Saturday with the wind rippling off Shivapuri...

Josh and I just watched Liverpool dismantle Bolton in the English Premier League tonight while Shaku slept on the couch... but before napping, she made an especially delicious dinner for us of steamed rice accompanied by an exquisite roast pork, sauteed tofu vegetables and a sauteed garlic spinach.

Shaku said she was dreaming of how Ezra, who left a few days ago to go back to his desert solitude at Deep Springs College, would have wanted his home-cooked dinner. She felt she was cooking with her absent son in heart and mind...

Being a parent does truly odd and indescribable things to one's inner life...

Earlier in the day, Shakun and I had lunch at a British couple's home up here in Budhanilkantha. Richard used to work w/ Caroline at the Aga Khan Foundation in Geneva. Now he manages a national civil society project with the World Bank and is slowly adjusting to his new life in Kathmandu.

After an enjoyable afternoon w/ Dee Depert, Bruce Moore and Lisa Choegyal at Richard and Claire's home, we headed home up the hill about 3 pm to spend some late afternoon hours in the garden.

Today's task had already begun in the morning when I was out trimming scores of lower branches on the rapidly growing trees around the house. Some of these evergreen trees have grown so astonishingly, they almost completely block the natural light. Now that we've enjoyed their impressive size for a few years, we want to open up more space below them -- especially in the courtyard at the entrance of the house where it's been so dank, dark and moist this summer.

Last weekend I'd already started trimming some lower branches. I began after my morning Nepali tea with the 40'+ stately juniper from Nuralyia, Sri Lanka, the one in front of Josh's bedroom that I carried back on the plane 14 years ago in small plastic bag. Then, the burgeoning Peepul (Bodhi) tree with five separate trunks (one for each of us in the family...) by the walkway leading up to the house.

Some years ago, when we were first planting the garden, friends gave us a bunch of these Peepul trees as gifts, so we planted them all near each other at the approach to the house. Knowing these Peepul trees, however, some day, long after we have turned back to earthly compost, someone is going to have the roots of one helluva enormous Peepul bot lifting up the floor of the garage and winding across the rivulet. If you've ever seen these trees in South Asia, you know what I mean: massive...

I'd nearly smashed my right hand on the Sri Lankan juniper while I was up on the aluminum ladder whacking branches off with the small village sickle/scythe. Laxmi, Gita's young neice who's been working with us the past year, walked by. Looking up, seeing me using the smaller blade, she made a typically Nepali 'chhhing' sound and turned around. She went back to the garage where she picked up the heavier, stronger hand sickle, and lifted it up to me on the ladder. Not, however, before the knuckles on my right had were swollen from the repetitive blows against the immoveable, rather substantial tree trunk.

Today, it was the turn of the willows along the eastern brook to take a major hacking. Whoosh. I can still hear the sting of Tek's axe against those dense 10' diameter branches. The wheeping willows must have felt it painfully, too! Ouch! But it was really time to clear those muscular branches of the riverine willows as their dense monsoon foliage had been been blocking the growth of everything below.

Now, the stately plump Metasequoia (deciduous Dawn Sequoia) with its feathery leafettes has plenty of space to rise elegantly on its little patch of green before the house. To my great surprise, I'd found that young sapling over a decade ago in a nursery behind the palace. Little did I know at the time that the Rana upper classes had acquired these refined sequoias from Yunnan in the 40s and '50s, like the ivy-coated universities in the States. There was one gargantuan Metasequoia behind the Smith College library, par 5 on the 9th hole of our frisbee golf course, as I remember. Presently, to my householder's delight and pride, a similar Metasequoia, more than a few decades younger, stands as a solitary, exquisite forest sentinel as we walk up the mossy stone path to our home on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

Besides the Metasequoia, the tropical palm from Cambodia we'd planted along the stream years ago, as well as the luscious mint green Dendrocalamus minor amoneous bamboo from Florida, were being crowded out by the dense cloak of willow branches overhead, as well. Clearing out these lower branches of the 15 year old willows has given a more spacious look to the front yard.

Tek, of course, was the main man behind these copsing efforts today. Tek did the serious, agile tree climbing work while I knelt in humble regard to lop lower branches off the Lemon Cypress tree in the backyard. Then I cut the prematurely deceased 7' Deodar and Tajik Junipers along the brick wall that separates us from our neighbor's property. These promising saplings, sadly, died over the past six months (due to unknown causes...); their roots, possibly, cut when we built the new wall or simply out of botanical compassion for the tragedy of the over-crowded, polluted, congested commons in Kathmandu below.

Josh had gone out while we went for lunch, but returned in the early evening to relax at home before watching the Liverpool game after dinner. Lying on Leah's bed upstairs, he was reviewing some of the hip clothes he's designed on his laptop for his new internet company, the Fyujan Factory -- a creative, entrepreneurial idea to market high-end fashion, leather bags and computer cases through an ethical local business in Nepal.

