When the team leaves town...

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.

reverse reverse

And so my day ended.

I laid down knowing that I would awake to snow like someone careless with powdered sugar on the mountaintops.

Just then, a slobbery gust of wind and rain blew the curtains away from the teahouse door immediately signifying that the brief visit had come to an end. We declared our joy at getting to see each other, our promises of later visits, and dashed out and then off into the sheets of rain our separate ways.

The cold and nearly empty thermos of sweet tea was content to take up room on the small table as she whispered to me about her family. Her aging parents still doing all the farm work, her monk brothers who were professional idol and incense makers, her sister's five children, her younger head strong brother, all know whom she has believed and all in her tender though loaded words: disagree. She brushed a slightly greasy strand of hair away from her symmetrically almond shaped eyes and nervously twisted a ring on her finger... it's difficult she only just mouthed. I squeezed her hand. There was nothing else I could think to do.

She had sent a message saying she was across the street, I had sent a message begging for any other time to see her, then immediately changed my mind, laid my work aside, slid back into my well worn shoes, and out the door once again but this time on an invaluable mission to visit a dear sister who I hadn't seen since last term. And the joy to which I was met with upon entering the teahouse where she waited for me made even putting the dirty socks on again worth it. So we went about the business of chatting over tea.

Finally, a moment, after a long, nearly continuously interrupted day to just breathe and finish the odd scraps of lesson planning that needed to happen for next week. But it was only a moment... the phone is going to go on strike after what it's been through today.

Even my weariness couldn't quell my urge to stop. Secretly I had always wanted to have the opportunity that lay before me on the uneven sidewalk in the dimming light as the cool breeze sliced my fingers and swirled the crowds of dirt lined against the curb. There was another student perched on a stool playing a serious game of Chinese chess with two grizzled and even more serious old men. A chance of a lifetime for a foreign teacher who walks by serious games of chess like it's her job with a longing to stop and watch or play but possessed only of a debilitating ignorance. Which promptly fled in sight of my student. He promised, between serious moves that involved a lot of grunting from the old men, to teach me how to play... leaving the doors swinging open on their hinges for future sidewalk games. Pleased and quite finished, I went back to the apartment.

So I found myself racing to the school gate only four and a half minutes late for a dinner meeting that had been arranged on the fly. I have always been able to distinguish this tiny student of mine from all the others at a distance simply by the way she wraps her long black hair behind her head in a bun. We walked through the cool breeze to a hole of a Chinese restaurant as she told me about her teaching job, about how she misses Lhasa, some questions of English letter writing, her family... a conversation continued over too much food and bursts of laughter more genuine than anything coming out of the blaring television set in the corner. Afterwards, I saw her to her bus then turned once again to head back to that place I had woken up in what seemed now like nearly a century ago.

We walked back together to where I could catch a bus and the idiotic phone rang and meetings were canceled and new ones were made and flies buzzed over a heap of trash nearby. She looked at me: teacher, then we go back to my house together? And I couldn't do anything but smile and hug fiercely this girl who after spending nearly five straight hours with me would so so gently request more. So gently in fact that it took every ounce of restraint left in me not to just agree and spend the rest of my life in that small room in the intestinal alleys of Lhasa. But it wasn't to be, and there wasn't a moment to lose before meeting another student for dinner.

On the roof the sun was warm nearly blistering and it was obvious by the fact that she had brought her dictionary with her that she had many things on her mind. So she looped around and around, words like birds dipping through the air, as we squatted on the dusty rooftop. She arranged her fears and doubts in circles around us and I dutifully followed the swirls; picking the fears up and presenting opportunities, dusting the doubts off and displaying strengths. We were interrupted by wild giggles in the alley below and we couldn't resist peering over the wall to watch as a group of children turned some plastic baskets into race cars. Race cars that we dodged a few moments later as I left to find the remainder of the day.

