On the morning of the third day I was in Nepal, as returned back to my guesthouse, I found my guide waiting for me.  Although I was not going to be able to do the Annapurna trek as I had hoped, he did have an alternate suggestion.  I could fly to Pokhara, a lake town at the foot of the Annapurna range, and trek up to the Annapurna base camp.  It’s a popular trek and, although not what I really wanted (it’s heavily traveled and not off the beaten path the way Annapurna I is) I decided it was worth a try.

It’s funny, though, how we take for granted certain things in this country.  Things like credit cards.  Although I’d brought some cash into the country, I didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay for domestic flights (I prefer Yeti Air to Sherpa Airlines…. and I’m not kidding about those names), pay for my guide, and for lodging and food.  Being a good American consumer, though, I pulled out my trusty gold card.  No dice.  Most businesses in Nepal require a call to a bank for an authorization code on a credit card transaction.  As it was, the airlines were surreptitiously open… you had to know someone who knows someone.  On top of that – the banks were closed.  I could pay for my domestic flights in cash, but not with a credit card.

My guide and I then tried to procure more cash.  Nepal has ATMs, and there is even an ATM in Jomsom, up in the mountains.  Just go to any corner, right?  Wrong.  In Nepal, ATMs are in bank lobbies.  Banks were, remember, closed.  One or two banks, we found, had left side doors open with a guard nearby.  You could go in (trying not to draw TOO much attention to yourself) and use the ATM.  HOWEVER.  Because of the situation, banks had programmed the ATMs to dispense only 10,000 Nepali Rupee at a time.  At that time, that was about $144.  I needed three times that.  So, I did two withdrawals.  I was about to do a third when a chilling thought occurred to me.  Although I’d notified my credit union that I’d be in Nepal, three transactions for exactly the same amount within 10 minutes in a foreign country would – I WOULD HOPE – trigger some kind of flag on my account.  Did I try risking it?  Would I end up with a frozen account?

This is where things started to get a little dicey in my mind.

“Wait a second,” I thought to myself.  “You’re going all over town, trying to raise cash, to book a flight that might be canceled at the last minute (the Nepali papers were reporting that 50% of domestic flights were being canceled due to the bandh) to go out to one of the remote parts of the country, where there have been documented cases of violence.  If you get there, what’s to say you can get back to Kathmandu?  What if the bandh is still on then?  What if you get there, can’t get back, AND THEN CAN’T GET CASH?”

You know how the practice teaches you to watch fear and anxiety arise, to witness it and encompass it, neither denying it nor shying away from it?  Boy.  I was really glad I paid attention that day.  Because this was starting to get a little too real.

I told my guide I needed to think for a minute.  We walked, and I weighed out my options.  Do I go, and risk it?  Doesn’t opening to grace involve a bit risk sometimes?  Did I come all this way, just to not see the mountains?  Could I live with that?  Do I want to be the guy that traveled halfway around the world and then let a Maoist General Strike keep him from his goal?

As I walked, I did my best to breathe deeply.  Breathing deeply in Kathmandu can be a challenge, between the pollution and the different levels of sanitation.  I do not suggest breathing deeply by the rivers.  I thought about Douglas Brooks’ statement on the Gita:  “No matter what we are doing or where we find ourselves, we can, and indeed we must, create an experience of alignment.”

What, I asked myself, is the experience of alignment here?  Do I stay in Kathmandu and return home, or do I go on a trek that involves a number of risks?

Understand that through all of this, there was a physical sensation of longing to see the mountains that was so intense as to be painful.  I was so close.  I knew that one quick flight would put me in sight of Macchupuchare.  And I want to see that mountain again so much, even now, as I type this sitting at my desk in San Francisco, that my breath becomes tight.  This is what it is to love the Himalayas.

