Whiplash

I should probably learn to listen to the little voices. Still, it’s hard to trust your intuition. When my guide for Japan told me, with what seemed like complete conviction, that all chances of going this year were off, something in me kept hearing the phrase, “it ain’t over.” I assented to the notion that it was, indeed, over, and yet I also decided to wait on cancelling any reservations or changing plane tickets, at least until after a short 5-day trek in Nepal. For one thing, what was I going to change them to? As of now I have no fully formed Plan B. But maybe more importantly, some small voice said, simply, “let’s wait and see.”

Now rumors are swirling that things in Japan are about to shift, and tourists may soon be allowed to enter for unrestricted activities, including pilgrimage. What “about to” means is anybody’s guess. I find myself scratching my head, but also attentive and even excited. Maybe after all … And also, still, maybe not.

And anyway, right now I have other things to attend to. Trekking in Nepal, especially at the tail end of the monsoon,  is about as different from trekking in Ladakh as two things can be. At least that’s how it feels. Among other things, you stay in teahouses and even in really really remote places there’s abundant wifi, which, after 18 days off-grid, is just … weird. There’s also jungle, torrential rains, leeches, beds, showers, leeches, stone staircases to climb forever, and sweat. Also, leeches. So far, there has largely been avoiding of leeches, but here they are. I would say that trekking with leeches is one of the more advanced forms of practice in which I have ever engaged. I could write a whole post about me and leeches, but also I could just not. Other than that—or, actually, along with that—everything just feels new, unfamiliar, and kind of energizing in its strangeness.

Moving from deep familiarity and even predictability to such newness can feel like a form of whiplash “Good morning, wherever you are,” the latest message from the Japan guide began, causing me to wonder, where am I, exactly? It doesn’t help that most of the walking is in deep forest, and most of the views when we emerge from the forest are completely obscured by a total cloud white-out. I think about the phrase “cloud-walking” and wonder if this is what it really means.

While here, the walking days being short, I’ve been rereading, for the nth time, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. This is a book I’ve read many times in Ladakh—white people read it there, I think, because there are so few books about Ladakh and somehow the Tibetan Buddhist Dolpo region of Nepal seems “close enough.” And anyway, there are blue sheep and snow leopards and gompas in the book, and so how different could it be?

The answer, of course, is “very, very different.” But reading the book here, for me, now, feels uncanny—almost too close, the very opposite of whiplash. Here is a Zen buddhist practitioner traveling in Nepal, trying to wake up and to deepen his understanding of the dharma, or maybe, more immediately, of life and death, the great matter. Here is a trek at the tail end of the monsoon season. Here is an itinerary that takes Matthiessen and his traveling companions through an area where I am considering traveling in a matter of days, on exactly the same days they were there in the late 70s. Here—and I had forgotten or just never noticed this—are intimations of the devastations to come with climate change and natural resource extraction. Here are references to Suzuki Roshi and The Parliament of the Birds. I saw a hoopoe today, the bird at the center of that great epic, a bird that is also very common in Ladakh, and all of a sudden, things did not seem so different, or distant, or unfamiliar, after all.

For right now, the request seems to be to show up—to show up for not knowing quite what’s happening, to show up for an obscured view, to show up for cloud walking, in all its forms. One of the great tropes of The Snow Leopard is Matthiessen’s broken promise to his young son that he will be home by Thanksgiving. I, too, promised to be home by Thanksgiving. I’m listening for what the little voices have to say about that.