A note

Dear Grandma,


I am lighting a candle for you today.

Because today, now, here, is January 29th at home.

I know that it is from you that I have the love of dance and music in my life.

And the ability - even when life is harsh - to smile and laugh.

Hungary, Chicago, Texas, Hillsboro.

$5 checks at Christmas.

Remembering only what is most important.

Lover of freedom.

I feel you still with me

and will carry your spirit forward.


Love,

Your granddaughter, Tiffany

Saturdays

I decided to follow custom today and to do laundry and visit a holy spot....in this case, the local gumba (Buddhist monastery).

Here are some images from along the trip.

1. Buffalo checking me out

2. Truck art

3. ....closer look

4. Oil lamps at the gumba

5. Painting of buddha

Rethinking the ordinary

You know when you’re camping, and it’s late fall, or perhaps winter, and you’re all snug and warm in your sleeping bag? You don’t want to get out, because you know that it’s coooold outside. So, you stay longer in the tent than you should when you have to make a visit to the trees in the middle of the night . And in the morning, you hope that your friend is an earlier riser than you are and that they will start the fire and the coffee first.

Well, my life is like camping right now. Every day. First, it’s cold. At home, in the office, and when I’m in my Nepali class with my tutor. Second, when it’s dark outside, it’s dark everywhere. We’re now up to 12 hours of (day time) load shedding.

I also have lots of time to think in the moment. Specifically, I have been thinking recently that things that – just months ago – seemed so foreign, or different, or unusual now are a part of my every day.

To keep my thoughts and creativity from also freezing, I’ve decided to do a short series of photographs of these ordinary, everyday things that are integral in my life and daily routine these days.

Above:

Cooking with propane on a 2 ring burner

Boiling water

Candlelight, homemade sweets given to me by a neighbour, and my work notebook

The Power of Words

The US Embassy held a poetry slam recently here in Nepal. Below is a poem from a Nepali youth.

I find it incredibly refreshing. Almost every youth I ever meet (aside from my 17 year-old friend who is my downstairs neighbor) just wants to get out of Nepal. They are sure that the solution to a better life is somewhere else.

There is so much beauty in Nepal, though, on many levels. And Nepal needs it's next generation desperately.



Home
Yukta Bajracharya

All I can see outside from these rose colored glasses
are neatly aligned boxes with big windows that breathe despair
big gates that breathe suffocating
and walking, talking sticks inside them that do not breathe at all.

The air here stifles,
crushes,
murders my every thought. Those cold faces
with hypocrisy painted over them
suck the life out of me.
Vaccums me.
But of course, you won’t hear the noise
you’re too deafened by the
clinking of the coins,
the rough strokes of the ugly green.

And so I sit here wishing
that I could fly to that place
you refuse to call your home.
Fly to that place
that I call home.

Home.
Where,
Poverty rings like temple bells
and smells like plastic full of dendrite.

Yet,
Home.
Where the air redolent in the smell of fresh jasmines,
the buttery smell of sweets from the haluwai,
Warm my soul.

Home.
Where,
Illiteracy, Surfaces as statistics
of people in the West,
dying of diarrhea.

Yet,
Home.
Where when you sit in the dabalis of the Patan Durbar Square
with eighteen rupees a cup tea in your hand
and for once
the world stands still.
You forget all your worries.

Home.
Where the streets are not paved with gold
but with potholes,
Because what fun in treading on smooth pavements?
To not trip once in a while and feel human?

Home.
Where the temple bells ring at early hours in the morning
and again at the not-so-early evening
and again and again and again
until, my spirit start to ring
in unison.

Home.
with shabby houses that smile,
slanting just a little
but standing
through and through the test of time.
The narrow, labyrinthine gullies
that lead you to courtyards of epiphany.
That perfect place of imperfection
where not everything is right,
but everything is alright.

I refute hundreds of your “heavens”
to go back home.
Because home,
is where I belong
Because, home
is where my soul
finds the voice to speak.