Past a pile of pink and purple plastic pails I turned left into an alley and left again into a house that had begun to feel more like a home to me after my countless visits over the last year. Delighted to find my ever cheery, slightly freckled student at the top of the stairs we began what would be just another day together. She slid her glasses up on her nose with her middle finger and flipped her tidy black braid over her shoulder and together we set about the work of washing, cutting, peeling, frying, boiling our lunch of vegetables over rice and sweet milk tea. The cracked mirror hanging on one wall reflected back the chatter of the next door neighbor grandmother as she stared and commented on how big my body was, reflected back the foggy Tibetan lessons, reflected back dozens of text messages and phone calls from what felt a little like everyone in the city, reflected back the stacks of bottles and books and clutter that filled the tiny room. The mirror had seen enough. My sweet student and I headed up to the roof.

The clouds hung like a thousand gossamer veils over the mountains. Cold. I racked my brain for any excuse I could think of that would be valid enough to keep me in bed the rest of the rainy morning... but instead of a reason I got a text message and my day began....

No, today doesn't really make any more sense in reverse.

Some visuals... more to come...

And then there were three...

The mission:
Chinese milk tea complete with chewy tapioca balls. Hot or cold... as you like.
The method:
Take a bus to the edge of town, walk until your legs begin to tingle, hum Chinese pop songs that you can't actually sing along to, squint until you see off in the distance a tiny little speck of a shop with the Chinese characters for cha do do (tea much much), race to the counter, wait patiently as the person in front of you buys her weight in hot dogs, order three teas, enjoy while squatting on the filthy curbside.
The menagerie:
One American foreign expert of nothing. One Chinese student expert in snacks. One Tibetan student who was guilted into tagging along for the ride.

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

In my two years here I had never undertaken so random a mission using so haphazard a method with so diverse a menagerie. As step one of our method chugged along I found myself sandwiched between the profoundly Tibetan and the quintessentially Chinese and felt a little claustrophobic as both stared me in the face. What had I done?

It wasn't until we were squatting on the curbside before my anxiety over the potential disaster that I had orchestrated subsided. There's something alarmingly equalizing about squatting, not to mention squatting side by side on some stained pavement slurping tapioca balls through wide straws as flecks of garbage trundle past in the breeze. Though I tried not to show it, it struck me continuously how the three of us represent all of the conflict and beauty that this city suffers under. We chatted in English, I clarified in Tibetan, they exchanged in Chinese, and the world became three dimensional as the layers of language swirled around creating a conversation that was nearly impossible to follow due to the fact that perhaps only two thirds of us were understanding any given exclaimation. Everything repeated three times with the only variation the order. It's delicious! Shimbodu! Hao chi! Slurp slurp slurp. Di johkma ribe? Is that an ant? zhege mayi ma? Slurp slurp slurp. Wo hen shui jiao. Nga galeh cahgbodu. I'm sleepy. Slurp slurp slurp. On and on and on... round and round and round.

But not everything can be translated.

When the paper cups were dry, the breeze icy at our backs, the wide straws useless, the ground more disgusting than we could bear, and the lady returned for her second order of hot dogs... we stood up to leave. Mission completed, we retraced our method back to the school.

After a threefold declaration of pleasure in our outing and a good bye, zai jian, chu-oh to the girls, I crunched through yellow piles of leaves with my mind reeling from our triangular conversation and proximity to the complexity that I always knew was here but had never sat between on a bus, had never wandered amidst down the street, had never partaken of tea among.

I have a lot to learn... and there's no one and no way to translate it.

The Lion

Look! The Lion from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has been victorious...

I stretched my legs out in front of me and leaned back on my hands. A rooftop on the rooftop of the world being an ideal location to let a few days sweep over you like crinkled yellow leaves somersaulting over the sidewalk below. The sun dipped behind the darkened mountain and I remembered...

An empty tea house save for a handful of drowsy flies and a teacher and a student. Two bowls of noodles licked nearly clean bridging the minute expanse of the wobbly wooden table between us. A glum looking child squeezing the breath out of a matted kitten in the corner. She reached in her bag and hands me back a precious Book, that I had had no intention of getting back. Knowing she couldn't have completed it in only a few short weeks I asked what she thought, why she was giving it back.
I showed it to my uncle she said. It was the only response I needed knowing that her uncle was a long established monk who she honors as the wisest person in all the world. I fingered the paper cup of cooled soggy tea leaves and suddenly realized that this girl's journey was far longer and more crowded with family members than I had previously understood.

