As I prepare to leave Deer Park Institute (on the 9th) where I’ve been working since the beginning of my gap year, I feel I should reflect a little bit on what I’ve done here, so that hopefully the act of writing will deepen my memory of it. It’s strange what has stuck with me and what hasn’t: how weeks of actual work dim away but the smile of one six-year-old Tibetan girl, when she grabs my hand so I can walk her home from the children’s library, feels marked indelible in my mind. And so a pleasant coterie has formed of half-remembered frames that hover inside of my head. Smiles, steam rising from plates of food, the subtle curve of a ridge being outlined in the morning sun. I don’t think this can be expanded: what sticks sticks. But I’d like to jot down the other things, the daily things and the special things lost in a sea of special things, the things my limbs will feel out for when I’m gone. If the thoughts run it's because they do in my head too. I don’t think there is any way to really extricate them from each other, and doing so artificially would give you an unrealistic picture of what life is really like for me here, what living is really like. So, this may get messy and babbling and long in the tooth. Whatever. It is a fundamentally incomplete list, but closer to the living than a complete one. In no particular order, here are some of the things I’ve done here:
Teach secular ethics and computer science at a Tibetan Children’s Village school, using games I learned as a peer leader and techniques I’ve picked up from going to a relatively progressive high school. There, I’ve: heard H. H. The Karmapa speak (in Tibetan, lovingly translated by a friend); met a teen muralist whose work is amazing and is currently doing a graphic novel of the Tibetan myths he feels are being lost in modernity and displacement (the aforementioned friend; I’ve already told him I’ll be his first customer); talked extensively with the principal, whose caught between abandoning the traditional way of teaching in Tibet (lectures, very little student involvement) and abandoning TCV’s position as a uniquely Tibetan form of education – it is also worth noting that Tibetan Children’s Village is a cultural institution more so than a general educational one. I was incredibly surprised when, in asking in my class how TCV can achieve areté, or excellence through fulfilling its purpose, the response was completely devoid of any mention of the aims of education as we think of it in the West (preparing children for their future careers, instilling critical thinking, etc.), only “to preserve Tibetan culture for future generations.” – he is a great man in every sense. Broad with caring eyes; drink butter tea (disgusting, the butter is salted and coats your mouth with a heavy, cloying fat after every sip); eat tingmo (Tibetan steamed bread) basted in the first hot chutney too hot for me and embarrassingly turn bright red and sweating while talking to some very important teachers; consistently misremember the names of my students (80% of the class is named Lopsang, Tenzin, or Norgay) and consistently be deeply sorry for this; hear traditional Tibetan monastic debate (they heavily slap their hands if the people answer incorrectly. Some of the more serious monks sometimes have to go to the hospital after and be bandaged up); play with the little ones there, tiny in their uniforms whose faces are somehow both ruddy and soft; help students apply to colleges abroad and always feel out of place when they casually mention escaping through the Himalayas when they were young, their family left behind, and how many of their brothers are political prisoners and for how many decades; ask once why there are so many fewer younger kids here than older and then remember that people aren’t escaping Tibet anymore (can’t escape Tibet anymore) and knew the eyes of my friends would be cast downward and their cheeks slightly red in the afternoon sun before looking confirmed this; never quite be able to get the sweet and wavering tang of traditional Tibetan instrumentation out of some deep wrinkle in my head.
Mourn that next year in Chicago I will be away from the huddle of the mountains that rise above me on either side. Here I feel in the belly of the world. There it is a much more naked outside: where all the skyscrapers feel paltry still on the side of the lake when falls a stripping wind.
Ask why I’m even going to UChicago. Remember why I’m even going to UChicago. Slowly develop a deep, underground, gut thankfulness that I’m going to UChicago.
Help set up a Children’s Library here! Decorate, catalog books, catalog books, catalog books, and have my work each day interrupted by an hour of children streaming in and running and falling and breaking things and huddling together to read and play games (often with me) and be thankful for this too over the hot milk chai I use to reground myself in a world of adults when they leave.
Trek into the next valley (and deny a proposed marriage to a Pahari girl – they are beautiful. Slim cheeks, almond eyes – even though I was assured by her Auntie she was available).
