Curdish Country

An overcast six am and the birds of the forest are in full song and complaint.  A large group of Chinese walk up the private road looking around, clearly exhausted, and following like Hunan sheep someone leads them the wrong way.  I was able to sleep through the night, thankfully, the pain in the lower left side is still there with every moderate to serious cough.  Walking to Pokhara is still in the cards.  Yesterday Beem invited me to come to the farm for the finest curd in the country, full of vitamins, pure, organic, no chemicals, as fresh as fresh be and then some.  Is it fresher at 5am than 6am? 

 My back hurts, four Chinese women stumble up, stop at the bamboo gate and turn around.  They could have reached the top this way and I wouldn’t have stopped them.

Ram comes to the door says good morning and nothing else.  He wants to tell me something, he was sent, no he’s got a sweeper, and he’s sweeping the balcony.  And whoa here comes the large Chinese group led by their 60 year old guide with a tour of the rooms while I stand at my door in my underwear and oops.  ‘We’re from Malaysia, plane crashes and disappears’, well I was thinking Cameron Highlands and strawberries and tea plantations and alligators on the 13^th fairway.

4.41pm.  

I left for Lakeside at 8:50am and looked at my mobile at 10:30am to find myself at Centerpoint.  I didn’t look at the time going up because I was in no competition with myself and I was already pretty banged up after a 15 foot slip and sliding communion with nature.  Was it the wet slippery moss or a theory that could end the fighting in the Middle East that distracted my foot from its firm implant.

Suraksha brings home a 38/40 exam, good job and Laxman has to sign it but she is afraid he is going to complain about the teacher about something perhaps irrelevant and there is a scene until he relents and simply signs the paper, Suraksha holds the exam firmly.

This 11 year old walks to and from the school at the bottom of the mountain five times a day.  And it still hurts to cough. 

So what is the theory?  I have others and sometimes they amount to simple madness but you never know.  Here it is:

Changing Interpretations

Who today reads and understands the Bible the way it was understood in Mississippi in 1840? No one.  What was the cause of this eventual reinterpretation?  War and Charles Darwin to name a few? 

A mother ship cloud hovers lowers herself, gray fog rolls into room five and then the rain comes, a straight down hard driving kind.  Two Asian girls, women probably, take room six.  Ram is closing windows to rooms 1-4. Locals in room 4 left after two hours.  They have to pay the full rate ya know when ya use it like that.

Changing attitudes about law.  If a law written 40 years ago no longer applies,  change it.  And we’ve been doing it with the bible for who the hell knows how long.  I figure for people who remain in one place their whole lives there is no reason to change anything, including how you interpret the bible.  But it happened in the South because of a revolution of change.  And it continues to happen. And it needs to happen and it could happen to other sacred texts, which is what Buddhism teaches regarding the basic tenets and then the rest is impermanency. 

The rain falls harder and at an angle it comes down good. 

Suraksha made herself lunch when she returned home and gave me a half pan fried cheese sandwich, she is so sweet. "This is so American, mita cha.  We compared leg abrasions now that I have more than her.  I will hopefully sleep well tonight.  A good day’s walk hurts but it’s a good hurt, the kind of hurt you’re glad you can still take.  As for the pain in the lower back,  not a lot of improvement.  It’s sore and there is still no laughing, coughing or sneezing. 

The rain has stopped and there is dead silence.  Let’s listen to nothing now.  There wasn’t nothing, there were crickets and pots and pans clanging and a river but that would be really far but I don’t know what else it’d be, heavy traffic?  Not here.  but very little else until whaaash! A rolling thunder clap preceded by a quick strike. 

People change.  Moslems change, Christians change, and the word of God never changes except for its interpretation.  Fallible fellas we are, we’ve known it from the beginning.  You consider the time you live in not time 2000 years earlier. 

Sara and Hajar

Isaac and Ishmael

To solve the hardest of problems one must go to the root, here it is.  The text remains the same but how you read it changes. 

How do you read it now?  I read it like a Jew, God made some errors. 

How should you read it today?  Well that’s where you’d need your Muslim theologians and the Jewish ones and maybe one Catholic/Christian apologetic to explain Saul the Anatolian writings which led to the birth of Islam. 

And Israel knew what was going on in Medina and Mecca, what did they expect?  And what about India?  They knew what was going on there.  There was trading of goods and symbols. 

And you’d take a real close look again at the two women in light of that time and today.  What it was then is not what it needs and ought to be today.  Cousins, this isn’t necessary.