine. Got so far as one circumambulation this afternoon, with a one hour stopover three-quarters around at the local branch of the Starbuck’s subsidiary. Just looking for a large cup of strong black coffee, together with a first floor window overview of the other circumambulators. Not so very crowded, but never empty. Everybody’s got their set of circles they gotta walk through. Once, or more than once? Spinning the prayer wheels in hand, or turning the large prayer wheels built into the wall, turning the drums full of prayers, counting the prayer beads, the Mala’s, and for others, walking close to the storefronts of the surrounding buildings. Pick up one of those magazine tour guides full of advertisements about Pokhara, pretty much next down the road from where I’m at now, as far as I can tell so far. Looks like it’s turned into a real tourist mecca, much different from the small town I barely remember. Couldn’t have been there more than a day or two on either side of the trek. Completely lost in the background.

     So I can look into the Lake again. Last time, I saw the Lake from a very green hilltop. A very empty space high above the Lake that was a mirror to the blue sky on a clear day. This on the thirteenth and final day of our trek across the hills and up the river valley and return the way we went up. I with my Tibetan refugee guide around my own age, Gopan Tsering. Really do not remember meeting other western trekkers on the path, but one – very few at the most. So I’ve got some kind of memory to visit in Pokhara, and I’m really curious to see how I take to this once-upon-a-time staging area for the climb I had only heard about. Coming from the North American midlands, don’t recall having seen the Rockies during those growing up years. Here I was, walking the river valley gorge as it passes trough Tatopani and other villages between the snow-capped peaks of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. A memory that never fades. What will I see this time? Not going to get too far ahead of myself right now for my planning.

     Reading stories I find on the library bookshelf. A Wind in the Door, by Madeline L’Engle, a brilliant story for bridging the distance between the seen and the unseen worlds, and about what it means to communicate through the heart. On my wall, a really nice watercolor of the Kathmandu valley and the river and the hills on the horizon all fading through blue-gray washes into the cloudy sky above. The forests are green and the river is fresh, and the clouds are promising rain. The river through the forest before the cities moved in, and belched smoke into the sky and effluent into the water. Recall watching those buses and trucks and jeeps belch black smoke out of their exhaust tubes into the faces of whoever happens to be out there. There is no stopping it. The future generation, and two and three, are progressively fried, and the smoke is not disappearing into nothingness. And so for all that is going on in the world out there, I make one circumambulation today, with a cup of good java along the way, and a passing glance from time to time, wondering where my next conversation will be coming from, and how far it will go, and how far will it go?

     Room with medium-dark brown wooden floors, a bedroom-living room to spread out in. Only occasionally does a barking dog interrupt the nighttime silence. Curtains ripple gently in the breeze. I’m making this Boudnath circle and guest house my home base for four additional days till June fourteenth, one week from today. Planning without planning with intentional focus.

     June eighth, Wednesday morning at ten. Just biding my time (bide-ing) – in a quiet residential neighborhood. Occasionally, children play in the narrow lane outside my upstairs window. What does one do in Kathmandu? I met myself all over again in Durbar square two days ago. He said, hello young man, I remember you. I was once your age, and now I am your grandfather’s age. The hair becomes gray, then white, and the face wrinkles in characteristic patterns of thinking and looking at the world. What you see is where you will be.

     The traffic beyond the gate of the Boudnath Stupa enclave is bedlam. I’ve walked the downtown of the ancient city and met myself from a previous age. I’ve got a shopping and coffee house district within walking distance along pedestrian-only lanes. At early morning breakfast in the garden-side guest house restaurant, I can check my emails and follow the American news, and maybe make a posting for friends and family to read. Feeling a bit more connected now with my American world of family and friends than I was during my first couple of months in India. All part of the ebb and flow of sometimes cultivating solitude and sometimes cultivating involvement. Of all the neighborhoods there are in the city to wander around in, I’ve landed in a perfectly fine one.