Be told “I hate Tibetans” in Kangra before coming to Bir Colony and then coming to Bir Colony and understanding. Everywhere in Himachal the road work, the harsh 16 hours of pounding stone into bits and keeling over hot, stinking tar trucks is done by economic migrants from Bihar, who live in blue-tarp villages just outside towns. Foreign aid consistently flows into the Tibetan community, as does foreign tourism into Buddhist Centers like Deer Park. Their schools, community centers, etc. are decidedly more developed and prim. But it’s easy to forget what it means to be a refugee. To be casually talking about Tibet with the daughter of the Tibetan family who lives here and be told her father has been a political prisoner for 19 years. To forget that in all probability, everyone I know at TCV will not see their families again, were pushed into some cold train car of huddled shadows between six and ten or rode someone’s back over the high peaks into India. There is no right answer. There is no right answer. No right hatred. No right indignation, no right anger, nothing. Just sit back and sip your tea and try always to feel compassion for the whole of the wounded world.
Join a monk soccer team from a local monastery. Have trouble distinguishing my team-mates from afar because everyone except for me is wearing red and yellow (some in their full habits just rolled up at the knees). Play defense because their footwork is impeccable but end up pulling some good plays.
Eat out with many monks and many friends at many great, tiny places where the sunlight holds steady and purple for a few minutes after sunset. Fall in love with Charun Café.
Write a lot of poetry in fits and starts. Force myself into creative nonfiction because Once More to the Lake and On the Rainy River get me every time.
Practice meditation and mindfulness as much as possible and find it, and Buddhism as a whole, really and legitimately useful in processing the world around me. Start learning sitting, walking, and tea meditation not as rare events, but as parts of a daily routine, to augment the experience of living and cut through all that dulls it.
Grow a scraggly beard (I’ve been called a cross between Castro and a mullah) and be joked with that as soon as H. H. The Karmapa’s security come during his visit to Deer Park I’ll be tackled to the ground.
Have H. H. The Karmapa come to Deer Park, exchange a few words with him, marvel at the horde of Chinese tourists who fluttered into the campus just to see him take a few sips of tea and to veritably force money at him, and not get tackled to the ground.
Start a D&D group with some of the local volunteers here who teach English at Monasteries. Start to play with just the three guys, and by the end of the first game have all of the five female volunteers clustered around asking how to play and watching. The party now includes a unicorn and a gnome named Snaps McCrakin.
Go to the waterfalls: wander through the upper Indian village for about an hour, playing with goats along the way, pass the ashram where the yogi is said to be 135 years old, wind your way along the gaddi path to the rock cut steps where time and feet have worn an upside down bell curve, walk on slippery rocks along the river’s edge, climb over the first waterfall, grab hold of the spindly bamboo roots and pull yourself, crawling prone on your stomach up the near vertical incline at the second, go further along the river to the third, climb over that on mounds of rock too, and wind your way to the fourth, where a clear spout flutes from a bare rock face and your journey ends in the totally clear pool of mountain water, shallow enough to walk in until just under the fall, where it drops off six feet deep and the current tugs to whatever mysterious network of tunnels and growing things lies below. When you finish swimming and your limbs are numb with cold, sun yourself sprawled on the high rocks. On the way back, you may, as I did and many before me did too, fall down a minor cliff to the rocks below, and have a broad red bruise across your lower back for a week but, none of it matters because you’re still wet in your woolens which the sun hums along like a lazy Sunday walk and in your mouth will be the leaden taste of time like honey and strawberries.
Smoke for two weeks: Birri, the rough cut local tobacco wrapped in a dried leaf and tied with a single loop of purple string. Nuttier and richer than American cigarettes. Filterless with a gummy catch in the throat. I stopped when walking in Bir, smoking, I passed a distinguished elderly Pahari (local) gentlemen in full formal apparel, the ghost of all my Himachali ancestors past, who said in Hindi: “You are a handsome boy. Birri is very bad.” And then he gave a staunch little head nod that reverberated through his white beard. I stamped the butt out and haven’t picked up one since.
