Lhasa, January 2007

“Toss away stuff you don’t need in the end, but keep what’s important and know who is your friend” – Phish

Has it really been since the end of October since I last wrote?! Wow. How the time flies!

To my defense I have been extremely busy the last few months. I became very ill, traveled to Sri Lanka and have been applying to graduate schools. Not to mention there’s been 4 major holidays that we had to celebrate American style!

Where to begin? See, this is what happens when I go so long in between writings…there’s so much to catch you up on I don’t know where to start. Well, I’ll start from the beginning and work my way to the present.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away there was a young Jedi by the name of JJ Sankwalker…

The last time we caught up with our young friend, he had just returned from the far western reaches of the Tibetan solar system – the planets of Guge and Kailash. It was an incredibly spiritual trip that touched him deeply in his ever growing center of light. This profound affect included a feeling of pure light expansion beyond his bodily borders, a feeling that his heart was larger than the universe, smaller than a quark and One with All. Using this inspiration, JJ returned to his temporary time and space station of Lhasa in the cosmic vessel that most refer to as the body. Traveling through time and space as the pilot of his own spaceship is a slow and sometimes time consuming process but one that JJ doesn’t mind and in fact appreciates the slowness as it gives room for mental wanderings, deeper appreciations of the space traveled and rare opportunity to connect with not only the local inhabitants (which are really just reflections of his Self) but to connect with the local Source. To put two naked feet and two naked hands and one naked heart on the dirt and breathe in the energy that is that Place, that Space. Every sentient being is an axis of time and space, a meeting of conscious energy and the x/y grid of the universal latitude and longitude. Think of it this way, your birthday is the X axis of Time and the place you were born (hospital, home, back of a cab) is the Y axis of Space. So in reality we are all just points on the matrix of the universe. So in the future, instead of asking what’s your sign? Ask what are your grid points? Sounds unromantic doesn’t it? Maybe but many times, reality is much more romantic than imagination. I guess it just depends on how you ‘see’ your world, your self, and your travels.

I was talking to a Tibetan friend yesterday. He told me that many people we hang out with are envious of my ability to travel wherever I want, whenever I want. For many here, it is virtually impossible to get a passport because it the process is profoundly complex and never the same for any two people or it is prohibitively expensive. So in essence many here are prisoners of the system. Even if they had the money or time or desire to leave, they couldn’t. Without a passport crossing borders is illegal. Personally, I’ve come to look at my passport as my ticket to experience. It is probably one of my most precious and priceless possessions. Speaking with my friend, I am once again reminded that travel is a privilege, not a right. The whole conversation was about privilege really. Here I am, born a white male from America. Besides a few misplaced prejudices about being selfish or egotistical or violent (which I think I work hard to overcome), there are really no social or cultural barriers in my way to accomplishment. Right? I’m not a woman and all the inherent stereotypes and glass barriers that come with the heavy burden of sex. I’m not black or yellow or red or green and all the inherent stereotypes and stigmas that come with the unavoidable witness of skin color. I am not Hispanic, Tibetan, Native American or born to some wild ‘uncivilized’ tribe in the rainforest and all the social discriminations and marginalization or cultural taboos that come with being born still deeply connected to the Mother. Ever since the fable of Adam and Eve came out a few thousand years ago, the male has been in power and given ever privilege possible. Gee, I wonder why the patriarchs of that time thought it time to change the predominant myth. Anyway, as a white American male is there anything that is not in my potential? (Besides childbirth of course – a gift I am happy to not have this life…ouch!) No, I don’t think so. Besides the ones I close myself, ignore to see or refuse to open, there are very, very few doors closed to me. In fact, in the last couple years my only real major crises were because I had too many options.