The night before Leah had her adorable Danish friend, Esther, sleep over. Of course, the two had to rush in the morning to get out by 8:30 where Tek took them to meet Priya (their close friend and the third Mouseketette...) to go together to the Wind Horse stables in Thapathali to ride horses for an hour. Priya goes regularly and Leah's been joining her for the weekend friendship and animal affection time. When we checked in later by phone, Bruce, Priya's Dad, said that they were taking the co-conspirators to the American club, Phora Durbar, for swimming, lunch and total fun. Ms. Leah didn't come home until eight pm as the girls didn't leave Phora til 7 pm, and crashed soon after arriving on the bed next to Josh and Shakun.

While most of the life inside the house was centered on Leah's bed, I enjoyed the lingering, crepuscular light in the garden. I stood alone on the roof looking south toward the city. The monsoon clouds gathering above the nearby Shivapuri ridge while the fading, tempestous light shown clear and beautiful across the congested city below.

As I filled my soul with this radiant late monsoon sun fall, Shakun appeared from the back garden w/ a bright yellow lemon in her hand. "It fell!", she called up to me on the roof, then strolled behind the house to advise Laxmi on some plants below the Camelfoot Palm that Steve L. had given us a few years ago rising above our no less congested, but lushly tropical 108 Lotus pad pond.

On the flat roof, taking in the sweeping view across the Valley, I looked toward the rooftop loggia above the living room, with the diminished willow trees still rising 40' above the stream providing a comforting privacy from the road outside, and imagined an Finnish sauna on the backside of the loggia for those chilly winter evenings.

Actually, this persistent daydream may actually happen...

Last Wednesday when I flew to Pokhara for our latest Federalism Dialogue series on the Division of State Powers, I ran into a Jesuit friend, Greg, who I'd first met in 1984 with Father Joe, a Maryknoll priest. They are both Catholics of the cloth, but different in most every other category. Joe is the motorcycle priest from Ohio travelling across Nepal to look at mental health issues; a jovial, barrel-chested, athletic man who played squash with a sweet, laughing disposition. Whereas Greg is a true Jesuit: serious, intellectual, academic and purposeful. He's already written one book on Newari Buddhism for his PhD and become fluent in a handful of national Nepali languages. I hadn't seen greg for a few years. He'd put on weight, but still had those same round, Harry Potter glasses, very observant yet shy.

Somehow the subject of saunas came up. G-d knows how -- except I've dreamt of having a sauna on our roof for a decade... well, basically, since we built the house... and, to my real surprise and delight, Greg knew a Nepali carpenter who has built 5-6 of wood-burning saunas for Finns living in Nepal. Before I could call him when I returned to Kathmandu on Friday, Rohit called me. So when he arrived I took him up to the roof, by the loggia, to measure the possible sauna location. Although Shakun and I didn't agree on which way to face the sauna, toward Kathmandu or up at Shivapuri, she kindly deferred to me, knowing that I'd been speaking/dreaming of this for years.

So, as I stood today at twilight en plein air gazing at the lush forested Shivapuri National Park behind us and down on the dipasi brick roof loggia, I could almost imagine, come October/November, as the temperature drops at the start of our night-time winters, how glorious it would be to be sitting in a pine sauna sweating profusely after a long day in town, with the lights of that harsh city shimmering deceptively below, and thankful, once again, to have this Licchivi sanctuary up here on this Himalayan hill, surrounded by a botanical garden we have created, designed, trimmed, culled and loved for over a decade, more.

I then stepped silently away from those open vistas for that scrumptious family dinner w/ Shakun, Josh and Leah before the Liverpool game began on another Saturday night in Kathmandu.

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry
b. 1934, Kentucky, US
Farmer-Writer-Poet


[Thanks to Lennette Boner for sharing on FB...]

Each of Us an Odysseus; Each Life a Journey from an Ithaka

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.


Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

Parenting, it never quite ends...

Thoughts today about our young wards...

Shaku and I were discussing last night how few times we've actually had a sit down dinner w/ Josh & Ezra since we came back from the US nearly a month ago. For all of the eager anticipation of family time together back here in the nest, we usually hear these big boyz coming home after midnight and see them only briefly, at times, during the week.

Not exactly the fulsome family time that we had hoped for during our 'summer together'...

In some ways, that is why I always planned our four to six week summer trips to the US and/or Europe since the boys were petite. At least on those excursions (what we used to comically call 'Napoleon's grand army in retreat'), we were together all the time, the boys in the backseat strapped in, often w/ an ice cream in hand, watching the world drive by, while we meandered among friends, family and national parks.

Yet, those memories have long since receded. Punctuated by Joshua announcing a few years ago, as we were driving from Oakland to San Francisco, that this would be the last family summer trip together. Fair enough. He was 17 years old, ready to spread his own wings, plan his own travels and adventures, free of the nuclear family, out in the world that he had been gazing longingly at in the back of our summer rental cars. Although slightly younger, I'm sure Ezra was feeling the same sense that an era had come to a close and their own youthful spirit was calling...

But, even though we went through such stages with our own parents in the 1970s, possibly even younger and with less humility, such are the realities of our endless growing up (older?) that we are still caught by surprise by such events in our own constantly evolving incarnation as parents.