Listen to Neil Young and the Grateful Dead and Leonard Cohen and love the song Suzanne until the line “And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water / And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower / And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him / He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them” rattles in my bones like the Sanskrit and Pali chants that strike as so resonant and reverent and holy. It becomes what I speak, in a slow, low voice while I tap my stick at the desperate stray dogs who pick fights in the night.
Have many days brightened by the gaddis bringing their goats and sheep through the village in fluffy wandering clouds.
Meet a group of students from the US doing a Buddhist study abroad program and working on social science research projects in Bir. Many nights, sit around together in one small room, crowding onto both beds and spilling loosely onto the floor, talking and laughing and drinking apple cider and plum wine while someone fingerpicks an acoustic guitar and someone else sings along.
Work at Deer Park Institute! Do many things! Data science, ecology work, community development, explore Upper Bir, help on the organic farm, develop curricula, go to other local non-profits and help them, lead ecology workshops for local Indian and Tibetan schools (and, learn once and for all, when trying to teach students how to turn old plastic bottles into planters, I will never be good at crafts). But, take a tea break twice a day (10:30 and 3:30) and there sit outside with the staff on the terrace and drink hot, thick chai in the sun while goofing around.
Get very close with the Nepali Kitchen staff and make them Toad-In-The-Hole some mornings with masala and lots of chilies. Become fast friends with Ranjeet, whose 20 but can’t believe I’m 18, and spend lazy nights in town drinking beer with him over fresh chicken from dhabas, watching the cartoon movies he watches when he misses his family in Nepal when we come back. Never know how to walk with other men here, but end up steadily pressing our forearms together, like the men do in Turkey.
Forget the names of my taxi drivers and feel bad about this.
Learn how to slaughter and process a chicken.
Meet people:
Sindhu whose face is composed of flat planes and always wears a red shawl. Who knows more about alternative pedagogies than I could learn in decades and just did part of the Camino in Spain and is wandering for now. Who speaks with a careful resonance and who is a master with children and reads to them with in a voice low and deep-set with love.
Trilok who is my boss and is from Upper Bir. His broad alligator face flits between happy and sad with great clarity, and when he works through data the mental chewing shows in his eyes and the way his entire face suddenly seems to focus on a certain, far-away point. He invited me over for kitchori his first day and his wife served me a huge plate of it as we sat cross-legged in his mud-brick kitchen. Then, two ice-cream scoops of homemade ghee, drawing all the room’s light into its thick and pungent self. Homemade ghee has the quality of earth to it. Not dirt, but earth. Tasting it you feel the ground the cows have been grazing for thousands of years. Too rich for me, way too rich and deep and whole, but I ate it anyway, with my hands molding the rice and rajma into dense arancini.
Vid. A mid-70s twice-refugee whose been to 80 countries and done 32 Himalayan treks. After escaping Latvia during the annexation and years of learning English by singing Baa Baa Black Sheep to the American soldiers in refugee camps, he went to Canada and entered McGill at 16. After dropping out his first year, he finished up medical school (meeting his wife backpacking through Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, and Israel immediately before his last year). Now settled in New Hampshire with his easygoing humor and slow, avuncular speech (when it rained cold and hard during a hike he simply turned to me, chuckled and said: “We ain’t made of sugar, are we?”) I’m going to stay with him in Gokarna for a week. I miss him. He was here for the first two months I was, and our patterns had an unforced synchronization to them. We both love old folk (though he saw all my favorite artists live), and he gave me medical advice while I gave him technological help (we took his first selfie together). All of my attempted realistic depictions fail, give way to assumed exaggeration that’s really just my attempt at an honest depiction. He is wise with a wiry strength wrapping a stoic moral character. When he half-joke calls me son it is meaningful. He is the type of person I hope to grow up and become. I will be staying with him in Gokarna when I leave here.
Learn how long I can go without showering (long) and how few clothes I really need (few). File that away for college next year.
