on being extravagant

To inaugurate this blog, I offer this passage from Henry David Thoreau, which I intend to be the theme with which this blog is, well, blogged. Love to all of you from Nepal. More to come on my situation soon. Credit for this inspiration goes to Mark Retzlaff, who gifted me the anthology whence it came.

________________

I fear chiefly lest my experience not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded...

I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.....

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring....

“They pretend,” as I hear, “that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the esoteric doctrine of the Vedas”; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Henry David Thoreau

its like that, only moreso

So I arrived in Boudhanath somwhere around two weeks ago. Time is somewhat more fluid here, containing few reference points as I am largely bereft of responsibility, though I have managed to accomplish quite a bit. At my first Saturday talk with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, I ran into an old friend from high school who is well into her Buddhist Studies MA and whose Tibetan is seriously impressive. With her, I got a kick-start introduction to Boudha and the burgundy monastic madness it specializes in. I've spent some time with Pema Chokyi, a relative of Khentrul Rinpoche's who I met in Tibet two years ago at the horse races. She introduced me to the inner Kora (circumambulation) route where there are beautiful grass spaces for sitting in.

And last week I moved in to new new digs in Casa de Thubten, who is a fantastic colloquial Tibetan teacher with a great family. I'll also being sharing the house with a kind red bearded Coloradan called Adam. Oh you red bearded Vajra brothers.

I want to share a few of my observations. Firstly, you hipsters, devotees of irony, have got nothing, I repeat, nothing on Nepali and Tibetan youth. They wear culturally curious slogans like "organic to the bone" and "Death Note" or sport Eminem and Nirvana t-shirts with great pride if some uncertainty as to the iconoclastic message the artists had for us. Indian, and now I understand, Nepali English are tremendously playful pidgeons/creols/some new category (only Danthro would truly know). My favorite sign thus far was on the back of a blue garbage truck my taxi passed on the way from the airport to Boudhanath: "My life is broken heart." How true. How true. Some recent favorites, witnessed while circumambulating the stupa with Danyo, a Swedish monk:

Never judge a girl by her bumpersticker.

It may possibly one's dream to satisfy all wish.

Last week I was watching TV with Ama-la and her son (my new Tibetan younger brother and all around maniac) Tenzin; more precisely a program called "Sai Baba" after its eponymous main character. Sai Baba, as far as I can tell, is something of a Hindu equivalent of Scott Bakula's character on "Quantum Leap." Like Dr. Sam Beckett, he is a time/space traveller. Except that he is a bliss-eyed yogi enraptured by the sweet embrace of samadhi, and travels around India (rather than through time) helping people get married. It was awesome.