(no subject)
labrang, amdo, tibet
i have little doubt in my mind that the three days we spent here were the best this year, perhaps of many years. i think it was this combination of this jumble of factors in symbiosis which gave it SUCH a powerful quality, such a sense of absolute departure from the western world, interior and exterior freedom.
a- being a buddhist monestary, as with any place of worship, there's that air of reverence and sanctity. here though, i felt it fuse with my cells more than i ever have before in my life, i was moved to tears. i don't know what it was; if it really was the place itself or if the sunlight was just falling on the dust in the correct way that particular day... if we were just lucky. but i stood in the prayer hall looking through into an ajoining room which we weren't permitted to enter, where the monks were sitting cross-legged in rows chanting and playing instruments... the air choked with the musty smell of butter lamps, incense... i felt like bowing my head, prostrating myself. in another monestary outside zhongdian, i did find a quiet room, alone, mimicked what i'd seen so many old tibetan women do, having felt this powerful urge to do the same rising in my gut the whole time i'd been visiting places like this. head, face, heart, and then onto the floor, touch the ground with yr palms and rise again. when i turned around to leave there was an old monk sitting in the corner of the room, crosslegged. he looked at me with this tender patience, as if everything was okay, as if everything was still. i had been worried about seeming blasphemous, offensive, looking silly. but the way he looked at me... it was as if nothing could possibly be wrong with anything anyone did, as if he knew that understanding what i'd done was not important, that judging me was infathomable. after that, in another room, i stood and watched a group of monks... one very old, singing from some scriptures, the others perhaps learning from him. they invited me to sit with them. i felt out-of-place for a while, crouched on my velvet cushion, as if my western baggage had followed me there without my consent and was making a fool of me... right then, i wanted my skin to be scorched and weathered, my clothes to fall off my back. but then that same feeling seeped into me, an utter wide-open acceptance, and i shut my eyes and stayed with them for quite a while. i keep forgetting these little details.
{tangent} b - the physical landscape. it was like we had been dropped into a mirage in the centre of nothing-ness, the same way i felt when we lay under the stars in deqin, underneath the enormous, gold prayer wheel. mountains on every side, everything so WIDE and VAST... like the town was existing within some vacuum. and at night, this vastness was counterbalanced by these stars, so bright, i don't think they could possibly be that spectacular anywhere else in the world. and then there's your breath, and the biting cold, and it all just melds together and you feel as if yr heart has fully opened itself to the world.