However, as I told my friend last night, with this heavy burden of advantage comes a necessary counter balance weight of responsibility. Exactly because I was born in this time, space, body and ability, I feel the absolute necessity to use these implied rights to help others with fewer options than I. How could I sit on my ass and just cruise through this ‘easy’ life? How can anyone born to similar situations for that matter? I feel it is my (and everyone’s) duty to utilize this precious life, this precious opportunity to create precious life and precious opportunity for others. Sure it would be easy to coast through this life on auto-pilot, allowing life to pass me by as I watch TV, play video games or drug myself seeking escape. But what’s the point in that?! This planet is too crowded as it is for so many of us to be wasting such priceless time and space. If you don’t like your life, change it or get out of the way. This might sound harsh and it is, but I am tired of people wasting their potential. My mom and dad really drilled it into me from the time I was young and for the longest time I absolutely hated that word: potential. But to be honest I think it is one of the most important words in spoken language. When we are born we are born into a certain potential reality. We have our sex, our ethnicity, our family, our genetic cards dealt to us and we’re supposed to over the years build a strong hand with the cards given. Sometimes we can trade our cards in for better ones, sometimes we trade our cards in for worse ones, and sometimes we even pass when it comes our turn to play. Yeah, playing cards is risky. There’s a lot that can go wrong, a lot that can go right. But if you don’t risk anything then you don’t gain anything either.

So I’ve chosen to use my cards and play them. Hell if I’m going to sit back and watch others play when I have a perfectly good deck in front of me! Thus I feel that where I am and what I do, whenever I look in the mirror, whenever I check the time or date, whenever I look around and see what’s around me – at all points, at all times, my life is exactly where it should be because I am the pilot of my space ship. And for whatever reasons (I think I saved the Pope in a previous life), I was born with a super duper ship that can really go anywhere it wants. And as a young Jedi, using the Force (or Source or Light or Center, whatever you want to call it) is as necessary to enrich the life as a good plate of garlic mashed potatoes or a raspberry mocha on a Sunday morning!

Yet again, I ramble…enjoying the ride so far? Where was I? Oh yes, talking about responsibility and potential. Some people don’t have a lot of potential. Sometimes it’s physical, sometimes it’s cultural, sometimes it’s self-restricted. Whatever the reason, if I have too much potential or more than I can use at any given time, why not try to share it with others? Maybe at some point I’ll need someone to remind me or share with me. There are some that think that humans are born selfish, that there is a selfish gene let’s say. Others would argue that there altruism or compassion is innate with being human. In more crude terms, are humans born sinners or saints? What do you think? Do you think we are a conglomeration of self-serving beings only looking for survival of the “I”? Or do you think we are a community of compassionate beings looking for a way to coexist harmoniously?

I have to be honest with you; there are many times I get lost in my own processes. I think that you, the reader, has been given a rare glimpse into my mind and heart. Many times I am working things out with you, in front of you. I never sit down know what will come out when I write these things. Sometimes it is a duly recorded witness of history, sometimes it is a complete random collection of mental wanderings (which seems to be the case this time – lucky you, eh?).

I guess I should catch you up with the happenings since I’ve been away. Basically when I got back from the Kailash trip I got really, really sick with a strong lung infection. Just in time to welcome Leigh’s best friend, Deb, to Tibet. Sorry Deb! The only time I can remember being that sick was when I was 15 or 16 and I caught pneumonia and bronchitis at the same time. I was REALLY sick then and ended up in bed for over 3 weeks and lots like 20 pounds. It was horrible. This was not quite that bad, but it was rough and looooooong. I was sick basically the whole month of November and the first half of December. In fact it took my trip to Sri Lanka and the warm humidity and oxygen-saturated sea level breathing to fully recover. I took antibiotics, drank teas, took heavy drugs…nothing worked. Some of it helped but none of it kicked it out. I coughed so hard and so much that I ended up either bruising a rib, cracking a rib or just seriously pulling my rib cage muscles so badly that even 4 weeks after being cured of the infection, my cage is still sore at certain times. Crazy stuff. I shouldn’t be too surprised about getting sick though. Tibet and Lhasa especially is dusty and unfortunately a lot of that dust has human and animal excrement, human spit and construction materials carried along with it. Tibetans (and Chinese) spit and hock and shoot loogies more than any Georgia farm boy I’ve ever known. When you walk down the street anywhere in Lhasa you have to watch where you step. Green slime is everywhere. It’s gross. And I am also quite surprised at the openness and non-chalantness (sp?) of people pissing and shitting in the streets. The shitting is mostly the kids and dogs but on any given day I’ll see at least 5-10 men pissing on a wall or down a sewer drain…RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN! It’s like walking down Peachtree Street and seeing some business man whip it out and start urinating right on the Hard Rock Café’s walls…it’s gross and very unsanitary. On top of that, everyone gets sick and when you get sick it takes a long, long time to get better. So everyone is getting everyone sick and then everyone is staying sick. Winter here is one big walking sanitarium of coughing, hacking patients. Thus the end of October, including Hallow’s Eve and the Day of the Dead and pretty much all of November through Thanksgiving was not much fun for me.