     Time to start bridging the difference in concept between tourist and ex-pat. For the past six and a half months, including those three and a half months in Pondicherry, I was still the tourist, the visitor, leaving a lot behind to experiment with a different sense of myself in the world. It’s all been kind of tourist-y. An example is all of that time in Sikkim with all of those road trips and excursions and exploratory walks. Even in my old familiar Pondicherry, I didn’t have much of a sense of reconnecting with a former self. No, I had to wait until I arrived at Durbar Square in Kathmandu, and walked the nearby lanes I knew so very briefly once before. Like a little vortex sucked me into remembering how I was with the world back then. I was a tourist then as well, but now I am graduating into an ex-pat. I don’t have to run around checking out all the districts. Nurturing the district I’m in is much more creatively appealing. My time here is short enough as it is, for I will be moving on. No sense in trying to swallow Kathmandu whole. All I’m really looking for is myself and someone to converse with, and we can be found anywhere. Like-minded people meet in Like-minded places. There is letting things happen and there is making things happen and there is balance between the two. Settling into a quiet frame of mind is kind of like doing both at the same time. The travel journal of the tourist becomes the place where the ex-pat sorts it all out into some sort of idea, or theme, or story. Or, simply lets it be its own story, the unfolding page by page, petal by petal of the blossoming flower, into a never-ending story, where every last page returns to the first page, and the first page never ends.

     Wednesday, June eighth, afternoon at three, at the Himalayan Java shop. Of course you had no idea then that you would become Me. You had not yet even opened your first Anthropology book, and were three years away from painting your first picture. I’m sure you had barely even ever heard of the Aztec calendar stone. You had less than three months to go for your Peace Corps tour. You had an idea for an academic career path. Go for a PhD. in Anthropology, and a lifelong professorship. You had no idea about using your economics degree and Peace Corps experience to pursue a position with a corporation or a bank. You wanted to be attached to a University Library and to follow your line of questioning through the volumes in the Temple of the Book.

     As the months and years went by, doors opened that you had no idea even existed. Other doors closed, or you turned your back on them, in search of another path. It seemed like you were making conscious decisions, just as it seems so today, but aren’t all of our choices rooted in the primordial soup flowing through our veins, rooted in the synapses that were connected when we were learning how to walk and how to speak the language that we were hearing?

     The only scene I remember from those two or three days in Kathmandu on either side of my trek was sitting on a stone ledge on one corner of an intersection between walking lanes with a few middle-aged Nepali men. Senior to me, but not ancient. Night’s darkness had settled in but there was soft light from candles or oil lamps. I was on an exploratory walk, and joined this welcoming group for a sit down rest. The chillum was going around and whatever was in there was strong enough to get me coughing, and my friends were amused. The chillum came around again, and I was a part of the circle.

     As the years go by, the circles grow wider, until they become as wide as a life is long. Circles of Inclusion. Circles of Participation. Circles of Listening. Circles of Heartfelt Understanding. Circles of Willingness. Circles of Artistic Creativity. Circles in the Silent  Language.

     Touching base on Freak Street in Kathmandu was like reconnecting with a ground point, plugging into a socket that had long been idle. I was smart and alert and questioning and decisive, and on a personal mission to know the world around me, along with whatever underlying truth I could discover and understand. I was a complete novice with Tibetan culture, my main experience having been following my guide Gopan Tsering along a trail for thirteen days, sharing sleeping quarters in small homes or huts along the way, having dinner with the family. And listening to 108 school children sing Tibetan songs in their wide, low-ceiling classroom in Jomsom at the end of the trekking trail.

     That’s all I really knew, and what I’ve learned since, compared to what there is to know, could be written on the head of the proverbial pin. And I’m always open to another text that can, through its language, throw a little light into my mind. Like Poetry, the Language of Light. Here is another way to know the world. Listen closely.

     Friday, the tenth at four in the afternoon, with an Americano at Himalayan Java. So what do you do when both of your houses are a pile of rubble and you don’t have earthquake insurance? What do you do when the clouds are rolling in with fresh buckets of water to keep the tourists away from the courtyard? When there is nobody to talk to about what you know, and your wife is living with her parents in their village four hours away, when she will not even be eligible for a teaching position for another four months? How about when your musical instruments have been trashed and your practice is falling further and further behind with every passing day? Time for reaching out, would you say? First an email, then a telephone call, then a bus ride from Bhaktapur to the Boudnath Stupa and Shechen guest house. Is there some way I can help this noble and gracious person? None of this - give a man a fishing pole bullshit. There are no fucking fish in the fucking lake. All the tourists are staying home, and all the fishing poles lie in pieces under a big pile of bricks. . . .

