A Visitation of Cranes

I heard them before I saw them. A cacophony erupted in the sky, hard to place but unmistakably the voices of bird people. I asked my guide what the sound was, and he responded, “vultures.” “I do not know what those are,” I said,” but those are no vultures.”

We had climbed up out of Lo Manthang  on the first leg of our journey back to Kathmandu. The trail is old and beautiful and takes you over a pass that is wide and flat and looks to me very much like the Alaskan tundra or the Tibetan plateau. The walking is easy, though the pass is the highest place we have been in all Mustang.

I heard the calls erupt again, but this time saw a cloud of bird beings,  black against the sky. There were so many, and they moved with such mesmerizing, circling grace that initially I thought perhaps it was that famed murmuration of starlings. The birds were in a large circle and they were moving back-and-forth across the sky. In this way they did not look like the migrating geese and other large birds I have seen in North America, who keep moving in a single direction, rarely or never circling or doubling back. The most immediately striking feature was the fact that as they went in one direction against the sky, they looked black, and in the opposite direction, blinding white. What in this great earth and sky was I looking at?

Just about a month ago, I was blessed to see a few pairs of black-necked cranes by Tsokar lake on Ladakh’s side of the Tibetan plateau. I know that these birds are sacred in Tibetan Buddhism—some believe that previous incarnations of the Dalai Lama use them to travel from place to place—and that they have been named the official bird of Ladakh. I also know that they make a great migration every year to places in India, Vietnam, and even Thailand. Nonetheless, it took me a good 10 minutes to realize what I was looking at. Great Vs of new birds came and joined the spiral, and then others broke off to reform their flying pattern and head south. Against the clouds, moving South, they were black, but as they emerged into the sky again and turned back to the North, the silver-white flash of hundreds of wings filled the sky. A trick—or a gift—of the light.

To receive a visitation from these great and revered beings just as I turned to leave the border with Tibet left me breathless and stunned, a feeling akin to our encounter with the wolf Jigmet and I saw in Zanskar a few weeks ago. In both cases, part of the divine nature of it all was that I was not looking for this blessing. It just arrived.

Descending the pass, a half hour after seeing the cranes, we saw both yak and marmots for the first time since arriving in Mustang. Today, to my further astonishment, we saw blue sheep just walking across the main road, the highway, right in front of us on the switchbacks. Where did they come from and where were they going? It made no sense. But here’s the thing: these are all creatures that I spent a significant amount of time with in the first part of this four-months journey, when I was in Ladakh. Seeing them again yesterday and today feels like nothing short of a seal on the first half of this journey, the Tibetan Buddhist portion of the pilgrimage.

I came to mustang by accident, but I know I will be changed forever by what I have seen and felt here. There is a wildness to the energy of this place that is hard to put into words—yet the few other practitioner-trekkers I met in my time here all remarked on the same thing: the energy is high, strong, vibrant, and just a little edgy. I felt great joy and a surge of life-force in this place, and a lifting of my spirit that I know I will rely upon in whatever unfolds in the weeks to come.

It is not lost on me that cranes have great significance in Japan. Not the same ones, exactly—theirs are red-crowned, Tibet’s black—but they are close kin. I don’t know, but I felt like there was some kind of handoff happening in the moment that the great birds circled overhead and then turned to travel South in enormous V formations. I will follow them South in the days to come—they to their Winter grounds. me to Japan. And I will continue to ask for, and marvel in, their blessing.

note: I’m unable to post video here. so I’ll share a few stills. I hope to update later with their sky dance