We pretty much skipped Halloween though there were quite a few kids running around with masks on, but that’s not really that out of the ordinary. Thanksgiving, however, was another story…we blew it out for Thanksgiving! It was incredible. And I don’t think it would have happened without the encouragement, enthusiasm and coordination of our friend Deb who was in town during that time. She has amazing energy and can really inspire people to live into their potential, which is something I really admire in her and try to emulate. For Thanksgiving we asked the Gorkha (the hotel we stay in) if we could use their kitchen to make our feast, which they agreed to. So Leigh, Deb, Reid and I spent most of the day in the kitchen making the food for the night’s dinner. Reid works for Insider’s Guide to Beijing guidebook company and he and his comrades, Gabe and Simon, were in Lhasa for a couple weeks to work on a Insider’s Guide to Lhasa, which Leigh and I contributed to heavily. It will hopefully be printed in March. Leigh and I both wrote some articles and I sent in quite a few photos, so we’ll see what happens with all that. Could be cool. Anyway, we spent most of the day in the kitchen whipping up all kinds of stuff (of course dependant on the availability of local goods). As there were no turkeys, we had to make do with chickens. But it didn’t matter. We produced a feast! We had roasted chickens, garlic mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, carrot-orange soup, rice, ginger soy oyster mushrooms & broccoli, roasted root vegetables, apple-cranberry crisp, banana bread, warm and iced teas, wine and beer. We had the whole restaurant to ourselves and filled it with friends – both local and foreigner. There were over 25 people there and we all had a great, great time. After dinner we went around in a circle and gave thanks for the things this year and it some of the things said were very touching. It was a rare occasion where people felt comfortable speaking their hearts in public. All in all, it was one of the most memorable Thanksgiving meals I’ve ever had - a real cross-cultural night of sharing, connecting and gratitude for life’s little gifts.

Just a little after Thanksgiving, I accompanied a couple foreign friends to help them work on a mini documentary on the Tibetan ‘river folk’. This includes the fishermen and the ferry people. The documentary makers want to focus on how because of paved roads, bridges and the influx of Chinese fishermen have had a dramatic and mostly negative impact on the river folks’ lives. Our first visit was to a Tibetan fishing village to the west of Lhasa. Culturally it is pretty taboo to be a fisherman if you are Tibetan. The reason being is that karmic-ly it is very bad to kill one sentient being to feed one human. So chickens, fish, rabbits and similar small animals that can only feed one or two people at a time are not to be hunted, fished or killed for consumption. But an animal like a yak or a cow or deer, which can feed several people for many, many days at a time, is acceptable. I guess the logic here is that if you must take a life, which brings with it bad karma, might as well have a big bang for the buck, right? So to be a Tibetan fisherman is to be a social outcast or enigma. When we asked the people living in this village how they can be fishermen (without being so blunt), we were told an incredible story….

A long, long time ago, in the time of Guru Rimpoche, a very important Tibetan Buddhist master who lived in the 7th century, the Kyi Chu River (which runs through Lhasa) had so many fish in it that they blocked the water current like a dam. Guru Rimpoche, seeing this was very bad decided that he should give all the fish wings so they could fly into the sky and leave the river. He could give fish wings because he was Guru Rimpoche of course. But because there were so many fish and now they all had wings, they flew up into the sky and blocked the sun like cloud-cover. Then seeing this disaster, Guru Rimpoche chose three Tibetan brothers and told them to establish three fishing villages and gave them sanction to fish in the river. And of course after that, the river flowed properly and the sun shone strongly (and there was singing and dancing throughout the land). And these three fishing villages were given ‘official’ permission by one of the great Buddhist masters to do what they do. So they do not feel any problems with what they do because of how they began. What a great creation story!