     What an amazingly beautiful conversation to be watching. Between a young monk, perhaps thirty or so years old, and a young western woman of around the same age. I’m guessing the language is Tibetan. It’s not about learning the language. It’s about what is the language talking about. And the language that both of them, and especially her, are speaking through their hands is a magical dance of infinitely expressive gesture. Such a spontaneously interactive exchange of ideas that both are working on together. Both are clearly entirely fluent in the language they share. I have never in my life witnessed this kind of conversational expression. So thoroughly mentally involved they are with one another, and so intricately animated in the way the fingers, palms and wrists move with emphatically precise and graceful innuendo. Such a joy comes through in their linguistic expression, smiles of realization and insight interlace their sentences like emphatic exclamation points. Pure mental, mind-to-mind interactive joy! Here is how we share our words about this whatever that both of us are passionately involved with. With our hands as much a part of our voices as the words on the tips of our tongues. Neither one of us one-upping the other; rather both of us forging a path together in exploration towards the expression of a realization that both of us are searching for.

     Debate as the mutual challenging and reinforcement of ideas in spiraling realizations of a Truth that we both recognize. Something other than Debate seen as a challenge that leads to winners and losers. The young monk is the teacher and there is a notebook on the table he shares with his student, the eloquent young woman who speaks with the hands of a Bharatanatyam dancer. They both know what is in this notebook, as if they had written it together, taking notes in tandem from whatever source. Only very occasionally will this notebook be referenced.  The monk has the final nod, and the woman whose words dance on the tips of her fingers knows full well with absolute certainty when she has reached a conclusion. There is no hurry. This is not a contest. The young woman may even plug into her laptop and look for something in there. As if reconnecting with some half-remembered thought, filling in a blank on the way back to the continuing conversation.

     On this Day for Special Conversations, Krishna comes by for a visit. Took the bus in from Bhaktapur, two buses actually to get within walking distance of Boudnath. Within ten minutes of his arrival at the garden-restaurant where I am waiting at a table, the rains begin, and they come down heavily for easily an hour.  We have a small pot of masala chai. Here is where our voices and our thoughts meet across the table. A different kind of gestural interface. Krishna can talk about the economic disaster he has encountered, and is encountering, with absolutely no trace of any anger towards anyone or the system that keeps him in this mess. He is a husband and a father and can’t go running off to the Emirates to make a bunch of money. He’s got the land his houses were built on and a three room reconstruction, and a well kept garden, and he is in a Love marriage for six years now. What becomes of his Life will Become here. Nothing complicated about this conversation. What this man needs is some Crowdfunding! Hmmm. See how we think in this digital, mindset world! Back down on Earth, gradually the rains subside, and the cloudy sky evaporates. Time for the two friends to take a walk around the Stupa, stop in a Thangka shop for a look-see, and climb the steps to the Himalayan Café rooftop for lunch with a front-row view of the reconstruction progress of the new stupa pinnacle. Krishna and I are a part of each other’s conversation, or shall I say that he and I are each a part of the conversation we have? I think both of these are true. Two people finding each other in conversation! What a Rush!

    

     Fingers dancing on the tips of Bharatyanatyam gestures.

     Thoughts on the tips of our tongues in conversation.

     Lotus Blossom, Petals Open, Dawn.

     Sunday the twelfth at one-thirty at the window of Himalayan Java overlooking the circumambulators while listening to three men and a woman exchanging their ideas in Russian. Nine nights it has been here now at Boudnath. Two more are planned before a Tuesday morning departure for Pokhara. Ninety percent of my Kathmandu experience has been here on the grounds between the Boudnath Stupa and the Shechen Monastery Guest House and garden-restaurant. How are you using your mind, what are you using your mind for today? How are you choosing to direct your thought? How about some monotonous repetition? Like all of the mala-bead recitation people? Carol P. visits in my dream last night, my art teacher back at the University of Wisconsin back in the late-eighties, when I’m in my younger forties. She is kind of teasing me in a playful kind of way. Sooo, John, when do you think you are going to start drawing your mountains and mandalas again?

