Nepal: You Are (not) a Tourist.

A Brief and Casual Reflection on 36 Hrs Spent in Nepal

Nepal: the mélange of everything you’ve ever heard about anything. Christmas lights that are hung to celebrate the birth of Christ back home become symbols of Lakshmi during the festival of lights. Images of Shiva are images of Bhairab and a six-year-old girl looking down on you from a window is a living goddess.

You notice a seamless confluence of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Animism in even the poorest of neighborhoods. You find it impossible to deny the feeling of painful irony as a mob of deformed untouchable children follow you and all you want to do is hold them. You don’t take your eyes off your feet in fear you might step on something, or someone by accident.

You are told about the royal massacre that ended the Nepalese monarchy; a tragic love story that puts Romeo and Juliet to shame. Did the Prince who gunned down his entire family, his lover and himself ever read Shakespeare?

Watching the cremation of a very young child along the Bagmati River haunts you but you are unable to leave; there is no one else there to mourn the child. You see Sadhus covered in the ashes of the dead and wonder who will wear these ashes? The holy Sadhus who have devoted themselves to live outside the caste and religious limits of their environments become the holy punk rockers in your mind. You rock. Don’t ever change.

Your legs are sore from your capoeira class but you and the hundreds of others still climb up the 300 steep and uneven stairs to reach the Stupa atop a mountain. Buddha’s eyes join yours as you look over Kathmandu Valley. 

You take the easy way down through a forest of Prayer Flags. Did monks really climb those trees to get them there?
You entertain the idea that maybe the Prophets you've read about are somehow connected to Vishnu.

You wait for the monkeys in your bus to leave. You choose to walk home through the remains of Tihar (Diwali) and see a cow eating the garbage.

What is going on? You realize that the spirituality here is communal and individualized. Everyone worships differently together. You participate in rigorous theatre rehearsals run by a veteran known for having a direct connection to the divine and consequently he could spontaneously fall into trance in the middle of it. 

            There is something that we all have in common - not situational but metaphysically - the emotions we feel - the processes our body go through - the cycle we all begin and end. We have to be parts of a whole; individuality is too superficial. That seems like a scientific thing to say so why was the idea inspired by studying Hinduism?

There are always different names for the same thing so maybe I’m only throwing a new vocabulary on the beliefs I’ve always had.