I’ve got another creation story while I’m on the subject. It tells us how the yak came to be. A long, long time ago (has to be to be a creation story right?), there were two buffalo brothers living in India. One day a trader came by to ask if one of them would help him take some rice up to Tibet to trade for salt. One of the brothers agreed. Hearing that is was very, very cold in Tibet, he asked to borrow all his brother’s hair to keep him warm. His brother agreed and gave him all his hair. Then the brother went up to Tibet for the salt trade. When he got there, he saw how green the grass was, how blue the sky was and how beautiful the mountains were. He wrote a letter to his brother in India telling him he as staying forever. That is why the buffalo in India has no hair and the buffalo in Tibet has a lot. That is also how the yak came to be in Tibet.

Pretty cool, huh? I love creation stories….

I was talking about Tibetan fishermen. We stayed in their village most of the day and filmed them fishing, laying their nets and making what is basically fish ceviche Tibetan style. They take the still wriggling fish and on a big wooden block chop the beheaded and de-finned fish, rest of the bones and all, into a sort of mash. They add radish, onions and salt to the mix and this is the filling for the very rare and very interesting steamed fish momos they served us for lunch. If it wasn’t for the bones, they might have been pretty good. They also take the fish mash and add chili river water broth to it and eat that straight up, no cooking! A raw, spicy fish soup. No way was I trying that, seeing what floats around in the river, so I can’t tell you how it was. They all seemed to love it, though. The boats they use are made from wood and yak skin. It takes 4-5 yak skins and about 3 days to make one boat. They use yak hoof glue to seal it. They are beautiful creations if not very light or navigable. Crude but effective, Tibetan traditional boats are becoming more and more rare. For example, because of over fishing (mostly by the Chinese according to this village), there are now only two fishing villages, not three.

Oh! I almost forgot…Leigh’s birthday! That was fun.

This brings us to my trip to Sri Lanka. I was commissioned by CARE USA for 12 days to travel to Sri Lanka and cover the 2 year anniversary rehabilitation/reconstruction programs they have there. On the way I had a nice 1 ½ day layover in Bangkok to pick up my Sri Lanka visa. I used the time to rest, eat sushi and Thai food, take naps, enjoy hot tubs and saunas, speak English, watch CNN and ESPN and generally just indulge myself in carnal pleasures denied to me in Tibet. The commission was pretty straightforward – document the rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts as they stand 2 years later. These stories and images would be used by CARE to give to the media and their donors to show what has been happening on the ground. As some of you know, there has been a lot of press about how much money the NGO’s got during this time. The American Red Cross got something like 1 billion dollars! Imagine…1 billion dollars in donations! That’s more than many countries national GNP for God’s sake! Don’t misunderstand me here. The outpouring of charity and support that happened after the tsunami in 2004 gave me deep hope for the future of mankind. Of course a lot things that have happened since then have again degraded that, but that’s not the point here. For example, when I was still working at CARE, I was phoned one day by the treasury department there who wanted me to come photograph the massive amounts of mail they were getting immediately after the disaster. I dutifully went up with my camera and started to take pictures of them sorting checks, letters, cash. While I was up there, they came across an envelope from an elementary school (I can’t remember where). Get this…the kids in one home room class collected all of their milk money for a week, put it all in a Ziploc bag and mailed it to CARE. And when I say milk money, I do mean nickels, dimes and quarters. And included was a hand written note from the class (in child’s scrawl to boot!) saying how much they want to help and maybe this little bit of money they sent can help the school children there. Wow. I still get goose bumps when I think of that. It’s still one of the most compassionate and awesomely innocent gestures I’ve ever seen!
My trip to Sri Lanka couldn’t have come at a better time too. I was still sick and still coughing badly. The weather was starting to turn really cold and windy and I was very afraid that I might be sick like this through the winter or even have to leave and seek warmer, lower climates to convalesce. Fortunately, this would help me keep my passion for humanitarian work going, get me out of Lhasa and Tibet for a needed break and give me a few extra dollars in my savings account. I was in country for roughly 11 days and saw virtually the entire southern half of the island country. Unfortunately, the north is off limits because of the recent flare up in the decades-long conflict that has ravaged this country. It was doubly unfortunate because a lot of the most affected areas from the tsunami are in the north, Batticola and Tricomalee in particular. And what’s most frustrating about the whole thing is that CARE (and the vast majority of other NGO’s working in Sri Lanka) has had to put a hold on all of their projects in these areas. So that means no houses being built, no schools being repaired, no wells being cleaned. It’s become stalled and there are still people living in tents without clean water to drink! Argh. Shit like this is just so stupid and childish. To let political ideology get in the way of basic human living. But Sri Lanka isn’t the only place this is happening – Iraq, Darfur, Burundi, Uganda – just to name a few. When will we learn? When will the idiocy stop?

