Kandrinche La, Bhutan

The Boys’ Sick Room is empty and I won’t be able to pick up where I left off. I’m at the end of my time in Bhutan.

For the last year, my experience has been something tangible and solid. I stood on my front porch and took in the sights of mountainsides punctuated with villages and Buddhist temples. I listened to the sounds of drums and horns and cymbals played by monks performing rimdros in neighbors’ houses. At school I could smell doma on the breaths of teachers, feel the heat of bodies crammed together in a classroom with no air-conditioning.

Now that I am leaving though, my Bhutanese life will stop and become memory. My experience will dissolve into something ethereal, slowly changing, abstracting, and eventually, disappearing into a past that I won’t be able to grasp.

I’m beginning to mourn. What an experience it has been.

Times like these make me remember other lives I’ve led. I lived with a host family in Costa Rica when I was twenty. Doña Flor, my host mother, was a commanding five-foot-two, pudgy, and wore thick glasses. She must have been in her late fifties. She loved watching WWF, raising a fist in satisfaction the moment one wrestler executed a perfect body slam or hit someone across the back with a folding char. She spoke to me patiently—my Spanish was in its infancy then—and she never quite knew how to pronounce my name.

“Yrosh, come. Eat.”

“Yes. Yes. I eat. Thank you.”

“Papaya? You like papaya, Jroshu?”

“No eating before. Never eating. First time.”

“You try, Yroshu. Eat a little.”

I only lived with her and Flori and Esther for a month. They were wonderful people. I learned a lot from them and we became good friends while I was there. But now I don’t know anything about them. The experience has dwindled down to only a few sensations: the coldness of their linoleum floor on my bare feet, the taste of eggs made green with cilantro, the creak of the metal gate at the entrance of the house.

Peru lives in the same ether. Giancarlos and I would eat pollo a la brasa and watch Kung Fu movies inside of Café California after it closed. When the movie was over we’d jump up and start punching the air, poorly mimicking Ip Man. At night I’d meet up with the Peace Corps boys and we’d drink too much at 13 Buhos and flirt first with the German bartender and then, when the drinks gave us more courage, with the beautiful girls that came in (if they came in). We’d fail at wooing them almost every night. I spent the days at a Catholic school and my students would cook meals and complete ropes course challenges and write newspaper articles, learning English through such projects. It was my first year teaching and still one of my best in terms of student engagement.

But now Peru seems as if it was just a film itself, something I observed remotely but could never have actually lived. I could have never hiked the Huayhuash range with Vishal nor returned a lost lamb to a nomadic shepherdess in Hatun Machay and sat with her and talked about her flock. No, such things could not be true because they exist now only as electrical signals in grey matter.

Were the sakura blossoms in Fukushima a rouse too? The way they plastered against the sidewalk, turning it into a pink carpet? What about the cold winter nights with Eriko, the smell of kerosene from the small heater? Was the warm sunshine at Dainichi Iwa with Iga-chan and Horie-sensei and Suyama-San and Kawamura-Kun false too? Was the fresh sushi and hot ramen and the night in Tokyo with Kenya and Kenji and suit-clad business men just a dream?

When I leave Bhutan on December 31^st, I’ll leave behind more memories. The loss will be like a death. What consoles me, and propels me perhaps, is that I know that I will also start new adventures, adventures that exist still in their own ethereal state. And I know that even though the here-and-now will fade and the solid will become mist, it is all still substantive. I have been nourished by these experiences. I am fulfilled.

Ahead, there will be difficult times. My motorcycle is sure to break down somewhere in India and somewhere else in Nepal. I’ll get scammed, perhaps have to pay a bribe or two. I’ll eat bad meals, sleep in risky hovels. I’ll fall in love and find that it is unrequited.

But when I have found a small paradise, a perfect meal, a good friend, or a beautiful woman and then I must leave, it will be more than just difficult. I will mourn. As I am doing now. As I have done for Costa Rica, for Peru, for Japan. I have been fortunate in my life to have not lost many people who are close to me. But the deaths of these experiences are hard, and saying goodbye to Bhutan is not easy.

