Last Blog Post from Nepal

This is my last post from Nepal. I am getting ready to take a taxi to the Kathmandu Airport, for a six hour flight to Guangzhou, where I will have no internet and the firewall will prevent me from posting anyway. I have a 15 hour layover there, so I am planning to take a taxi to Shamian Island, but the logistics are a bit confusing. Then I board another China Southern flight and twelve hours later land in Los Angeles. 

As I sit here these last hours, I hear the daily singing prayers of a man's voice, a woman's voice, tablas, and a harmonium. They are quite skillful and I have really come to appreciate the music they make twice each day just outside my window. It is trance-like and entrancing and kind of sums up this beautiful land, along with the incredible monsoon showers that recede to beautiful sunlight an hour later. I am relaxed and entranced here.

Blogging has been a way to stay in touch, to communicate my experiences here, and I so appreciate those who have been viewing my blog and those who have been commenting. At the same time, I realize that there are experiences beyond language, and these last few days here I have had some just staring and experiencing moments that cannot be turned into a narrative and I have had feelings that are beyond labels of language. So I've reconnected deeply with the fullness of time that I once experienced here when I committed two years of my life to living and working in Nepal. That was a formative experience for me, and coming back has re-energized that soulful, solitary part of myself that I experienced long ago. 

I know that the school year and  hustle of Los Angeles await me very soon, and that I can't help but get sucked into the stress and anxiety and attention deficit of modern, metropolitan life, or can I? I will try to keep a little bit of Nepal with me during the coming year and will offer to share my experiences with staff and students, but never to bore you. Travel is a great awaken-er, and this kind of travel, while not pure relaxation and luxury, is the most transformative. 

One of many of Nepal's dogs relaxing at the Monkey Temple

The tablas are playing faster now, and the children are crying for their dinner, and the taxis are honking in this crazy patchwork of diverse cultural society that is Kathmandu.  May it forever inhabit me.