I was aware, as I considered my decision, that I was already dangerously close to being dominated by scarcity thinking:  that there will not be enough, that I will not have this opportunity again, that this would be my last chance to see the Himalayas.  I’d recognized the impulse to scarcity thinking the night before, when I, like all the other tourists, was busy buying food while the bandh was suspended for two hours.  I found myself buying things I would never even consider eating were I at home, driven by a “what if the stores don’t open tomorrow” mentality.  I mean seriously:  strawberry Oreos?  (That having been said, add Strawberry Quik to the filling of an Oreo and you have  something at once grossly processed and overly sweet as well as AWESOME.)  I’d bought eight liters of bottled water, just in case (I was going through 3 a day in the heat).

So, scarcity thinking was the first thing I had to tackle.  Yes, I’d made a considerable number of financial sacrifices in order to fund this trip.  There would be no other vacations or trips this year and probably not next, either.  I’d foregone doing yoga teacher training.  I didn’t consider going to Bali with Laura Christensen, to Costa Rica with Stacey Rosenberg, or to Mexico with Darcy Lyon.  I wouldn’t be returning to Wanderlust, and would probably have to stay in San Francisco for both Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Those were not good reasons to put myself in a precarious position.  And there would be other opportunities to return to the mountains and, even if I never made it back to Nepal, there are still the Canadian Rockies and the Patagonias in my own hemisphere to explore.  Scarcity thinking could not dominate this decision.

I also had to tackle the story I was constructing about how I think of myself.  I didn’t want to be the guy that gets back early, that took the safe route.  I wanted to be the guy that scoffs at political instability and privation and hardship and still has a great time.  I WANTED TO BE INDIANA JONES.

Okay, not really.  But I say that to be honest about the level of bouncing around my mind was doing as I walked around Kathmandu, considering my choices.  On my last trip to Nepal, I read the Shiva Sutras.  I’ll be honest – I didn’t understand most of it.  And two years later and a workshop with two of the foremost authorities on the subject, Douglas Brooks and Mark Dyczkowski, I still only understand parts of it.  But the second sutra, “jnainam bandh,” “Knowledge is bondage,” is something that has resonated with me since I first read it in a town south of Kathmandu, Pharping, near the principal Kali temple of Nepal, Dakshinkali.  How does what I think I know about myself limit and bind me?  So much of my last trip to Nepal was about identifying those things I thought I knew about myself and tackling them (to wit:  I’m too old for a career change; I’m not smart enough to go into medicine, even as a nurse; I’ve wasted so much of my life on trivialities).  There is another application of this sutra, though: to what knowledge do we choose to bind ourselves?  What understanding of myself would I be binding myself to by going home?

Having dealt with the scarcity thinking and these silly ideas I was binding myself to (“go home now and you are going home a milquetoast fool that didn’t have the gumption (not really the words I used, but this is a family-friendly blog) to go after your goals”), I asked myself how I would counsel a friend in this instance.

“Duh!”  I said to myself.  “Go home.  You can come back when the time is right.  Or you can go someplace else.  Both are perfectly acceptable choices.  The mountains will always be there.  And this will not be your last chance.  Even if you never come back to Nepal, there are still many wonderful and beautiful things to see in this world.”

And with that, I started to make arrangements to come home.

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I wish I could say that it was all shri and rainbows from there on out.  Being human, I second guessed (and third, and fourth, and, well, you get it) myself repeatedly.  But I still managed to have a blast in Kathmandu, especially on the last two days I was there when – you guessed it – the bandh was called off.  There was another few hours of considering whether I could re-change my plans but they involved canceling my return flight, going on a trek, coming back to Kathmandu and hoping I could get a flight out on a date that reasonably approximated my original date to be back at work.  All while hoping that the bandh would not be reinstated (the first one being, according to Maoist party leadership, a “dress rehearsal”).  I was ready to go home.

Boudhanath

And have a blast I did:  I got to see all of the places in Kathmandu I’d wanted to see again so badly.  I went to Swayambunath,  one of two major Buddhist stupas in Kathmandu, known as the “Monkey Temple” because of the troops of monkeys that live at the temple and thrive off of the prasad (the food offerings) left there.  I also went to Boudhanath, the other major Buddhist stupa in Kathmandu, that has, for centuries, been a pilgrimage site for Tibetan Buddhists.  It is a place that radiates peace.

