In 2008, I was in the Sacred Valley in Peru, on a terraced hillside and in ceremony with a small gathering of Priests. In a circle of smoke, small items were unwrapped with white crumpled paper creating its own pile beside a growing altar of so many little things. After gazing into a small fire that had been lit in a bowl, one of the shaman-priests turned to me. His face, still with the imprint of the flames, turned towards me and his arm reached out to draw in the dirt beside me. His finger started to trace an outline of a mountain that I immediately recognized as Mount Index, a jagged up pointing peak that I see out of my old kitchen window in Gold Bar. This mountain is in Washington State and commands eye lifting wonder as you enter into the Cascade mountain peaks of Highway 2. Time is stopping all around me and the priest asks for his words to be translated. Speaking in Quechua, he says “this mountain”, pointing his figure at the outline, “is being ignored by you and you are not in respect. The sacred Apu are in constant conversation. They see everything that is going on they know.” He continues, “You are lost in your own very small world, and you are to look up. Go and talk to the mountain. Apu wants to be in relation and in this way we can continue to help you and you can find us.”
When I got back to the U.S. I did just that. Many mornings you would find me in deep reverie with the mountain that stood outside my kitchen window and small gifts were placed along the Lake Serene trail. Ever since, the mountains occasionally send a message in the most forgotten and unlikely times for me.
This week, I am at the airport in Connecticut and I am missing my ride to the retreat. Upon calling my hostess, it was discovered they had ordered the car for a flight I had originally been taking for the following day. A few minutes later I was called back and was told that a driver would be there in twelve minutes and indeed he was. Out of the car jumped a sweet and familiar feeling young man. As we drove away we introduced ourselves and we shared where we were from. Abiral was from Nepal and as I look out over the city sprawl and flat lining horizon I can’t help wondering if he misses his home country. So I ask, and our conversation takes off down the road and his words travel me into a very different landscape.
Abiral is a sherpa from Nepal and has ascended Everest many times, as a guide. He names off Annapurna II, Mount Sagarmatha and the other great elders of the Himalayan range. He shared how he had left school at age 14 to climb and to guide. Again I am taken by the contrast of where we are in this East Coast landscape while the sun which is known, but not visible, sinks behind tall buildings, grey clouds, big freeways and moving cars. Together we now enter into the dusk of our conversation.
When Abiral left Nepal for the US, he was sponsored by those that had paid thirty five thousand and up for a permitted expedition up Everest or Mount Sagarmatha (as the great spirit of this mountain is known by in Nepal). Having had no “schooling” he was sponsored to the US to “finish” his education and to attend the climbing programs offered here in the US in order to have qualifications! Large expedition organizers were wanting insurable people to do the guiding. To do this, he parted from his wife and young baby in Nepal, but he knew that there was a pushing out coming from the mountains themselves. It was time to leave. He had, over his 15 years of being a Sherpa, seen the inevitable changes coming. No longer did his crampons meet snow making them now helpless in the navigating of receding glaciers and in the scrambling across increased fields of scree.
People with no relationship to the Himalayas kept arriving to scale and conquer the mountain faces. All this to him, felt threatening. These arrivals came irresponsibly and unprepared for the unpredictable wild expressions of nature that happen miles up in the Himalayan sky. He found himself exhausted from a worldly arrogance of being treated as “other” in the very land of his people. It was as if they seemed to have to check a box on some great list called world accomplishments, and he was there to make that possible. As he picked up the increasing trash along the way of water bottles, power bar wrappers, dropped gear and dead oxygen tanks he started to question the changes. He was coming into the realization that the role of sherpa had changed and it was no longer fitting his dignity.
Abiral had grown up in a Nepalese village with nothing. To be without his trade in mountain guiding, left little opportunity for him in Nepal. His lineage is Tibetan Buddhist and his people are from Tibet. His family bones are of Kathmandu, Mount Kailash and Mount Sagarmatha, and inseparable from rock face and glacier. The warm compassion in his eyes as they connect with me in the rear view mirror, bring home to me the words of the Peruvian priest. “The Apu, they all talk to one another and when it is in the timing of their ways they send messages to those that need to know.”
My message wakes me up. This part of the world, the very heart of our Mother, is in trouble. There are fissures and a crack opening up that the disappearance of Tibet forewarned us all about. Not so much the political statement but the unheard cry of an ancient order of things is being super disrupted. No longer are the prayers that hold all things as one being spoken from the top of the world flow uninterrupted. The very stewards of the mountains are being thwarted. It is demanded of them to accommodate the thirst of material accomplishment over prayer and reverence. Integrity pushes my driver away from the momentous slopes and the voice of a clamoring materialistic world overshooting the simple respectful voice of the Sherpa, the voice of Mother Earth. These big generous hearted people of high places are suffering like the mountains. A way of being is melting as the refuse of a greedy outside world is spilling out over the newly exposed scree. This sherpa is now driving an Uber car on the East Coast of the United States in order to support his wife and child who have recently come from Nepal. His parents came to North America, to explore the possibility of moving. They soon left after not speaking English and being removed from their village and roots was too much. They returned with no desire to return back to the West.
Today his family in Nepal now stand in the path of Covid seeping out of India. No vaccines are available and as Abiral’s family on the US end awaits their green cards to be processed, none of them can travel outside the U.S. They are stranded in their double bind. The wife’s mother has died and during this time of Covid, his sister has passed. I commiserate with the sacredness of these deaths and the important rituals to be observed. I listen how they did their best to light over a hundred candles for each one, in their small flat, revealing this deep rupturing of ancient ways that is happening as we, the leading edges of material power, catapult ourselves into great and further disruptions of the natural order of things. My driver speaks of guilt for leaving and he says “it’s like the whole world is tipping and we all are falling off our mountain” … Gulp
And so it is that Mount Everest, Mount Sagarmatha sent me a message; We are in trouble.
***Of note. While I was on the plane heading for Connecticut, I spent my time studying the map of Central Asia. I wanted to learn where all the “stan” countries were like Kazakhstan, Aberjistan (Stan means land and Kazik or Aberji are the tribes) I noted that Tibet no longer had its own identity, and how Nepal sat, land locked and appeared vulnerable in the map of things. In the morning I awoke in Conneticut and the morning Guardian gifted me this read
And the words “it’s like the whole world is tipping and we are falling off our mountain” reverberated into the air. I had received a message for certain.
Sarah Maclean Bicknell
May 2021
Top Photo Credit: Kalle Kortelainen | Middle Photo Credit: Martin Jernberg