Anyway, I teamed up with a writer that was in-country and we hit the road. We visited the southern state of Galle first. There we met with families who are now living in new homes provided by CARE. We talked with women headed households who have been able to earn a little bit more money from the help that CARE has given them in starting up their small businesses (mostly sewing and small shops in the home). We even visited one woman who got a small refrigerator from CARE so she can sell cold drinks in the summers. Talk about personal service! After spending a day and a half there, we continued our counter-clockwise loop of the island and stopped in Hambantota. There we again met with families that had lost everything, literally. When asked if they were able to salvage anything, photos, cooking pots, clothes, anything, the inevitable reply was “Nothing”. Can you imagine? It is just so hard to fathom the absolute complete destruction that occurred. To be peacefully going about your day, washing clothes, chopping wood, walking to school, when WHAM! There’s a 12 foot wall of water rushing towards you, sweeping away houses, trees and your neighbors, sometimes even your family. Gone…poof! In an instant, everything you’ve ever known, people you’ve grown up with, married to, gave birth to….gone. It was really mind numbing. Not to mention the absolutely incredible power of Mother Earth. The trip really reminded me of two things - that every single breath is a gift, every sunrise a blessing, every meal a treat; and you should tell the people you love how you feel as much as you possibly can because you never know when you or they might be taken away. In Hambantota, we spent a half day with some fishermen who of course lost everything. CARE gave them fishing nets to help them get back on their feet. That was a fun rainy morning on the beach.

Oh man, the rain there was incredible. Torrential at times. And the thunderstorms that would roll in with the ear splitting cracks and tremendous light shows was such a nice reminder of those Georgia summer storms that I would sit awake at night and listen to as they rolled over me. I haven’t seen rain in Tibet since August. It hasn’t rained in months! And it’s only snowed of any significance once in October. This place we live in is D-R-Y. Crazy desert dry. It’s quite amazing. So to enjoy daily downpours and nature’s nightly fireworks in Sri Lanka was a special spiritual treat that I will not soon forget.

After a couple days in Hambantota, we moved north to Ampara where we spent the last few days of our visit. Again, there was much of the same – new housing, small business assistance. On the way back to the capital, Colombo, we stopped in the middle of the island in the ancient capital of Kandy. There we stayed in a nice colonial-era hotel right next to Kandy’s most famous attraction, the Temple of the Buddha’s Tooth. I visited in the morning before we left for Colombo, but after standing in line for an hour with all the other pilgrims and finally getting my look into the shrine room, there wasn’t any tooth! There was a medium sized ornately decorated golden stupa that apparently housed the sacred relic. It was a beautiful temple complex, with rich, thick jungle all around. It was a nice contrast to the Tibetan monastic temple complexes. It felt lighter and more relaxed but there definitely weren’t as many murals, detailed paintings, devout pilgrims or mystically chanting monks either. After my brief homage to the Tooth, it was back to the hotel, back in the car (I think we spent more than half our time driving while on this trip – but that’s not that different from any other NGO assignment) and then back to Colombo. A little shopping, a lot of eating, some wandering, some reflections on the trip and a lot of CNN, ESPN and HBO and I was back on the plane for the glorious and all powerful Motherland!