I had a Skype chat w/ a close friend who lives in Geneva last night. She asked how the boyz were and I explained, half-jokingly, that I sometimes hardly know. She empathized given her experience three times over with her own big children in England and Switzerland. She, too, commented that when are children are far away they often need us more, it seems, but when they are back in the figurative womb of our physical homes, they feel safe and protected enough to ignore us (and their studies...) for large swathes of time.

It seems that this is a common parental refrain whether in Kathmandu, Geneva, Philadelphia, Berkeley and points west...

In this role as parents, we each bring our own emotional skills, physical needs, complex childhood memories, eager dreams and conflated personal histories to the rich and confused stew called 'parenting'. We also each have our strengths, passions and our limitations (let's not call them weaknesses, but fallibility's...).

Among some of our closest friends there is one Janjati (indigenous) Nepali, one Tibetan-Nepali, one Dutch and one Jewish-American. That's already a lot of people in the stew. In fact, just within the pair of us, husband and wife, who have formed our families is an almost global community in itself. Dutch-Tibetan in one family and Nepali-American in the other. A bit of the East and a bit of the West blended not just in the marriage, but also within each of us, since our Nepali spouses were educated in a western language and culture while we both put on our socks one day when we were in our early 20s and headed toward Asia to never quite return home...

Yet our kids have all been raised here in our Kathmandu Valley cauldron. They feel home here, they feel protected here, they know their friends here, they have few fears here, they long for this place when they are away; they want to return.

Meanwhile, in our parental role, we are tugged here and there, this way and that, up and down, inside and out, high and low, frightened and enthusiastic, uncertain and eager; apprehensive, at times, about what Nepal offers to our offspring.

Will Nepal offer them a deep sense of home, independence and rewarding professional opportunities or a Thamel cul-de-sac within a rigid, narrow and corrupting society? Will their lives expand here emotionally or constrict as the years go by? As blended children, Western education/Eastern values, one foreign parent, will Nepal open up for them more generously in the coming years or continue to treat them as short-term 'bideshi' (foreign) guests who actually belong somewhere else -- somewhere imagined they never actually knew.

Which way do we point our children? Which goals and ambitions do we light in their lives? What messages have we given them these one score years to illuminate their lives and hoist them on their ways? What messages have we given that we never realized we were saying? In what direction did we encourage them without knowing that we were actually non-verbal neon signs on their youthful horizons bleating a message that we hardly recognized within ourselves?

What did they perceive we were saying?

What did they hear?

What did they choose to ignore?

What did they understand -- even when we were saying something quite the opposite?

And now we are no longer four adults, two couples/friends sharing our lives, but eight, with Leah quietly observing the rest of us and already, no doubt, beginning to make imperceptible, lasting decisions and aspirations for her young life.

At this point, with children bigger, smarter, younger, more energetic and optimistic than us, there is only so much we can guide them. There are clear patterns in their own lives that are slowly gaining ground and coming to the fore. There is much that each of them will have to experience on their own. Our sons come together as a gang for the summer here in Kathmandu to renew their bond of friendship and trust, in an outside world that they feel is often alien and unsympathetic to their own.

They draw strength and sustenance from each other before they must put paddle in the river, once again, and beat forward toward their own dreams and in their own lives.

We are here for them, we will never leave them, but we are not them and they are no longer us.

Those fondly remembered charming childhood days of unity and family are passing with each day. They are moving further away to a distant personal horizon (as we did once...) to which we, their parents, are no longer the core or the center, but the broader periphery that set the original bounds of their lives, but are no longer its heart and soul.

In this we must, reluctantly, but necessarily, step very carefully, gently, to the side. We can neither impose nor restrict, neither define nor differentiate for them. They are young men, not merely our children, soon to start on the course of their own individual lives.

Our consensus is that of parents, loving, caring, supporting, encouraging, guiding, which we each do in our own personal, public and often private ways.

The journeys, dear Ithaka, dear Cavafy, are now theirs, as they leave us again this month or next, back to the demanding, challenging, ennobling world outside, where they are becoming themselves, alive to the laughter and sorrows of the lives around them, conscious that they, too, must find their place, their profession, their partner, their home in a world daunting in its scale, but also in its love.

May the g-ds look kindly on our children and protect them on their way.

Om Shanti! Om Shalom!

Shanti!

A Man for All Seasons: 'that horrible moral squint...'

Brilliant quotes and words to the wise... for all of us...


The Duke of Norfolk: Oh confound all this. I'm not a scholar, I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not but dammit, Thomas, look at these names! Why can't you do as I did and come with us, for fellowship!

Sir Thomas More: And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?
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Sir Thomas More: You threaten like a dockside bully.

Cromwell: How should I threaten?

Sir Thomas More: Like a minister of state. With justice.

Cromwell: Oh, justice is what you're threatened with.

Sir Thomas More: Then I am not threatened.
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Cardinal Wolsey: You're a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint... With a little common sense you could have made a statesman.
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Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.

Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it?

Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.
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William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
-----------------------------------------

The Duke of Norfolk: The nobility of England...

Sir Thomas More: The nobility of England, My Lord, would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount, but you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.


A Man For All Seasons
1966 Academy Award "Best Picture"
1962 Tony Award, "Best Author"
Robert Bolt, screenwriter/playwright