Living in the foothills of the Himalayas ain’t all it’s cracked up to be some days.  I woke up this morning and it’s down to 50F in my room.  I actually got warm enough last night under all of my layers of covers to take one pair of pants, one pair of socks and my gloves off!  WOW!  But had to immediately put it all back on when I got up so….whatever.  I took a walk down to the kitchen to get my breakfast and thought just out of curiosity I’d put my weather station outside to see how cold it is on my veranda.  Whadaya know its 50F outside too!  Gee Whiz!  What a shocker.  Could it be because there is a 2-inch gap at the bottom of my door that my flimsy floor mat can’t block?  Or maybe it’s because THERES NO HEAT?  This is about the time I sit and laugh to myself remembering when, in Tibetan language class in Boulder, I asked Lhoppon what the weather was like here.  His response was “sometimes it get SO COLD we have on two coat AND mitten and we STILL shiver!”  I know, I know informative but I didn’t think it’d get that cold down here.  I’m still in the foothills but I’m not up at 6,000 ft. either.  But I’m not as cold or as hungry as the feral puppies and kittens that I see everywhere that nobody cares for so I suck it up and shut up.  This was my choice, they don’t have one.  But the really interesting part of all of this is NOBODY has heat.  People live huddled around either electric space heaters, a propane can with a boiling pot of water or a little steel pan in the middle of a room with an open fire in it.  It reminds me of growing up with the wood burning stove and always smelling wood smoke in the winters. 

 But remember that these people don’t sit around and watch the stupid boob tube all damn day.  There is no such thing as unemployment benefits or disability cheques.  These people are grinding grain for flour, making meals for 28 people, feeding livestock, tending crops, washing clothes in a bucket with a rock, walking sometimes MILES for water to do these things, some of the men leave the home to go try to make a living as a taxi driver or shop owner.  This place ain’t easy, folks.  But at the same time there IS ease about the place.  There is no harried pace of 40 things to do before the day is out so you don’t lose your job.  There is all the time in the world to get things done here cuz there’s always tomorrow.  Nobody is going anywhere, so nobody panic.  I adopted that frame of mind somewhat in America, about a year before I left.  The “it’ll be here tomorrow, the world won’t end….calm down”  At work it was tough because in the corporate atmosphere people expect that harried, panicked fervor of striving to be better than so-n-so or going for a promotion or kissing the bosses butt.  I stopped that and ya know what?  People thought I had gone mad.  What I succeeded in doing what giving myself perspective.  Life isn’t all going to work and being a slave to “your things” you are so very proud of, THANK BUDDHA.  But what these very rural and very isolated people DO have, sadly enough, is a very twisted view of America or anywhere else for that matter.  They only know what they see in movies or on the occasional television and we all know that’s not real.  You’ll truly never know until you go. 

 There is this really neat bug that has set up shop on the spine of one of my books.

 And yes, I know I bitch but really do have my heart set on returning in July of 2009 to trek to Manali, Spiti, Sikkim, Zanskar and Ladakh.  I am hoping since it will be summer break here at Jamyang Choling that Ganden will be available to be my guide.  She is looking forward to it as she is from a village in Spiti like Lobsang Chodon.  Maybe Lobsang Chodon will be free to come along too! 

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