Upon leaving
I've been savoring my last few days in Dharamsala as much as I've been able.
I've been pretty calmly observing, despite all my strange dreams, with mixed symbols and characters from my two worlds. The other night, I dreamt I was crammed with twelve other people (Indian style) into a jeep, but we were driving by the ocean, on the way to Santa Cruz. We missed Santa Cruz and ended up in Sausalito. I've also had dreams of the Tibetan alphabet, Hindi phrases oft-used in my daily routine (baiya, yeh kitana? dharamasala jaeger?)
Last night, Tamdin and I chatted with a neighbor a little bit when I got home. We talked about lightening. The wind was picking up ferociously. The power will go out, Tamdin said, just knowing how things go. Surely enough, the hills on the other side of the valley started blinking. The whole hillside went dark. Then lit back up in a few minutes. Then went dark again. Meanwhile, dusk was a little pink and gray. The clouds were gathering and were already thundering. Tamdin reminisced a little about thunder back in Tibet. This is nothing, he said, you can barely hear it. In Tibet, everyone's afraid of the dragon, what they call the sharp clack-ka-ra-ra of thunder. I was thinking that thunder made a lot more sense in the country, where things were still simple enough to be symbolic. For some time, we sat out on the balcony and just listened and watched that wonderful display of the heavens: lightening lighting up the entire hillside for an instant, or running across the sky like a crack in the egg of our world. Slowly, rain, off in the distance, over the Kangra Valley. In the distance, we could hear the drumming and whooping of an Indian wedding ceremony going on. Rain or shine, they continued to play.
The cold and drove us inside, but the weather continued its drama all night, with very fast winds screeching and rain. We had another kind of entertainment competing with that though, the 5-in-1 DVD (5 movies on one disc, that is) that we rented for rs50, yeah!
I've been pretty calmly observing, despite all my strange dreams, with mixed symbols and characters from my two worlds. The other night, I dreamt I was crammed with twelve other people (Indian style) into a jeep, but we were driving by the ocean, on the way to Santa Cruz. We missed Santa Cruz and ended up in Sausalito. I've also had dreams of the Tibetan alphabet, Hindi phrases oft-used in my daily routine (baiya, yeh kitana? dharamasala jaeger?)
Last night, Tamdin and I chatted with a neighbor a little bit when I got home. We talked about lightening. The wind was picking up ferociously. The power will go out, Tamdin said, just knowing how things go. Surely enough, the hills on the other side of the valley started blinking. The whole hillside went dark. Then lit back up in a few minutes. Then went dark again. Meanwhile, dusk was a little pink and gray. The clouds were gathering and were already thundering. Tamdin reminisced a little about thunder back in Tibet. This is nothing, he said, you can barely hear it. In Tibet, everyone's afraid of the dragon, what they call the sharp clack-ka-ra-ra of thunder. I was thinking that thunder made a lot more sense in the country, where things were still simple enough to be symbolic. For some time, we sat out on the balcony and just listened and watched that wonderful display of the heavens: lightening lighting up the entire hillside for an instant, or running across the sky like a crack in the egg of our world. Slowly, rain, off in the distance, over the Kangra Valley. In the distance, we could hear the drumming and whooping of an Indian wedding ceremony going on. Rain or shine, they continued to play.
The cold and drove us inside, but the weather continued its drama all night, with very fast winds screeching and rain. We had another kind of entertainment competing with that though, the 5-in-1 DVD (5 movies on one disc, that is) that we rented for rs50, yeah!
posted by sylviashines at 9:26 AM
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