The clouds bright with the setting sun floated over the rim of the darkening mountain like a wave of light crashing on the shores of shadow. They spilled over the edge and dissolved into spray that left the soft blue sky clear and tranquil as a sigh.

I opened the overly organized email inbox only to be greeted by a lengthy email from a colleague I only worked with my first semester ever in Lhasa. Back before I could discern which shops were grocery stores and which ones were restaurants. Back before butter tea was a reality. Before I stopped being shocked at where I was when I woke up every morning. Surprised at the seemingly rapid updates in his life I was more shocked to read this: What you have done in Lhasa explains what love is. Love is sacrifice to other people. Like the lion in the movie The Chronicles of Narnia. The large black font swam before my eyes and I read the lines over and over again knowing that this man believed 'only in nature' and yet that he had access to greater truth than he could ever have known.

The mountains went from a burnt orange to a deep purple to a dusky gray black and one tiny neon pink cloud danced alone in the pale sky. A sliver of moon made a delicate appearance and a cool breeze rustled the nearby trees and brought the sound of a woman's voice to my ear.

I had hardly knocked at the door to my colleagues apartment on the floor below me before it opened and we sat down to chat and drink a translucent red tea. The talk began of his holiday trip and wound its way to his planned retirement, looped through a few questions of history, and meandered towards a Book he'd been given from a teacher ages ago, pulled down from a nearby shelf, obviously nearly untouched but left on the table for the time being. His halting speech filled the room as he claimed that the belief of this city was so selfish, only for one people group, at least mine was open for anyone, indeed everyone. Even for you I affirmed as his oddly contagious laughter sloshed the tea in his tiny glass.

Up there on the rooftop the breeze was getting cooler but the roof remained warm and I stayed a little longer not wanting to miss a moment or a stroke of the masterful though mute performance that spun and dissolved over the tips of the jagged mountains, now nearly completely black in shadow.

My computer had never been in more rustic conditions as I proped it up on a wooden board which also balanced cups of sweet milk tea and I listened and watched as a long time monk friend scrolled through pictures of his holiday travels. Pictures of rainbows, and snow, and lakes, and mountains, and monasteries, and flags, and broken statue remains draped in katas flashed on the screen. When the faucet of picture stories had run dry we remained at the shady table and chatted while we finished the last of the tea. In response to something I remain unable to pinpoint he stared across the rickety board at me and scolded me for not thinking of myself enough and began to use my name as an adjective. You are too Kelly, always your mind is on Him, should you think of your own self this is best. And I laughed and reminded him of all the times he had called me selfish because I refused to participate in the detachment theories of his belief. He shook his head: You are too Kelly.

That evening I had walked slowly back through the beautiful weather past children scream giggling on playground equipment, past students with covered faces sleeping in the grass, past men urinating on the nearby fence... and nearly right into a hobbled Tibetan woman walking the opposite direction. Her face was a shadow to me as mine was a flash of bright to her and as we passed I heard her call out in a voice that sounded like ancient waters and could have called stones from their slumber: Oh---kay. My hand instinctively covered my grinning mouth as I thought: she's right, it is okay.

Lhasa sunsets are like a symphony playing a lullaby. Rich but gentle. Fireworks in slow motion, a swirl of dark colored paint on the canvas of the sky, in my greed to look ever upwards taking it all in the filth terror below subsides to a nearly forgettable moan. And I remembered...

Look! The Lion from the tribe of Judah... Then I saw one like a slaughtered Lamb.

I'll fly away...

I tapped at the cracked window and called out my most cheery "shopa deleg" (good morning) while the stars still twinkled overhead and the sun remained deep in sleep. The gate grandfather's wrinkled shivery arm handed me the keys to the school gate which clinked open loudly in the frosty pre-dawn air. Though clearly in a sleepy haze he had the state of mind to ask "cowah droga?" (where are you going?)

Some glad morning when this life is over... I'll fly away.

