magnanimously mistaken?

Mammoth fog-clouds blow into and through the mountain top.  Every hour this morning the weather changes, from boiling sun, fleeting showers heavy winds, panoramic vistas, and an exhaustive list of cloud formations. 

We’re having an adjustment of the gastrointestinal kind here.  Around seven I come up to the dining room, have a spot of tea or coffee followed by fried eggs or an omelet and two slices of toast with jam and butter.  Three or four hours later I’m sitting with the family for dal bhat and all its side dishes and it’s too much.   I have to choose one or the other.  If I skip out on the eggs breakfast I’ll have to wait to eat.  If I choose only the eggs breakfast and skip the rice, then it’s a long wait for the next meal.  I can do both with small portions of the traditional meal.  Getting a small portion from the overly-generous cook is the key. 

The Nepali word for coincidence is Samyog, the g is softly pronounced, like a y in yoke, popping the –ke in the deepest region of the throat.  I understand the Samyog that the shaman-atma influenced directly.  And I understand how my imagination, with assistance no denying, from the shaman-atma and several entheogens  took a life-time of dreams in my noggin and brought it all into contemporary life. 

What continues to plague me are those Samyog that straddle imagination and the facts because the facts are so indiscriminating it leaves me to believe the influence of well-intentioned but really misguided spirits. 

No school today, another holiday.  Suraksha and Mana, the pint-sized gremlin across the steps bounce around looking for something to do.  Didi the helper and who walks 90 minutes every morning to get here, looks like she’s looking for something to do this afternoon.  The sun prevails with gusty winds, oops, now it doesn’t. 

 

There were no mountains this morning three years ago so Keith and I started down from the view, but not before giving a group of Chinese tourists making far too much noise a warning such insolence in the presence of holiness is unacceptable.  Ahead on the path a woman stood at the entrance of a guesthouse, I saw her not clearly, but if there was another reason to have chai, have it from a woman who stands along the steps instead.  We were both complaining, I had discovered this cosmological collusion also called a test of one’s faith by some, while Keith whined of having three girlfriends and a new Toyota. 

And then she appeared.

In December 2008 I opened and read the war journal of my father’s mother. I was overwhelmed with a window into my spiritual heritage. Marcella Ranagan was the eighth daughter of John and Margaret.  I look at the copied photo I have of her and the entire family sitting for a pose; Marcella sits in the front left, right hand over the left like her sisters sitting to her right, she had a look of some consternation, perhaps having to sweat in heavy clothing…the photo blurs, I can’t see it.  

The following events are still sketchy, reliving the woman standing at our table, her waist was at eye level, she wore jeans, unbuttoned at the top, a flash of red under there and I remember looking at the temptation and looking at Keith, and saying ‘you see?  What is this?  This is a cosmological collusion.’  Keith, not seeing the tree in the woods said I could do better.  Laxman later called her the princess of Sarangkot, writing names of people who visited her guesthouse, the last of eight daughters to be married, (!!!the last of eight!!! Oh shit) scrubbing toilets (her words), carrying water up the mountain, cooking, cleaning and on it went.  What was wrong with a woman like this to marry, aside from the uncomfortable age difference (on her part mostly but also mine), she wanted to finish school and move to New York. 

And then the clueless and ignorant Chinese tourists pretending to know what a camera is, flooded into the guesthouse, zooming big lens, sticking them into faces, coming right up to me and what happened, they didn’t take a picture.  A Chinese couple were hiding in a small room.  I asked the woman if this happens often, ‘never’.  She looked Irish, funny, long black hair, green eyes.  She was beautiful and the reason I had come to Nepal with Keith was to find someone who might explain to me the coincidences I had experienced back in Al-Ain. 

And here, Lord have Mercy, was another one. 

As things have turned out, any coincidence between my grandmother and the woman became an unfortunate and non-existent relationship between us and it was, mostly, my fault.  Tossing two of her plastic garden chairs off into the black of night before crashing on a tin roofed house below on a windy evening with a bloody full moon because she only told me in writing she had a boyfriend was a bit dramatic and well…

Three years later how could have Marcella Ranagan or the spirit of a 2700 year old Caucasoid shaman who goes by the name of Job really not have known this coincidence was not meant to be?  Entities do have limited knowledge, even of certain future events, and while I appreciated leading me to this woman, for crying out loud why?