Welcome 2011

My trip to India was wonderful and here I am, back in Hetauda. With some fresh perspectives on life.

I was reunited with my sister in her home, got to see how she lives, to visit her ashram, to meet and spend time with the swami who is her (and so many others') teacher.

We celebrated Christmas with our mother singing carols in a rickshaw on the streets of Kerala. Opening fresh, young coconuts and drinking the milk. Too full to eat all of the “meat” after eating chocolate and homemade cookies from home. Reading version after version of comic family poems based on “The Night Before Christmas” - an old tradition we have.

There was also lots of dance... I had the opportunity to both teach a dance class to about 30 indian girls, and to also attend a dance performance by Kathakali (local, traditional) dancers.

We spent time with the ocean, releasing flowers from the last evening’s puja (prayer), swimming, breathing in the sun.

India. Ashrams, puja, oceans, dancing, coconuts, warm sun, rickshaw rides. Train travel across the country, watching the countryside change as I get to lean out the side and let the air rush by.

The day my mother arrived in India – something I had looked forward to for soooo long – I found out my grandmother on my father’s side had died. Life is like this. Happiness and sadness are so intertwined. One loss brings in something fresh and new and welcome.

I had told her many times how much I love her over the years, and especially before she died. We'd had opportunities to have really good phone conversations at times when we both knew she wouldn't be living for much longer.

Even so, it is hard to know that I will never see her again. I feel older, somehow, now that I no longer have any living grandparents. There is a special place that only a grandparent can hold, I think. So perhaps I will adopt myself a new grandparent this year.

I am back in Nepal now after spending a week with my mother, taking her to my home and some of my favorite places here. We celebrated her birthday at a Hindu pilgrimage spot, the largest (and arguably more beautiful) Buddhist stupa in the world, and eating a traditional Nepali dinner with my friend and his family in his one room home that houses 4.

The end of the evening was a bit rushed, as load shedding was imminent, and we were attentive to the dishes and homework that needed to be finished before the lights went out 45 minutes later. We were also grateful to get back to the comfort and heat of the hotel room.

Our travel back to Kathmandu after visiting Hetauda was one of the more uncomfortable (physically) trips I’ve taken. But the view of the setting sun against the Himalayas was the most beautiful I’ve seen in the year I’ve been here. It’s not often that we get to see the full range of the Himalayas stretched out, as if in a circle surrounding us. They are so often hidden in the clouds or the smog of the city.

Kathmandu greeted us with true chaos when we arrived by dark as everyone was celebrating the Gurung New Year December 30th...the first New Year of many here. The streets were chaotic and full, the traffic was challenging, and we were exhausted from travel. In my haste to get back to the hotel room and some peace I left a bag in the taxi that had my camera, jacket, favourite earrings, laptop *and* my back up pen drives of my information.

I waited for a couple of hours to see if the taxi driver was kind enough to realize the magnitude of what I had lost. Not just financially, but more than anything, my creative and personal work: photos from my whole year in Nepal, work documents that I had compiled, communication kept with care.

Intuitively I knew he wouldn’t come back, though. In one of the poorest countries of the world, a night that was already hectic and crazy and where he could whisk into the darkness so easily, he would be thinking of his family and loved ones, and not me. In some ways, I can’t blame him.

I miss my photographs the most. Snapshots of memories, people, moments, and insight into how I have viewed my world over the past year here.

So the new year has brought me a reminder that the nothing lasts forever. We have to take good care of what we have now. Our creations, and more importantly, our loved ones. Ourselves.

I have a perfect new netbook. It is light and small. And has a battery life of 7 hours that keeps me working an entertained through the long hours of load shedding that are now getting higher and higher. Soon it will be 16 hours a day without electricity.

I am back in my home, a sanctuary in this place that doesn’t quite feel like my true home yet. But also is familiar, and mine. And beautiful.

I am ready for 2011.