By Christine Tibbetts
Yak cheese for breakfast while sitting in a garden of marigolds, greenery and immense pots of floating flower petals, conversations humming in many languages.
That was early morning in Kathmandu, Nepal for me, seven days in this capital city half a world away from my normal. Reading the Himalaya Times too, trying to understand the political energies of a country whose borders have only been open some 50 years.
Plenty has been happening here for 5,000 years without the rest of us or our ancestors coming in. Nepal is complicated, relevant, calm and startling all at the same time.
This is a vibrant country with 37 million people, no ocean borders and next door to “the top of the world,” as Tibet is known.
Mount Everest is here, and so are thousands of grand symbols and stories to rival even its peak and abundant inspiration.
My noontime blessing from a 9-year-old goddess in a Kathmandu neighborhood connected me directly to a 17th century Nepali tradition active today, and that’s how it is all over this land: ancient and modern side-by-side, interacting easily.
Little girls from nine families in Nepal are potential carriers of the Goddess Kumari. If discerned to be one, the child is selected by age 4 and a ritual places the goddess within her.
That and much more I learned from Binaya Rana, a Buddhist scholar with impeccable English language skills and the son of a Rinpoche. To Nepalis that is a title of great respect, earned only after years of concentrated study and meditation.
The Kumari goddess comes out into the city only 13 times a year, carried in a palanquin. The September Festival of the Chariot celebrates the Kumari and this tradition.
Back to her family she goes when puberty arrives, considered a goddess for one week longer and then no longer sacred.
Normal in Nepal is not the same as normal in my land.
This is a trip of the heart. Took me a while to get that flow right, to stop wondering why these gentle people didn’t do everything the way mother taught me. The more I kept my western world notions in my back pocket, the better I appreciated and admired their understandings.
Worship is a great delight, happening all the time. This is a land to release prayer in the air.
Flags in fresh vibrant colors and also as tattered threads flow overhead on yard after yard of cord, with the wind horse carrying the prayers they hold, Binaya said. Red, white, green, blue and yellow are their colours.
Hands turn prayer wheels as people walk clockwise around the many, many temples, releasing a mantra engraved or painted on it.
Once I learned that’s the purpose, the privilege of joining local residents and visiting pilgrims as they circled felt immense.
With so many Buddhist and Hindu holy places, Nepal attracts travelers making pilgrimages sacred to them.
Incarnation is a word heard over and over again with new forms of the many gods and goddesses and huge, grand, glorious stories to accompany them. They have lots of arms, hands and heads because they have so many functions and such complex personalities.
Incantation is the word for lovely sounds rising into those same prayer winds. The murmurings of families and individuals in the temples, the low-toned conversations with holy people as exchanges of rice, flowers, grains and nuts are made and chanting of the monks merge in the air, wafting across rice fields and up steep mountain sides.
I heard them as I trekked to altitude 6,000 in the Shivapuri National Park to visit the nunnery on top of a southern slope, overlooking the Kathmandu Valley.
My destination was the Nagi Gompa nunnery. Saw the prayer flags first, then young girls lugging baskets of gravel on their backs, taking them further up the mountain to construct a new building. Already they had completed a temple, residence, kitchen and rental rooms.
Really. You can stay up here. I’d recommend packing light.
Pilgrims, and pleasure hikers, choose a longer route to the headwaters of the sacred Bagmati River where a rock appears to be the face of a tiger. Binaya told me this is a place to encounter Hindu monks and Sadhus, men who have forsaken worldly goods and affairs for a life of separation and meditation.
The Bagmati River continues to be considered holy as it flows through Kathmandu and that’s why people choose to end their lives here if possible. A hospice stands on the bank and body-length stone slabs angled gently to the river allow drawing final breaths with feet in sacred water.
Should you die elsewhere, this is still the place for your cremation several hours later with the eldest son lighting the fire. Ashes go into the water three or so hours later.
Three cremations were taking place the day I walked along the opposite bank of the Bagmati River; a dozen could happen at the same time, with others scheduled later so chances are good this is an experience often available.
Respectful not gawking was automatic. Astonished when I realized what I was seeing, and a moment of thinking I had intruded, but that’s not the case.
Worship in Nepal is visible and everywhere—street corners, front yards, marketplaces, water gathering squares. Seeing families share these final hours in the open felt just right too when I got the whole picture of this place.
Visit Nepal with my heart, not my Western outlook. Worked for me over and over again.
Took some repetition to understand worship when I passed it by because at first it looked like farmer’s markets or odd leftovers on the sidewalk.
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