Shambala

Class topic: Can and Can't

Me: Tashi, what is your biggest dream?
Tashi: My biggest dream is to go to Shambala.
Me: Do you think you can do this?
Tashi: No, I can't.
Me: Why?

Tashi: I can't because I don't know where it is.

****************************

Shambala. Shangrila. Paradise. Heaven.

He knows that he doesn't know where it is.
He doesn't know that he doesn't know Who it is.

Shambala. Shangrila. Paradise. Heaven.

*****************************

His response had made me burst out laughing in class, had made me translate the Tibetan word and then the Chinese word for the English ones, had made me smile and ask them all whimsically, "Maybe you don't know where it is, but can you find it?"

However, as the rest of the day unraveled into bowls of steaming dumplings, around cups of thick sweet milk tea, through conversations with students past and present, over a dinner of oily vegetables and curious students, and ended up in a pile on the dingy carpet of my apartment... his response wrapped like a thorny vine pricking my soul till it now bleeds. He wanted to go there, but couldn't... couldn't because he didn't know where it was... Who it was.

But I knew. I know.

And if I could rewind any day of my life, return to any previous moment, sit down in a time machine and end up at any point in the past, it would have been that one... and it would have gone like this:

Me: What is your biggest dream?
Tashi: My biggest dream is to go to Shambala.
Me: Do you think you can do this?
Tashi: No I can't.
Me: Why?
Tashi: I can't because I don't know where it is.
Me: Tashi, your dream is beautiful, and you can go. Do you want me to tell you how to get there, how to get to Him?

But I can't go back in time. Only forward.

Forward holding the hand of Him who is outside of time and through some divine joke has chosen the clumsiest of vessels to transport the most precious of messages to the most painfully captive of prisoners.

Shambala. Shangrila. Paradise. Heaven.

Let there be a room waiting for Tashi there.