Go up to the falls again with a teacher a Deer Park: a monk who fled Czechoslovakia at 19 and hitchhiked through Europe and got introduced to Buddhism through LSD, who knows 13 languages including Sanskrit and Pali and many more than I ever will. Swim in the cold snowmelt, warmed by days of ambling through the mountains, before easing in a rough triangle onto a high rock thrust into the afternoon sunlight. On the way back visit the ashram and be blessed by the 135 year old yogi, a student of Vivekananda, who gave me thick sweet cream and lychee for prashad, on the way out hear someone in my group say with a slow, American affectation: “y’know… Believe what you want to,” smile, and agree. Go trekking with the teacher again in the nearby forested valley the next day and learn about Husserl’s investigations into the mind. Regret not waking up for breakfast to see him out the next day because the warm bubble of my five heavy blankets holds down my limbs and the resistance I put up to continued sleep is half-hearted at best.
Walk at night with my flashlight and stick, and more than a few times be lunged at by the curs who fill the streets of Bir. See a pug with half its eye out and what looks like a half corgi half dachshund get its rear leg crushed by a car and limp away, mewling, as the other street dogs flood forth from each alleyway barking to investigate the loud crack.
Get my leg hurt, badly infected, sliced open, and then fine again. Is it bad I only wish the scar was cooler?
Go paragliding.
Have bonfires with the monks from a local monastery where we all sing Hindi love songs and dance. Find, adjoining the field where we have them, an invitation-only backyard restaurant, open only one day a week, opened by two paragliders (from Germany and Mumbai) who serve unlimited pizza (perfect with a thin crust, cheese from Manali) and chai and strudel (also from their wood burning oven) for 300 rupees a head. They serve it with Thai basil, rocket (arugula), and long, thin dried chilies, the color of fired clay, glistening in oil. Eat there until stuffed and laughing with friends from India, Nepal, France, America, and Belgium on the wide couches they set around a simple, long table while pizza after pizza rolls out of the oven and the night rolls on.
Listen to Feist and Big Thief and Vulfpeck and other bands I got from those US Students (for which in return I could only contribute a deeply and endearingly earnest indie rock cover of The Monster Mash).
Meet Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, who spent 13 years in silent retreat in a mountain cave, and now established her own nunnery and is a staunch advocate for women in Tibetan Buddhism (she has vowed to achieve enlightenment in the female form). Marvel at how after so many years here her straightforward British way of speaking is unchanged. Talk about historical opposition to women in Buddhism (even the most elderly nun has to bow before the youngest monk) and how most ordain because they want to do something meaningful with their lives. Most money that goes to monastic institutions goes straight back to Tibet, or to support the living conditions of the monks (who live very comfortably in general), while none of it goes to nuns, many of whom have to support themselves financially. Talk about how Buddhist philosophical contributions have been ignored in the West. Talk for two hours and babble quite a bit because I find her really inspirational and have trouble believing I’m actually this close to her, just talking (this is a problem I had quite a few times here).
Eat durunge and kinnu and mossami and all the local mountain citruses you won't find anywhere else, pickled spicy in the fall and fresh in the winter. Have Trilock pick fresh sweet melon buds from the trees in Bir's alleyways as we walk and eat them, gingerly pulling off the spiny shell. Eat Pahari food: qatta, a sour curry dish made with powder from dried green mangos, and mundra, a thick orange curry with a yogurt base. Find walnuts and chestnuts on every hike, rich and ripe for cracking.
Trek a lot, up, down, and across these mountains. Tear a Darn Tough sock, which has got to get me into some elite club. Love the blue light that slants across after the sun sinks behind them, when mist forms into an effervescent sheath and bears its way slowly up the mountainside, until each ridge is a floating terrace, each tree an island. Love the internal twist of being directly across from a vertical face that fills my whole field of vision and causes a sudden hiccup in the concept of “down.” Put on Bob Dylan when I hike with girls, mostly early stuff with the exception of Tangled Up in Blue. Always in small villages in the mountains be offered hot chai and a place to sit by the old men, playing cards, smoking, and laughing as their animals graze. Be cozy on these mountains and cozied in Bir between them. Here is a remarkable place. Between the sloping sides of the Dhouladur Range and the broad plain behind. The belly of the world. A good place to walk and to be. To stop for a while.
I'll write one of these reflections after each leg of my gap year. Next I am going to travel India for a month, then go back to the US for one month, and in mid-February, start in Jamaica, doing marine and mangrove conservation with C-CAM.
If you'd like to follow my journey photographically, check out my Instagram.
If you'd like to follow my journey photographically, check out my Instagram.