     Monday the thirteenth at ten-thirty morning. Just gotta Luv these smooth transitions. Yesterday afternoon, stop at the front desk to ask Ngawang for some basic info about getting my way over to whichever bus station can get me going towards Pokhara. Ngawang points to Tashi sitting at his computer in the room across the hall. Tashi has all the answers. Tuesday morning at quarter after six, I carry my bags downstairs, through the garden and to the stone pavement at the security gate where I will meet my taxi driver. He will drive me to the bussing area near Thamel in central Katmandu, where I will be dropped off at the appropriate bus. All these guys know each other. They do this all the time for mono-lingual, bewildered tourists. Bus ride is from seven to three, and I’ve got a mid-coach right window seat, the preferred side. Looks like a short bus, as busses go, nice pretty new in the brochure picture. Tashi’s got me lined up with Little Tibetan Guest House for ten dollars per night. A taxi man will be standing at the bus drop off point with a card with my name on it, and I will be whisked off to the hotel. Door-to-door service between cities takes the edge off of that uncertainty I must carry when I enter a city with no pre-booked room, as I went through with Khakarvitta and Bhaktapur, and which I’m sure I’ll go through again along the road. What will be, in either case along the road, is what will be.

     Since my Durbar Square excursion last Monday, every day has been around the Boudnath enclave and surrounding pathways, and the monastery guest house. Circumambulations, along with a closer look into some shop I newly discover, spiraling staircases to rooftop patios for a veg burger, fries and salad or some such thing while watching the workers on the stupa reconstruction, visit Himalayan Java for a large dark cup with a chocolate muffin, and some windowside coffee house contemplation of whatever and whomever is out there. Walk the lanes back to the guest house around four, and share time between my room and my garden. Same, Same . . . only Different.

     Forthcoming time in and around Pokhara will be eye-opening, consciousness expanding in a different kind of way. I’ve got a memory picture of walking the narrow river valley between the snow-covered gray granite peaks of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna. I’ve got a memory picture of the Jomsom hamlet, and the graceful village of Tatopani winding along the river’s course. I’ll be looking for a jeep ride now, through this place where there were then no roads. Airplanes will be taking off and landing at Jomsom. Very much “Same, Same” for the view towards the sky, very much “only Different” for the trail. Jeep ride will likely be a few or several hours of a single day. My walk back in 1970 was seven days up and six days back. Superimposition of old and new images. What was for coloring what’s new, and what’s new to fill in the blanks between the old memory pictures.

     Vajrayogini dances, riding her blossoming lotus, sky-dancing woman with words of wisdom for those who Listen.

     Now Tuesday evening, the fourteenth at nine-thirty in room twenty-seven of the Little Tibetan Guest House in Pokhara. Referencing last night the thirteenth as I’m getting to the bottom of my last cup of tea at the Shechen guest house dining room. Last couple of days, there has been another elder man of European descent sitting at a table, just as I have been sitting at a table, and there are signals in passing that we are both open to a meeting, a possible conversation. Since I arrived at Boudnath June third, now eleven days have gone by, and I’ve had no conversational interaction with any of the other European or American visitors along the way around here. There are mostly younger travelers from their mid-twenties on up through their thirties and forties. Even a group of eight French-speakers for a couple of days who sat around their dining table, four along each side and two across, and I’m not exactly following what they’re talking about, but it seems in my ear as a musical chattering of French sentences simultaneously enveloping the air. Point getting around to when and where one meets one’s conversational partner.

     So I’m finishing my last cup of tea before departure the next morning, and in walks this other elder guy come down for his evening bottle of coke, and our mutual greetings lead us to sitting across the table. Freddie C. is from Britain, a tall, strong, robust eighty-one, thin wisps of white hair across a balding crown, and we begin our stores of how many times, when and where we have known India and Nepal. Freddie’s memories for this part of the world go back fifty years, and includes some time in Pondicherry. He has worked in some capacity for the U.N. as an economic development aide, though all of that is not a part of the point of our conversation. The point is that all of his adult life has been traveling more than half of every year, going here and going there mostly in Asia for different reasons that draw him to his special, magical places. One of which is Leh, which is on my itinerary, and which he makes a point of visiting every two years. I pictured myself in some similar professional role when I was an undergrad Economics major, and as I entered my Peace Corps assignment. Those were the first two steps of an imagined career path. Am I talking to the kind of person I might have become, career wise? My idea changed during that two year tour in Cuddalore. The path took a turn through Anthropology, Art, and Poetry, as I went searching for my original Vision, and my original Voice.

