Weeks after I ever presumed I would remain in Kathmandu, what am I still doing in this city? Attending Buddhist teachings has trained a certain discomfort with the directionless present out of me, as if things could possibly be better in India? Varanasi calls me to move on, and reasons ever evolve to make us doubleguess why we’d ever want to leave exactly where this awesome place that happens around us is. The feeling is not new-home, Himilaya, Butwal, but I never expect the near future to stop bestowing knowledge and comforts that I may be tested to renounce.
Boudha, a Tibetan Buddhist neighborhood of Kathmandu of which I feel a local, confidently navigating the curved, dirt alleyways that circumambulate the largest stupa in Nepal. I even judge the day tripping tourists who flash the monks’ routine with cameras. Attend Choki Nyima Rinpoche’s teachings, daily, for a week, 4-6 hours every morning, a flash flood transmission of the dharma.
Working inside one spiritual tradition, for once. Never mind this anarcho hodge-podgery free jazz McNature music yoga art jewish and most undefinable god endeavor that I’ve set out to discover the ways of the world by. They have answers, even a dictionary of language to precisely contextualize concepts that I struggle to find new words for. So Rinpoche brought us up to speed, explained that the “everything is nothing” moment that I grasped for, that I’ve defined as the highest, is but a part of godly experience, and the feeling of my most naturalest me. The phantasmagoria fleets until I learn to detach from it. Full realization comes with objectivity, and what I do with it. I could go on forever in this excitement, but Buddhist language, useful as it may be, quickly falls into the realm of cliche in writing, and this isn’t a log of “stuff I now know”-that would be so tedious. So I’ll stick to finding new ways to describe “it”, “all of it”. Apologies to a fascinated future me.
Studying Buddhism with Jonah has already volcanicly reconfigured our dynamic. It’s almost impossible to hurt eachothers feelings. if there’s a thought I want to convey that runs a risk of being taken the wrong way, he can check that flash of anger. Any jealousy, miscommunication, or careless action, I can nip in the bud, too! Ask myself why it bothered me, trace it so deeply, and its always something so stupid and selfish that I don’t relate to it in all when put into language in my thoughts. In conjuncture with “everything is nothing” mentality, I can genuinely remain unaffected, not forced to suppress it, or go through the electrifying, time and energy consuming, entertaining ordeal of settling it.