Oh my Strength and my Stronghold, my Refuge in a time of distress, the nations will come to You, from the ends of the earth, and they will say,
"Our fathers inherited only lies, worthless idols of no benefit at all."
"Our fathers inherited only lies, worthless idols of no benefit at all."
Yesterday her fingernails were hot pink. She had helped me bargain for a variety of gifts to take home with the dexterity of a mildly raging young twenty something Tibetan girl. She didn't know the area well and I showed her to a trusted and popular momo teahouse which she had, up until that moment, never knew existed.
The teahouse was populated with monks and nuns and couples and an old grandmother sipping beer and stuffing momo's into her nearly toothless face. My student whipped out a slip of paper and gave it to me. This is a gift for you from my grandfather. She said. You must take it to America and show all of the people.
I opened it up... I didn't recognize the folded, stained, torn, little piece of rag that was inside. She took it out and held it gingerly. Do you know what this is? Nope.
But as I looked the mystery became clear to me: what her grandfather had given me was a 100 sang note. Tibetan money, hailed from a time long ago when they used their own money printed in a nearby monastery. It doesn't exist anymore, no one under the age of fifty would have ever touched one of them, and no one under the age of thirty would have ever seen one. In shock, I stuttered that I had never seen one before and didn't realize there were any more left... my student brushed some loose hair away from her face and said, me either.
I insisted that I go and meet her grandfather.
She took me higgildy piggildy through some alleyways so narrow that a few inches less and my shoulders would have scraped both sides. We arrived to a hyperactive chihuahau and an old man with a red nose sitting crosslegged wearing long underwear under his pants despite the nausiating heat and sipping a large wooden bowl of frothy butter tea. His eyes were sun stained blue around the edges and he had an endearing habit of running his stiff, wrinkled hands through his gray black hair. When we would make eye contact he would grin to the point of laughter and insisted that I was no older than sixteen.
I asked him to tell me a story.
And so he wove out a story of Milaripa's youth. He spoke episodes to my student and while she translated the gravely speech heavy with Lhasa slang he picked fluff off the Tibetan style carpet on which he sat. I rubbed the dog into submission and and listened in wonder that a grandfather could tell this story of a Tibetan hero's half myth half history as though it were his own. And the only story worth telling.
We left a good while later when he had quite obviously become fatigued but not until after I assured him that his gift to me was safe and thanked him profusely. His nearly ruined eyes twinkled a little and I was suddenly struck with the understanding that all his hope, all his dreams, all his aspirations for himself and his people, lay wrapped up in a fantasical story of half truths and a now valueless piece of rag given to a foreigner.
He had inherited only lies and worthless idols of no benefit at all. And he was passing them on as his most precious possession to his granddaughter. Who would in turn pass them on... and on and on... until they, the lies and the people who believe them, are destroyed.
I stood waiting for a bus in the sun so hot that buildings became wavy and I started having visions of air conditioning and before I knew it I was mildly humming the Star Spangled Banner. But my heart was broken, shattered by a lostness of a people here at the very tip of the earth.
Oh my Strength, my Stronghold, my Refuge... what will it take for them to come to you?