My legs felt stiff as they pumped the bike pedals through the dark deserted city streets. I met Dolker at the bus station surging like a beehive, the only sign of life aside from the dazed street sweepers in orange coveralls that I had passed that morning yet. We wiggled our way through the crowds after scarfing some tasteless rice porridge and found two seats as the back of the musty butter smelling bus.

To a home on His celestial shore... I'll fly away.

The air was crisp slicing through our cracked window. The river was turquoise, the sky was blue nestled in a sheet of clouds. The mountains were dotted with yellowing trees and reddening bushes giving the illusion of flames licking their feet. When the road winding through the mountain passes turned into a one lane ordeal with frequent blocks due to stray yak, goat herds, and squealing pigs, I realized how far away from Lhasa we had come. When the one lane road turned into dirt I realized how far we still had to go.

I'll fly away.

Slightly queasy with sloshy stomachs we arrived at Dregung Monastery. Like red and white lego blocks chucked on the side of a sculptural masterpiece it was a shock to the senses to glance left and see the snow dusted peaks towering above a freshly harvested valley and glance right and see the smattering of gaudy temples. And the birds, black shadows swooping low, black foreboding packs gliding through the thin air, black gusts suddenly bursting from nearby bushes, they were everywhere. Shocking in their abundance and huge size. Dregung specializes in Tibetan sky burials, corpses cut up and left for the birds. Today I had to learn the Tibeatn word for vulture.

When the shadows of this life have gone... I'll fly away.

Outside we wandered through the monastery, laughing, taking pictures, avoiding overly friendly grandfathers, dodging birds, catching our breath, remarking infinitely on the grandeur of the mountains and valley constantly in view, and were greeted by a playful dusting of a snow storm.
Inside she scrapped butter out of a plastic bag and dumped it into smelly, smoldering lamps, she tucked small cash notes into idols hands, she bowed, she chanted, she let her body lie flat on the floor before some metal buddhas perpetually riding on big metal horses. The monks droned their spells, changing only at the snap of the leaders fingers, they beat their drums, they listened to their mp3's, they drank their butter tea, they eyed the pale one. I asked my Father for wings...

Like a bird from prison bars has flown... I'll fly away.

Temples finished, the green hills covered with yak and wild flowers, the light play of snow, the blue overhead, Dolker's contagious laughter could have kept me right there. But when I stood precariously on the near vertical sandy mountain face and stared that particularly feisty yak with downward thrusted horns right in the face I realized I didn't have the right shoes or guts to spend even the night. So off we were down the mountain in search of a car back to Dolker's hometown, halfway back to Lhasa. A search that ended after nearly forty five minutes of standing on a dusty one laned street where young men reved motorcycles and one driver, who's driving turned out to be only half as crazy as his hair, swished red bull in his mouth and waited for more people to join us.

Just a few more weary days and then... I'll fly away.

"I'm not tired," I told Dolker minutes before we both fell sound asleep sitting straight up in the crowded, jostling van. When our exhausted bobbing heads could stand it no more we awoke, and just in time to ask Mr. My-Hair-Couldn't-Have-Been-Craizer-If-I'd-Tried to drop us off at her sister's tea house. A welcome retreat for two, nearly half starved, sleepy, travelers. The only items on the menu were tea and noodles. Three kinds of tea, black, butter, and sweet, two kinds of noodles... which, after trying both, tasted uncannily the same. We chatted with her mother, a fat droopy eyed woman with few teeth but the same contagious laugh, her sister, her brother, and her sister's daughter. I insisted on taking a family photo, they insisted that I include myself in it.

To a land where joy will never end... I'll fly away.

A herd of piglets caused havoc in the nearby ditch as we pulled away. Two vans later we had bounced meandered our way back to Lhasa. It was dark by the time I had biked like the little engine that could back up the mountain to my school. A student's tap at the door minutes after arrival back bestowed all of the joys of her mother's home cooked bread on my next few days. A phone call from a monk who's been away traveling for about a month hinted at long teas and too many pictures to come. I did some last minute preparations for tomorrow's class and wondered if my Father hadn't in fact given me those wings I asked for...

Fly.