All I can say to you right now is this – you have NO IDEA how fucked up it is here. The things I hear and the things I see (but cannot tell you about here) make me thankful that I have the US to come back to (and for those of you who have to listen to my daily bitch sessions about living in America know the strength of this statement!).

After my recuperating trip to Sri Lanka, I came back to Tibet rested, well fed and healed. Just in time for Christmas too. I arrived in Lhasa on the Christmas Eve morning so there wasn’t much time to enjoy any build up to the festivities. Not that there was much mind you, though there is a surprising amount of Xmas decorations in the windows, doors and in hotels and shops. Amusingly, not many people here really understand the true religious significance of the day and some even told me “Happy New Year” on Christmas Day! People here just know that it is one of the biggest holidays in the Western world and they like any excuse to celebrate something. As China is moving more and more towards a free-market socialist system (I think, never easy to tell what China’s officially doing really), I think that the encouragement to shop and spend and give things to others has been increased. It seems that there are only a few things to do where with your free time – play cards, play pool, go dancing, drink beer, watch TV and shop. Sounds like of like the US, no? I see more similarities than I care to think about. I mean here is yet another super power gobbling up all the world’s energy and money, pushing brain-washing passive consumerism on their population and making the same social and environmental mistakes that all of the other present and past super powers have made and are currently trying to correct! Apparently nobody has learned anything from past mistakes and is just doomed to repeat them on greater and greater scales! Much to the detriment of the global community. *sigh*

Anyway, Xmas was very low key but unique this year with just Leigh and me to share it with each other. She was very sweet and made a little decoration in our living room with tinsel and some sort of lotus flower paper cut out with a well wish for a ‘Happy Yule Solstice Hanukah Christmas Day!’ message on it and below it were a few little wrapped gifts and some stuffed Tibetan wool socks that if you squinted (and put your eyes out of focus) almost looked like Xmas stockings! It was really nice. We spent most of the day catching up and thinking about the ironic balance we were feeling between not having to take part in the obscene American Xmas scene with all it’s accompanying nauseating music in any public venue you go from T-day till New Year’s; the seeming ritualistic gorging on food that occurs at anyone’s house you visit (at this time last year Leigh and I both were the fattest we’ve ever been); and the social compulsion to buy shit to give to others to symbolize how much you love them, etc; and the other side of missing our families (well, me mostly – this was my first Xmas away from family and I did get a little teary when I saw my first Xmas tree here). And to think that present giving wasn’t a part of Xmas until the 1940’s and 50’s. Hmmmm, isn’t that when America became a real consumer society anyway? Coincidence? Yeah, right. But at the same time it was really nice to just have Leigh there. She is MY family now. She and I will soon establish our own clan with our own convoluted and complex sets of intermixing cultural and religious traditions. And it was a nice first holiday season with her. In the morning we exchanged our gifts, one of which was Leigh making us some incredible cinnamon rolls from scratch! And all we have is a little counter-top toaster oven! They were delicious and most welcomed. During the warm and sunny day that followed, we walked around and photographed all the weird collections of decorations and had Nepali food for lunch. Then following one of her Xmas traditions we went to the movies that afternoon (remember, she grew up Jewish!). Then that night we went to the Nangma clubs to catch the Xmas show done Tibetan style. It was great! Dancers flying through the air. Cheesy Chinese pop ballads sung with the whole crowd dancing on stage with the singer. Over the top Tibetan ‘dress’ for the performers. I can’t really describe it well because there is nothing that translates in American culture. The closest thing might be karaoke but that doesn’t do it justice. I guess it’s like Tibetan Bollywood….sort of. For those of you few folks who have seen a Nangma, you know the joy and fascination. For those of you who haven’t, you really should experience it. All in all, it was a nice, relaxed and definitely most unique holiday.