I have made friends here that I feel more comfortable with than some in America that I have known for years. I have built up a routine so easy and normal that I have to stop every now and again and remind myself, “You live in Bhutan.” Daily I feel like I am a part of a culture that still has a foot in the old way, though the pressures toward modernization are ever mounting. There is so much learning I’ve done and so much more left to do, on hospitality, on forgiveness, on illness and death, on teaching and learning, on spirituality and belief. Here I am forced to reflect on isolation, on inconvenience, on hardship. There have been countless challenges to my previous points-of-view. What I believed before now seems so limited because I had not yet lived in Bhutan.

But what is the ultimate lesson? What do I tell others I have learned when they ask about Bhutan? Still, I can give no easy answer to sum it all up.

I keep telling my students that all great stories have a theme. This part of my life, I feel, is a great story. But the theme continues to elude me. Is it about abandoning the materialism of America, about finding spirituality among Himalayan Buddhists? Is it about adventure and challenge? About loneliness perhaps? Who knows?

Maybe that’s what I’m going to India and Nepal for: to give myself the time and space to reflect on all that has happened here and to organize my learning. I know that once the pain of leaving subsides, I’ll be able to take those memories and sift through them. Perhaps a few gems of wisdom will come to the surface.

Whatever happens, epiphany or not, it has all been worth it. I have been taught by the greatest of teachers: friends, students, monsoon rains, Buddhist mantras chanted to the wind. Thank you, Bhutan. Nami sami kadrinche la.

The Old Moth - A Eulogy

An old and tired moth grasps at an old and tired hemp rope that stretches horizontal as a clothesline. He is hidden in a corner, slowly making his way across. His turmeric and red sienna wings are stiff. They look like impossibly thin and symmetrical shards of sandstone. Only one wing is frayed, just slightly at one end, impressive for a relic like him. The other wings have remained defiant and feign a youthfulness in appearance if not in function. He could almost be a young moth, one fresh from the cocoon, if it wasn’t for how tired he feels.

Beleaguered, he inches his way across the line. The sun is just starting to lighten the morning sky, turning it a cool blue. He remembers when he first emerged from the cocoon and looked up at the sky: to start life as a crawling creature, toiling on the earth, and then to fall into that deep sleep, awakening to discover that he has wings. He remembers the first flutter; he remembers it as one remembers first falling in love. He barely moved his wings and suddenly his feet left the ground. He was enervated by that fortune of his. The world became entirely new, where the air could be traversed and the ground forgotten. (Yes, it is like love, isn’t it?) He could dive and spin and soar. He could fly. He, who once inched along the ground, could fly.

He was handsome then too. His spread wings were so large that they would cast shadows. In the sun, they gleamed. He was arrogant, he admits. But even the butterflies stopped and stared. Especially the butterflies.

Now he wonders if there is another metamorphosis near. He is so tired and this point in his life doesn’t seem so different from when he was a caterpillar, there, encasing himself in his cocoon. If he fell asleep now, it would be much the same. But what could be greater than awakening to discover that you have wings? He has been too blessed, he thinks.

It’s hard for the old moth to keep moving down the line. His wings have stopped working and now he must walk, inching along. With useless wings, he is a caterpillar again, he thinks. A damn handsome caterpillar. He has no instinct this time to build a cocoon. Even if he did, he has no energy for it. He can barely hang onto the rope.

The sun is rising over the peaks in the distance. He watches through his old eyes. The light settles on him and warms him. His wings are resplendent in the light. As the sun lifts and the bottom of the orb disengages from the earth he feels that moment again when he first used his wings, rising up and up into that beautiful, fresh sky. The sun moves uninhibited and eternal. Up. The moth is tired but he is so happy, happy to be watching that sun. If only he could beat his wings once more and rise with the sun.

He closes his eyes, as he must do. He is in the middle of the clothesline now, basking in the bright light. As he expected, he hears the air rush and feels the clothesline bounce. He crawled to the center of the line for this. He isn’t afraid. He knows that this is the metamorphosis. The line bounces again and he hears the wings beat. Massive wings. What powerful wings. He knows that now he will become the strength in those wings. He will fly again.

The old moth is raised up and in his last breath he opens his eyes and sees that he is in the air once again. He is rising with the sun, up and up and up. And he thanks her as he is carried off.

His wings fall back to the earth, the place where his life began, when he could still only dream of flying.