This isn’t in the book. Maybe it should have been. The words didn’t come until we settled back in the quietude of Astam, after the pages were printed and bound, and after the book was passed from my hands to family and friends. My truth is already out there, bare.
When the noise hushed, when bird song from the forest replaced the hum of condensers on concrete ledges, I did the chicken scrawl. And in the chilled monsoon silence, something gave way. A moment of reflection. Sharp as dawn breaking through the same old Pavlovian clouds.
What follows was written in January 2020, when we had just arrived in Nepal. At that time, everything felt like a promise—a calling, a dream we had leapt into without knowing how it would test us. Now, six years later, I look back on those words with tenderness. They belong to a younger self, brimming with hope and naïveté, not yet weathered by monsoons, scarcity, and the sheer work of making a life. I keep them here, not because they are still true, but because they reveal who we were before we knew the weight of what we had chosen.
The Dream Was Necessary
The words are still here, like a stone under the skin.
Many moons ago, we talked about our dreams of moving to a rural environment to lead a simpler and cleaner life. To allow the boys to grow closer to Mother Nature and be a part of her embrace in its entirety. The Himalayas, somehow, had its magnetic hands hovering from another life and when a calling came from Nepal, we took it hastily. Astam, a sleepy village nestled in the hills adjacent to the magnificent Annapurna became our new home. In her white towering peaks shadowing creature and forest, in her anarchy of icy winds, fury hailstorms and merciless monsoon rains – we sing, dance and cry together. This is our journey of building an earth home and a retreat – for learning, unlearning, relearning and being intrigued with the big questions in life. It is through the expression of yoga and in the spirit of exploration, dialogue and discourse that we have hope; hope to facilitate and ignite a breath of air where tradition engages the contemporary.
—January 2020
I read her now and I smile in tenderness, in exposure, in the uneasy recognition of a self I once was. I am not sure if the truth still fits, or if it glares too brightly to share. Yet I want to hold her face in my hands, and tell her this:
To go away is also to come nearer. It is the same thing.
How to keep the boys from hardening? Let them be mud. Let them be rain.
We said a simpler life, as if life would obey. As if simplicity were something you could choose and it would simply appear.
The Himalayas didn’t call us. They have always stood there, unmoved and indifferent. But still, you heard them.
Nepal. You wrote the word. It wrote you back.
Astam. What does the name matter? A place that does not need us. That is why we needed it.
The peaks. White knives in the sky. Do I dare say they love us? No. They do not care. This is purer than love.
The storms were so violent that the house trembled like tofu. Still, we stayed. Staying is also leaving.
To build a house of earth is to confess: I am soil and I will return to soil.
A retreat? No. It was a question disguised as a home. What we made was a mirror that offered us questions instead of answers.
What if learning is not unlearning? What is unlearning if not dying a little? The cycle is dizzying, endless.
Yoga, dialogue, silence. Tradition colliding with the new? Never finished. We sought a breath, just one fragile breath to hold it together.
Hope is not gentle. It is feral. It hides in corners. It waits.
This is not our journey. It belongs to the soil. We are only passing through.
And yet, without your dreams, I would not be here.
Your clouds on tour was the bridge.
Your hope, the scaffolding.
Your naïveté, the only rope strong enough to pull us forward.
I owe you much, even as I have outgrown you.
And as I outgrew her, the rope passed gently into other hands.
The boys are older now. They are no longer dreamers’ children, but questioners in their own right.
They make politics out of play, nonsense out of sense. Another book is already being born in them although they don’t know it yet. The Book of Utter Nonsense waits in their voices.
G and I have fought through storms that could have broken us clean apart. Raging, tearing, the kind that made one wonder if love can outlast fury. But we refused to end a day in silence. No matter how hard, we faced the wreckage. We threw down our anger, named it and owned it. And before sleep, we forced the words out: I’m sorry. I love you. That’s how we made it through.
And Kali? She has been here for a while now, chewing her slow, eternal chew. She has listened to our storms, every quarrel, every illusion we tried to dress in beauty.
Last night, after all my thinking, I sat beside her.
She blinked once, turned her head, and wondered what the fuss was all about.
Note to Reader: If Unearthed has found its way into your hands and heart, I’d be deeply grateful if you could leave a few words on Amazon or Goodreads. Your review, long or short, matters more than you think.
If you haven’t yet, you can find the book on Amazon worldwide, LitBooks at Tropican Avenue, KL and Swara Retreat, Nepal.
