poetry and pictures and a prayer

Living
(excerpt from)

How shall I reconile the two conditions:

Living, and yet - to die?

Between the curtains the autumnal sunlight

With lean and yellow fingers points me out;

The clock moans: Why? Why? Why?

But suddenly, as if without reason,

Heart, Brain and Body, and Imagination

All gather in tumultuous joy together,

Running like children down the path of morning

To fields where they can play without a quarrel:

A country I'd forgotten, but remember,

And welcome with a cry.

Harold Monro

standing in the rain, without really looking for it, really without any foreplanning, we came across - as happened every subsequent night - a comfy cosy place to sleep.  we began by searching for the balance between my proclivity to sleep out anywhere - although preferrably under a big tree - and ioana's habituation and desire for some sort of shelter.  standing in the light incipient drizzle, we inquired of the villagers if we could sleep in the little riverside shack we had seen from the bridge.  even if they did understand - the nepali-english language barrier had reduced us to hand gestures and hopeful snippets of hindi from me - there was probably a cultural incomprehension, i bethought myself, of the why of our desire to stay in such a shack in such a night in the rain.   in the rain we stood and beheld a majestic septicoloured arc spanning the skyline across the valley - a rainbow!   a nice big colourful rainbow, beneath which we took stock of our situation and the lowering light and recalled sujan's spontaneous offer of accomodation.  no sooner had he stepped off the bus and beheld us dallying by the bridge and told us about his position in the local municipality and listened to our question as to whether he knew a sheltered place nearby where we could light a fire and sleep, than his offer spontaneously issued forth: sleep at my house tonight, eat with me.  originally we demurred, adducing our desire for fire-lighting independence, but the rain made us reconsider: "sujan, what a nice, spontaneous offer he extended to us"  the challenge of finding his house then presented itself.  he had told us that his house was fifty metres behind the school on top of the hill, and that everybody would know of him when we uttered his name.   "hmmm, so sujan magarati, near the school........but which school? there are several", "the school on top of the hill" we asseverated confidently, but, "there are many schools".  everybody we spoke to was rather hesitant about the identity of sujan.  further on, when we reached the village behind the school, and darkness had really descended, a small boy presented himself to us thus: "i am sujan magarati, come!"  he opened a door which led into a small lit room and beckoned us inside, "come"
hesitation in the darkness.  em, we are looking for an older sujan magarati - maybe twenty years old?
amid the hesiconfusion sujan - our spontaneous sujan - appears, in all his smiling simplicity and open-hearted generosity and shows us where to put our bags in his own matrimonial room where the television set fulminates a gruesome bloody horror scene, and the local children stand gawk-eyed at the doorway before being chased away.  "we are very happy to have you in our village", sujan says, "no foreigners come to our village."   we sit outside and there in the dimly-lit courtyard the children return to gawk, and shy sujan junior is revealed to be a relative of our senior sujan host, with impish unblinking twinkling eyes. a rice dish is being prepared for us, we gather.  meanwhile sujan stands with young child in arms telling us he is a fighter for nepal's people liberation army.  his older brother - picture framed on the wall - has died for the cause and sujan will continue to fight.  "nepal is poor country, small country" - everyone says it - stuck in the mountains in between india and china, sorry, my english little little - no, we understand you perfectly - sujan wants to talk with us, wants to slowly consider his words; he unfolds his political goals: nepal needs to manufacture more goods, not import everything, produce   and    export.   i pictured his desired scenario of development, road expansion, construction, the increase of manufactured goods cushioning people's lives, and sighed inwardly at the expansive, polluting, planetary biospherical-harmony-depleting aims of the people.  later, ioana and i walked through remoter villages, separated from the other side of the valley and the road by several hours' steep walking, and marvelled at how self-sufficient their simple lives were.  we wanted to buy some fruits but found the few 'shops' contained very little beyond a few packets of biscuits, soap, toothbrushes and other such utilities.  correspondingly, there was almost no plastic refuge lining the sides of the paths, in sharp contrast to the rest of road-connected nepal we had seen.   the village of gatlang, which we passed through on day three of our langtang tour, was a hive of local industry, many woman sitting outside their homes weaving large pieces of fabric on handlooms, the men making wicker baskets and large bamboo partitions or else they were out in the fields harvesting the tasty little seeds of a miniature pea-like wild plant, or bringing back large bundles of nettles and other fodder for the livestock from beyond the village, or intricately carving the wooden panels which adorn their beautiful housefronts, the woodcutters for which we had already passed in the woods.   outside the village of nesing we came across a little wooden house containing a millstone pulled round by some simple (but nonetheless uncomprehended by me) mechanism utilising the energy of the stream's current to grind the dried maize corns into a coarse flour.  i marvelled at this.  it reminded me of the little mills i had once read about which adorned the little deeside streams in scotland in the seventeen hundreds.  over two hundred years later traditional unmechanical means of production have all but disappeared in scotland, but continue to be the everyday here in the mountains of nepal.  observing this first hand caused my thoughts to dwell on this mechanical revolution of our means of production and about the good things and bad things which it has brought.
on day five, at the 2,260m hot spring village of tatopani, a middle-aged swiss man was sitting in his underpants by the thermal baths smiling beatifically in the sunshine, a smile which never faded and which could have been a smile or could have simply been the way his mouth had come to hang.  he offered some mild rebuke when we heard that we had been sleeping in the woods and otherwise avoiding the local hostels and their pricey 100 rupee-a-bowl-of-porridge-menus.  "the local people depend on us white people for their income", he admonished, taking a pinch of his cheek between his thumb and forefinger, displaying the whiteness of his skin.  "we cannot go back to living in the woods", he broadened his argument, "simply cannot.   did you not depend on a flight to come here? that is the way the world is now; we need to work - sitting in front of a computer and so on - in order to get around."  i expressed my admiration of the simple, unpolluted village life, away from the mass conveniences of industrial production, and the (to my eyes) genuine friendliness and happiness of the villagers.  the sums of money that pass through one's hands are a poor indicator of development or quality of life.  quality of life experience is an inward thing, determined only in a limited way by sums of money.  "you don't know the inner desires, and frustrations of those villagers, as a result of their poverty" exhorted the swiss gentleman.   it is true that i don't know anything about a life that doesn't involve spending money, sending emails and the industrial production of comfortable footwear.

