Belly of the Whale

Kathmandu is surely a festival for the senses, all of them. Walking down the street can be nearly overwhelming, certainly more than I can take in or begin to understand. I work in Boudanath, an area of eastern Kathmandu named for the large stupa at its heart. The stupa is circled by some number of Buddhist monasteries. The Samtenling Monastery is a small one where I teach. Yesterday I rented a room in a hostel a couple hundred yards from the monastery. The room cost me thirty dollars for the month. It has a beautiful rooftop overlooking Bouda. The quiet is palpable to me coming from Thamel, the tourist center of the city.

Bouda offers a greater sensation, a wilder feel. Everywhere monks are walking, young and old, all the same dressed in there maroon and gold clocks, donning prayer beads in their hands, smiling. The beggers strike me - I stare and smile, but I don't give. I give if I take a picture which I am starting to force myself to practice. I took two pictures of leppers today, beautiful in their tragedy. There are so many, so many faces and dresses that I want to capture and save in my memory forever. I must shoot them. It must be worth the embarassment I feel in doing so.

When I go up to a roof of a cafe or my own roof for contenplation, I can see the prayer flags draped over antennas and railings. They wave in the wind, seemingly ambivalent to anything else. They have a timelessnes to them: none of them seem new, but the older ones seem unaffected. The wind and rain are not enough to concern them. Beneath them though is the bustle of venders and beggars, cabbies, monks, tourists, and craftsmen. Signs plaster the wall sides, all variations of color.

The aromas and stenches are always forefront in my attention. It is not too much to say that the city has a general reek about it, emanating from the gutters and puddles, refuse piles along buildings, cattle dung (as cows are anywhere they wish to be) - often I don't even know where the foulness comes from. It is greater in Bouda than it was in Thamel. It is impressive really. I wonder at the sanitation and the utter lack of hygene. Yesterday I saw a child, maybe two, on a bus chewing on the dirtiest oldest one-rupee bill in the country. We don't have bills this old in the States. Will he be ill? Today I saw a child sleeping face down of a concrete slab step. In Bangkok, I saw men bathing in a river essentially of sludge and waste, water you wouldn't wish to stick your finger into, nonetheless be splashed by lightly.

So the filth is oppressive and impressive. It amazes me. My nose no longer revolts. I no long revile against it. But again, I question how these people have come to such a pass? Why have they allowed it to become this way, to accept this as the status quo? In the same breath I know the answer: poverty. South and Central America are no different. I watched an old woman eat a candy bar and casually, unthinkingly, uncaringly toss it out the window of the bus. I looked out the window at the ghastly piles of other rappers and accumulations of decades of such abuse, and wonder why she would wish to contribute to such a travesty? Again, I saw a bus boy do it in town a couple of days ago. I think they lack the luxury to care and the education to understand the ramifications of such attitudes. Is it chance that the U.S., the richest nation is also the cleanest? Cleanliness a luxury? I hope or feel that it hasn't always been this way. It is the corruption of cultures by the development of a global economy. What does Bhutan look like I wonder? Or is it already to late there as well. I went into the Venezuelan bush along the Orinoco River, where tribal men knew no spanish. But they were corrupted even there. When poverty is corrupted it festers a horrible pollution. This sight in the Venezuellan jungle was one of the most painful and disallusioning of my life: coke bottles strewn in the mud, parrots tied barbarically to trees, outboard Yamahas on the back of dugout canoes - filth everywhere, and poverty. Where was the beauty I had hoped for, where was the miracle of the past? Gone and corrupted by the ushering of a new age. This is also the streets and alleys of Kathmandu. But it is different also.

There is beauty here everywhere my eyes gaze. The costumed women simply awe me; the faces wear such character - their lives can be read through their lines and scars and wrinkles. I stare unabashedly. Around the stupa there is always a chant. It emanates from the cd shops: Om Mani Padme Hum, a chant I read in Peter Matthison's Snow Leopard years back. It is beautiful and soft, and I hear it morning and night, day after day. When I think about the noice I tolerated in Thamel, the horns and party; more over, the noice and violence of modern american music, I smile a little and laugh. It is quite the change, the change that I came to Nepal seeking.

Everything seems now to be on track, organized, understood. I walked around today, my first day living in Bouda, with a perma-smile and glow. The hostess of the small restaraunt where I ate lunch laughed at my overzeallous thanks and praise of her cooking. I stayed up so late into the night lastnight, philosophy still haunting me. But last night all clues came together, everything intersected - my eyes and heart jumped, trying to follow my mind as it tore down this newly discovered, long yearned for track. I have (hopefully) solved the riddle of the next two years of my life, maybe, almost certainly more. I will not tell. It is for me, but it is no different than the last ten years really. It is an intensification, a bringing together, an explication, an unveiling, and for me - a validation of everything.

Indeed I am in good spirits. I have more to study, more interests I wish to pursue than I could accomplish in a lifetime. To me, they all seem so elegant in themselves - and yet I can not have them all, not now. But maybe the satisfaction comes in realizing that I am twenty-five; phycially, I am not at my end, but remain early in the game. To me, this is so exciting.

I crave days such as these when the world seems so ordered, and you have the code, the understanding. The world is benevolent, sharing her secrets long hidden. More, I would say, the ordering of secrets, the clues, the many peices of myself - always isolated and out of place, and now fitting together so smoothly. Today is a fine day.