     Freddie has a garden back in England that he cares for strongly, sounds like his home is a place where he can feel quietly, creatively comfortable, until he hears the voice that tells him to get up and go somewhere, usually in Asia, with India and Nepal being his favorites, several weeks at a time, traveling lightly, visiting familiar places, and some new ones. Kind of a way of life I’d like to direct myself towards, according to my own style. Where does one find what one needs to realize a sense of fulfillment? In the garden we nurture, the garden we venture forth from to find new inspiration to bring back to the garden, in the garden where Freddie cultivates his flowers, where I would bring forth my paintings.

     In my travels, I’m frequently asked how old I am, and when I say seventy-one, I am met with looks of amazement, and compliments for how strong and healthy I appear. I tell these people that I keep moving, keep walking, and that is my key to endurance that I plan to continue. Pursuing a life dream for me is an active tense verb. The walking I do now is simply a slower version of the running I did in my twenties. Setting a pace that pushes wherever I am at just a little further. Freddie also extols the virtues of walking, the virtues that keep all of our physical systems in working order. We are designed for walking, and the more we do, the longer we will be doing it. Freddie is an inspiration, so that when I get to feeling sluggish and worn out, I’ll remember the image of this cheerful old guy gallivanting around the world to this favorite places while he leaves his garden to care for itself sometimes.

     I ask Freddie if he reads poetry and he says not particularly, but he has appreciated some on various occasions. I’ve got a copy of my book for him, printed in Poindicherry, and he really appreciates the gift and speaks enthusiastically about reading it because he knows the author, this other world traveler who sees the world and our relationship to it in so many similar ways. Eleven days in Boudnath, to find this conversation, and what a good one it has been!

     Wednesday the fifteenth of June, at nine in the morning at my Pokhara home.

Recollection image: The village on the hilltop that looks across the valley to the snow-capped peak on one side, and from another side of the top of this hill, a view downward towards the sky-mirror of the Lake.

     Today in the City by the Lake, Light and dark gray clouds linger and merge into one another in wistful embrace, from horizon to zenith, the gray cloud hovers. Just in time for the off-season monsoon beginning. How far I will be able to go will be quite weather dependent, between walking along the streets of discovery in the city, or jeeping it out beyond the city limits.

     I’ve got my own semi-circular balcony with one round table and two chairs. The opposite door opens to the communal balcony hallway that leads to the stairway to the garden. This enclave is a cultivated rain forest of different types of trees, interlacing branches and sharing sunlight. A string of weathered prayer flags hangs loosely from one branch of a tree in one corner, coursing through the branches of other trees, to finally tie to the branch of another corner tree.  Opposite doors opening both is perfect ventilation. Maybe I’ll get very far towards the interior and maybe not. For now, I’ve made a beachhead, and what a very fine little place this is. No phone to the office, so I walk down to ring a brass bell to call the Tibetan matron, wife, and mother, in her mid-life sense of the world, to the door. I give her my order from the menu, and she will have her teenage daughter bring it to my room. Breakfast is the only meal served at the Little Tibetan, and I will be going beyond the gate to visit and choose from the endless rows of restaurants along the Lakeside main street, for I am pretty much in the middle of where all the backpackers pass through.

     Yesterday’s eight hour bus ride – station-to-station, seven to three – was rather rattling. Fine scenic views through my riverside window, on a bus with brakes that screeched through several octaves of intensity every time the driver touched the pedal, and besides the fact that, if this vehicle does have shock absorbers, they need serious attention.

     After resting, as dusk is reaching into darkness, walk through the misty air along one block, then another, checking out the shops, reading sidewalk menus, finally settling into a Godfather’s for a vegetarian twelve inch pizza and a small pot of chai. And watch the waterfalls out of the sky and make rivers in the streets. And so it is the clouds drift by overhead, with no trace of blue to be seen anywhere except in memory. It really doesn’t matter, what happens or doesn’t happen, as long as I keep writing about whatever it is or isn’t. All I really do is sit in my room looking out a window if I have a view I like to visit, which in the case of the Little Tibetan is a patchwork quilt of treetop greenery, so I like it. And from here I wait for some idea to take me through the garden to the gateway. Just coming in from eleven days of going around in my little set of Boudnath circles, on the threshold of an entirely strange set of city streets. Through the garden path to the gateway, and something new begins.