Himalaya: A Literary Homage to Adventure, Meditation, and Life on the Roof of the World by Bond Ruskin

Author:Bond, Ruskin [Bond, Ruskin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

OCTOBER 24

A cold wind out of the north. I wash my head. To reduce the drain on our food supplies, Tukten and Gyaltsen leave today for Jumla, where they will obtain rice and sugar and perhaps mail; if all goes well, they will join us at Shey about November 10.

Yesterday I wrote letters to send off with Tukten, and the writing depressed me, stirring up longings, and worries about the children, and bringing me down from the mountain high.

The effort to find ordinary words for what I have seen in this extraordinary time seems to have dissipated a kind of power, and the loss of intensity is accompanied by loss of confidence and inner balance; my legs feel stiff and heavy, and I dread the narrow ledge around the west walls of Phoksumdo that we must follow for two miles or more tomorrow. This ledge is visible from Ring-mo, and even GS was taken aback by the first sight of it. “That’s not something you’d want to do every day,” he said. I also dread the snow in the high passes that might trap us in the treeless waste beyond. These fears just worsen matters, but there’s no sense pretending they are not there. It is one thing to climb remote mountains if one has done it all one’s life; it is quite another to begin in middle age. Not that forty-six is too old to start, but I doubt that I shall ever welcome ice faces and narrow ledges, treacherous log bridges across torrents, the threat of wind and blizzard; in high mountains, there is small room for mistake.

Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?—the dying, yes, especially in cold (hence the oppression brought by this north wind down off the glaciers, and by the cold choppiness on the cold lake), but not the state itself. And yet I cling—to what? What am I to make of these waves of timidity, this hope of continuity, when at other moments I feel free as the bharal on those heights, ready for wolf and snow and leopard alike? I must be careful, that is true, for I have young children with no mother, and much work to finish; but these aren’t honest reasons, past a point. Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to “win my life by losing it,” which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but non-attachment.

If given the chance to turn back, I would not take it. Therefore the decision to go ahead is my own responsibility, to be accepted with a whole heart. Or so I write here, in faint hope that the words may give me courage.

I walk down around the ridge to where the torrent falls into the Suli. Beneath evergreens and silver birch, ripples flow along the pale gray rocks, and a wren and a brown dipper come and go where water is pouring into water.

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