She is touching me! Excitement awe dread and adoration surge, as when Kailas first seen in a photo took my heart, like many another drawn to it. Burnt out by psychiatry practice, already open to the East, I’m travelling for healing refreshment and transformation.
Tibetans’ renowned spirituality is clearly from their surroundings, from dwarfing majesty,
from daunting climate, from isolation, self reliance and by travelling light in sky-blue emptiness, to Buddhists the very nature of mind itself.
Halfway into space, close to the stars, breath is scarce and thin. Outmoded feelings are clear on laboured air. Void draws out the heart. Austerity refines. Great teachers, Buddha Millarepa and Padmasambaba got enlightened not by ashram practice but on the way.
With every whirlwind, wraiths prowl the land. Scores of twisters cross shimmering lakes together. Columns of vapour, radiant white and sparkling with ice crystals, rise to divide like angels’ wings. Walking on water then taking flight, they ascend into the heavens.
Buff figures of dust twist across the ground bowing and curtseying exaggerated farewells. Others hang low, jagged as the ranges but moving. They move like spirits, like spirits waywardly, of their own will. They’re free, wild dangerous, capricious – as Pan himself.
Nor need we give them angelic demonic or human form. My spirit leaps to greet them as they are. I’ve trespassed onto a heartland of the Earth; intruded into this secret sacred, rightly long-forbidden place, as it now storms my heart.
