Nepal Part I Emptiness

I am beginning to capture my thoughts and experiences about Nepal in this writing.

The trek, earlier in the summer, was a long 30 days in the Northwest corner of Nepal close to the Tibetan border.  We were a small band of seven, including two leaders, supported by 10 Nepali guides and porters, and 10 mules to lug the heavy gear and food needed to trek for so long in such a remote area of the world.  Upper Dolpo is high in altitude (14,000+) and mountainous with rock and glaciated peaks undulating out for miles in the distance.  At such high altitudes, there is little vegetation beyond the variegated fields surrounding the small villages.  It is sparsely populated, the villages a day or two hike from each other woven into mountain sides or along riverbeds. There is vastness to this place and also an emptiness of things and people, a quietness, amidst an immensity of space, sky, stars, distance.

The land and way of living remains mostly untouched by modern technologies and ways of existence.  The Nepali people here are of Tibetan descent and live close to their animals with cows for milk, oxen for plows, goats, sheep, and yak for food, wool, and trade.  Families burn the yak dun collected from the mountainsides for fuel and heat. There are no roads getting into and through this land.  Mule trains carry goods for trade like rice, oil, and blankets. Water is pulled up from the rivers through hoses that thread through the stone dirt pathways. Shelters are small and connected to each other, built from smooth river stones laid around dirt floors. Few of the villages have health clinics, schools or stores but all had stupas with prayer wheels large and small to spin.  Centuries of smooth river stones carved with prayers are stacked into low walls heralding the entrance to each village.  Some of these prayer stones are balanced in the middle of stream beds.  

In this land and landscape, I felt an internal emptiness that surprised me. I usually feel full and fulfilled when I am out hiking in the mountains, walking by rivers, sitting in the sun.  But in Dolpo, after many days of long high-altitude hiking in this vast empty place, I started to feel empty.  Empty of thought, expectation, empty of judgements of what or who I liked and disliked, what was going well and what was going wrong. It wasn’t only the geography that emptied me but the emptiness that came from an inner silence.  After several days of immersion in the simple rhythm of the trek  - hiking, eating, sleeping – the usual self-chatter of to do lists, judging what is good and what is bad in each moment, wanting and pushing away began to fade.  With nothing to prove, accomplish, purchase the mind stopped its incessant grasping after things.  With so few of the familiar comforts to look forward to after the end of a physically demanding day, like a hot bath, a comfortable couch, ice-cream, or TV, I stopped looking forward to what was to come and sunk more deeply into the next moment which was most often the next step, the next breath.  And found in that moment an emptiness like a deep and dark well inside of me, a container opened to be filled.

The emptiness had the feeling of a purification from negativity. While negative feelings still came and went – a day did not go by that I did not feel disheartened, so tired, sorrowful – they also passed much more quickly, into the next breath, through the next step.  Feelings had the space to be more fluid in my emptiness. I experienced coalescing harmony between what usually seemed to be so opposite, the pain and discomfort I typically push away and the grasping after comfort, pleasure, distraction. My push and pull of emotional states of being dissolved along with the self-chatter.

As we hiked those long strenuous miles each day and my mind was released from the chatter, I entered more deeply into the pure experience of movement.  I felt my pelvis and spine swaying with each step as  I rhythmically took the next step up and then the next until I was up and over the next pass. At the highest passes, it was hard to catch your breath.  With so much less oxygen, I had even less mental capacity for inner chatter. Even more letting go of judgement was invited and I was drawn into the experience of the moment.  I wondered if this is what dying  - and deep contemplative living - might be like, the letting go of more and more distractions and fears allowing and inviting us to slip into what is a more essential and less confined way of being.