Leaving Ladakh

leaving ladakh

Last time i took off in a plane from Leh’s Kushok Bakula airport, I assumed I’d be back in a year. That was how it had gone for the six previous departures. What in my experience could possibly have prepared me for the disruptions of a global pandemic, for the havoc that one tiny creature could wreak on the lives of previously comfortably privileged and agential humans such as myself?

As we all have cause to note nearly daily, COVID isn’t done messing with our sense of assurance, with our sweet human plans. We like to forget about it—I showed up for my flight out of Leh with no mask, because I just spent five weeks in a kind of pre-lapsarian Old World, one where COVID doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. The blue sheep and the marmots go maskless. So do the horsemen … and the horses. For not just days but weeks at a time, I forgot COVID was a thing, a factor, something in need of my attention and consideration.

But COVID is sure not done with us—or with me, notwithstanding my safety protocol amnesia. As I briefly mentioned in a prior post—honestly, I was still absorbing the shock of unwanted news and not integrating it thoroughly—the primary rationale for this four-month pilgrimage, my intention to walk the Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan, disappeared in a puff of bureaucratic-diplomatic smoke while I was running with the wolves and the bears and the ibex and the rivers in Zanskar. Apparently pilgrimage is not a form of legitimate (or safe) tourism at this time—or so say the decision-makers in Japan. I’ll keep my no doubt self-interested thoughts on this decision quiet and simply note that this—well, it does rather change the plan.

Leaving Ladakh has always brought a potent mix of emotions for me: appreciation, gratitude, wonder, aching grief, a kind of pain at separation normally associated with leaving behind the people we love. Yes, I cry when I arrive AND when I leave—every damn time. But this time around there’s also a hesitation, a little shocky edge: I assume I’ll be back in a year, but the last time I made that assumption—well, one year turned to two, then three. Every person I know and work with here asked me if i’ll be back next summer. The quick assurance with which I responded—oh, but yes of course I will—masked a catch in my throat, a choke almost: I sure as heck hope so. Part of the source of that choke was the unexpected three-year gap, the pain of which I don’t have words for. Part,  no doubt, was the more recent unraveling of the Japan plan, a powerful reminder that we just … don’t know.

Impermanence.  Non-grasping. Not knowing. The largely invisible unfolding of causes and conditions. Getting comfortable with uncertainty. Yes, I’m familiar with these in theory, but … just, but. We humans love what we love, want what we want, and the truth of the pain of separation from what we love or want is no more nor less a feature of our human reality, our condition, than the truth of impermanence. We study the dharma, we go on pilgrimage, we walk and we pray, to be more aware of and at ease with this human condition, not to transcend it.

Leaving Ladakh hurts. Not knowing what will happen next confuses. Being unable to undertake a pilgrimage planned for many years with both excitement and devotion frustrates and disappoints. Being powerless before a little creature-teacher holding the world in its grip humbles. All of these things are true and demanding to be felt.

And of course, there is much possibility here, too. Much freedom, even. I said when I set out on this journey that one of the guiding questions I would be walking with is what I want to do with my freedom. Well, all of this grief and disappointnent and confusion turns out to be a reluctant pathway to that very question.

Today I’m leaving Ladakh. Next stop, Nepal. I wonder what will happen next. And perhaps even more than that, I wonder what there is and will be to be learned from whatever I find there. I wonder what kind of mirror it will be.