My last meal in Nepal: daal bhaat, black eyed peas, saag, and veggies

With restaurants open once again, I also ate my weight in vegetable pakora, momos (momos are the Nepali version of Chinese dumplings), and the national dish of Nepal, daal bhaat.  Daal bhaat is comprised of yellow lentils and rice.  May you one day be so lucky as to have a huge platter of daal bhaat before you, preferably after a long day of trekking in the mountains, when it will taste best.

I also took a ton of taxi rides for no other reason then to take taxi rides, taxi rides in Kathmandu being one of my principal delights in life.  It’s funny:  I don’t particularly enjoy roller coaster rides, which is sort of like a taxi ride in Kathmandu.  At the risk of overstating, traffic laws are more notional then a sociological reality in Nepal.  There are traffic lanes, sort of, and traffic lights in places, and well, in the end, taxi drivers go full speed and you are often sure you are going to go through the windshield in a crash when, at the last minute, drivers headed straight towards each other somehow seem to find space on the narrow roads to avoid collision.  I find this thrilling beyond words.

On my last day I made two pilgrimages.  The first was to Pharping, a small town south of Kathmandu.  It is the site of Dakshinkali Temple.  This is the temple to Kali of the South.  It is also the site of Dakshinkali Mai.  Dakshinkali Mai is a Nepali deity, a swayambu (self-arisen) rock formation which is revered as a form of the devi, in this case, the Mother (Mai) of Kali.  I spent a good amount of time there on my last trip, as the friend I was visiting had done quite a bit of research there.  She even arranged to allow me to offer puja – a rare honor, as ordinarily non-Hindus are not allowed in Nepali temples.  I meditated outside of the Dakshinkali temple, and wondered what my return home would bring.  At Dakshinkali Mai, I offered the pujari (the priestess) an offering of Nepali rupee, and in return she annointed my forehead with tikka.

My second pilgrimage was back to Pashupatinath.  I must have spent more than an hour there, simply sitting across the river from the temple complex, praying and watching.  There were several cremations going on.  I don’t know how long a cremation lasts from start to finish; I doubted that the one I had watched at the start of the week was still going.  I also watched as two attendants bathed the body of a recently deceased woman in the river, preparing her for the funerary rites.  At Pashupatinath I was not left with any questioning:  I knew, and know, that I will be back there.  Pashupatinath has been the site of some of my greatest spiritual openings and shifts.  I will be returning again and again, as opportunity and financial means allow.

I had one last thing I needed to do.  I’d not forgotten the envelope I’d prepared before my journey, which held the names of people dear to me whom I had intended to carry in my heart as a way of strengthening myself for what was to be a grueling physical challenge.  I’d carried that envelope with me now halfway around the world and all over Kathmandu.  I wouldn’t be leaving it at Thorung-La, the highest point on the Annapurna trek, as I’d hoped.  Neither would I be leaving it at Annapurna base camp.  I considered keeping it, a reminder of how we prepare for the unknown, the difficult, and how we attempt to seek alignment in the midst of uncertainty.

But I knew I would carry these lessons – that we must examine those thoughts and values to which we bind ourselves; that we have the opportunity and invitation to seek alignment in every situation, even the most unlikely or challenging; that when attempting something difficult, holding those you love in your heart can be an amazing source of strength – I would carry these lessons with me always.  And so instead of leaving the envelope at the at Thorung-La, high upon the mountain as I had hoped, I approached one of the many white stone pagodas, and placed it there, reverently, in front of the Shiva-linga it housed.  It was my offering to Nepal, to the people named in that envelope whom I carry in my heart, and to the experience of opening to Grace and finding alignment under difficult circumstances.

There is only Grace. There is only Love.

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These posts are dedicated with great love and gratitude to my teachers, to the San Francisco Bay Area Anusara Kula, and to the people of Nepal.  There is only Grace; there is only Love.