"he was passionate about his views" i later said to ioana, "and i didn't see the point of trying to justify our deliberate avoidance of the tourist-orientated establishments."  "we are passionate too about our desire for living simply, putting less pressure on the planet", ioana reminded me.  again we forewent a beer on the balcony of a hostel and as night was coming came across an enormous boulder with a little grassy level patch tucked near the top - a regular eagle's eyrie for us - inviting us to survey the dark valley clouds moving in between the moon and the far-off snowy peak which forms the border with china, about which ioana later wrote:

What it is that glitters so magically in this ungraspable dream?  Just a moment ago it was cloudy and the moon was hiding her appealing beauty as if she needed a break from so many gazings.  All I remember is that I gave the fire a last breathing kick and then my mind wandered away into some unknown ocean, floating along the waves of the unconscious.  But look!  wow all the clouds have been flushed away - by a higher force conveying thousands of meanings to us - revealing a hypnotising reality.  It must belong to the other world!   What I see is what I am.   Millions of stars sprawl over my sight; all thoughts are one being drawn into the pristine night sky.  Oh, living is such an enlightening experience!  I say to myself and my words sink into the pervading silence of the mountains.

+

ODE À LA NUIT


Les fleurs sauvages
Cachent leur âge
Sous leurs feuillages
Voici la nuit

Le feu s'étiole De luciole
En luciole
Noire est la nuit

La lune passe
La lune glace
La lune efface
Froide est la nuit

L'aigle se terre
Parmi ses frères
En Cordillère
Longue est la nuit

Le serpent dort
Sur l'arbre mort
Que le temps mord
Morte est la nuit

Le fleuve roule
Qui se déroule
Et qui roucoule
Chante la nuit

La nuit protège
Le doux manège
Des tendres pièges
Folle est la nuit

Sur toutes choses
La nuit se pose
Et se repose
Longue est la nuit.

Jacques Brel

1969

Saint Francis of Assisi's prayer

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;  

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.