look deep o lama

11.28.2012

 Oh the lower back is stiff and my feet are cold.  The hot shower was nice though it’s not as hot as it can get when the sun is strong, and it wasn’t today.  A nice and much easier walk to Lakeside and back than eight days ago, which also happened to be the last time I wrote in my journal.  Another breakfast of American pancakes at Mike’s Restaurant on the lake.  Three tables behind me, six American men in their late twenties from Arkansas wax no elegence and let me tell you what I heard about zombies and Remingtons and dudes trying to out-cool each other with yo-ho trailer adventures in the wild, well it was hard to think after coming down the mountain after a most engaging conversation with the monk and that left brown eye of his going deep and looking for truth when I showed him a photo of my spirit and described the dude behind the coincidences that led me to this mountain.

As darkness falls two travelers from France enter the dining room.  Maya says one is very sexy and  I look for a moment.  Perhaps.  The lady in Leh was attractive.  SA-vay!  SA-vo!  The back hurts more, Suraksha finishes school at four and it takes the poor kid an hour up to reach home, Laxman is in Pokhara again applying for a chance to work overseas.  Why in God’s name is he doing this, of course we know.  I told him before I started down that he wouldn’t have time.  Go buy a Jeep. 

Dinner finished and yawning, the family gathers around an odd tourist with a guide and this young woman inquires of the price of this and that and smelling blood like a tiger Maya goes in for the kill.  It’s a kind of sales practice here in Nepal I eventually learned to say no to, but for the inquisitive and naïve soul, the pressure and the sweet talk will leave you buying something overpriced which you regret the next day.  It was annoying enough to return to room six.

Crap.  If I want that thangka and drum I’ll need to send almost three hundred clams to Salalah.  What are the value of these things now ol boy?  Maybe just the thangka?  I told John I wanted it back because the spirits and energy was up in the area and having the tangka would help me discern.  If the spirits are in fact saying anything with me I’d like them to share some money.  I have the money, it’s 25% of what I have left. 

I asked the spirit specifically to lead me into a bookshop to find Leon Uris's Exodus and the spirit was close but no bloody cigar.

On the mountain sharing my insanity with a monk and feeling somehow relieved, contented, exonorated, at peace, do I now feel so far away from any compassion.  First it was the red necks and then awful sales pitches, why did they take me away from the joy of the morning? Time to sleep, by eight pm, clouds break up and the moon beams brightly.