Melissa and I are sitting in the middle of an impossibly wide field of round and broken stones just outside the settlement of Muktinath, 3,800 meters high, on the Nepalese side of the Himalayas. The air is thin and cold, the sky scraped bare. The peaks ringing the valley are streaked with grey rock and outlined with skeletal fresh snow. Backs against our backpacks, we’re alongside the narrow trail that leads ahead to the snowed-in Throng-La pass. We’re too late in the season to cross the pass, so this is our last stop before having to turn around, at the edge of Nepal’s restricted Mustang territory, on the northernmost and highest point of the Annapurna Circuit.
The field is dotted with dozens of small backpacker’s Chortens—stones piled in pyramids by hikers as they’ve made their way across this valley to the pass ahead. For the Tibetans and Nepalese, a Chorten is a monument to honor the dead. I’ve been thinking—uncharitably, cynically—that to the mostly western backpackers who pass through here, they’re a kind of rock graffiti: yup, we’ve been here. A hippie ‘Kilroy was here.’ We’ve been passing them all along the circuit, which we’ve been hiking the last two weeks.
There’s a single prayer flag whipping at the end of a thin post bent against the wind. Not another trekker in sight in any direction: we have this field of rocks, this scraped sky, and this narrow path, to ourselves.
Melissa’s pushing her straight, blonde hair behind her ears as it snaps across her face. The smooth skin of her cheeks pulled tight across her cheekbones with the cold. Her eyes clear water, reflecting the sky.
We’re out of sight of the whitewashed stone walls, narrow streets and prayer flags of Muktinath. This morning we passed the closed but unattended gate to Mustang. A single guard rail lowered across the narrow road between two houses.
Today would have been the 30th birthday of one of my oldest friends, had he lived past 21, which he did not. He’s been dead for nine years. I think he would have enjoyed this spot, this silence, this spare landscape.
Melissa and I are on our honeymoon, this long trip a handy signpost of our life together. The wind-blasted day, the clear sky, the world, this plain of rocks, is wide-open. Melissa’s eyes are closed against the sun and she’s leaning back on her pack, serenely smiling. Perfectly lovely, gathered in her parka.
Without quite consciously realizing I’m at it, I stand up and, gathering stones, start to build a small Chorten a few feet off the trail. The rock is cold and sharp against my hands as I stack the broken stone. My eyes keep wandering to the single prayer flag, the inked jagged lines as it’s flattened and whipped in the wind. The sharp wind wraps my bare face, outlining my skull. Cynicism suddenly blown open in this urgent impulse to honor the dead, to honor life. To honor this moment.
My cold cheeks are streaked with tears. The beard I’ve grown—which will be scraped off in a few weeks in Kathmandu but will reappear in about twenty-five years—is damp with them.
I realize I’m whispering the Mourner’s Kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead—as I stack the stones. My voice is lost in the wind, the prayer carried away in the scraped sky.
One more thing.
As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.
I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.
How this works.
I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside will offer those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.
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