That basically brings us up to New Year’s which was enjoyable as well. Leigh and I gathered up with a few Tibetan, Chinese and foreign friends for the evening. Again, like Christmas, Tibetans are just looking for any excuse to celebrate and have a party! Even though their New Year’s isn’t until the 18^th of February, they still want to go out and celebrate ours too. It’s great. So our team of 6 or 7 folks head out and start the evening with a grand feast of traditional Tibetan foods at one of the better restaurants in town. We had sha katsapo (spicy yak meat), drolma dretse(mini sweet potatoes with butter and sugar in rice), pak tsa margu (sweet dumpling with cheese and brown sugar), logo momo (steamed bread), atsara (spicy tomatoe meat dipping sauce), shokgo katsa (curried potatoes), and pu cha (butter tea). We also had roasted lamb ribs, sautéed spinach with garlic and ginger and of course the obligatory Lhasa beers (which is brewed right here in Lhasa). It’s no 420 or Fat Tire or Duvel’s, but you can drink a lot of it and still make complete sentences. After a delicious and relaxed dinner we headed out to the new club in town – Tang Club. This club has only just opened and it is to rival Babi La (see earlier blog, April I think, for Babi La descriptions). Babi La has recently been rumored to discriminate against Tibetan patrons and taxi drivers. With the Tibetan patrons they are requiring a drink minimum, something like 400 kuai (or $50 US), which is a LOT of money for most. With the Tibetan taxi drivers, the management isn’t even letting them stop there for fares….only Chinese taxi drivers are allowed to pick up departing guests. On top of all that, there have also been rumors of people getting drugged through someone slipping some kind of narcotic into their drinks and then taking their purse or wallet, etc. The way our friends were describing the effects, it sounded a lot like ecstasy. Not that I would know anything about that drug, mind you….Anyway, Tang Club is apparently much more Tibetan friendly and we have discovered plays much better music. In one 15 minute extravaganza the DJ’s played Depeche Mode > Prince > Michael Jackson > Madonna > Donna Summer! That was a sweat and fun 15 minutes. Whew! Unfortunately it is much more crowded and smoky, too. After finally finding a table (there were about 10 of us crowded around a small cocktail table), we ordered drinks, danced and screamed into each others’ ears in three different languages until shortly after midnight. After doing the countdown and kissing my wife the traditional New Year’s welcome, Leigh and I split for home. Tired, smoky and feeling a bit overwhelmed, we sought the refuge of our little palace here in the Gorka.

It was quite amusing to us to know that we were later waking up as most people we knew back in the States were going out. There’s a 13 hours difference now without daylight savings so we were getting out of bed on the 1^st about 9:30 pm of the 31^st for most of y’all.

As some of you may know, the last few weeks of my life have really been occupied with applying to graduate schools. I am applying to 6 different graduate schools for a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography. They are (in some order of preference) – Pacific Northwest College of Arts in Portland, University of Arizona in Tucson, University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Washington State University in Pullman, Arizona State University in Tempe and University in Washington in Seattle. It has been exhausting! For every school you have to have some many things put together and it seems that every school wants it a slightly different way. Oye! There are really 4 major things that took most of my time pulling together – the portfolio (still not satisfied – how can they ‘know’ an applicant with only 20 images!), the letter of intent (actually pretty proud of this and if anyone would like to read it, let me know and I’ll be happy send), the letters of recommendation (bless you Valenda, Don and Maggie!) and the official transcripts (which are the most royal pain in the ass!). So basically from December until now I have spent the better part of my mornings preparing to send all this stuff off. The first three have been sent, fingers crossed. The next three are being sent as I write this, fingers crossed.

I have very mixed emotions about graduate school. For one I have witnessed what it has done to my poor wife. She thinks it was marrying me that gave her all those gray hairs? HAHA! It’s that ‘other boyfriend’ Emory University that has, I know it. I’ve also always kind of thought that academia is a self serving entity, in the sense that if there weren’t any academics there wouldn’t be any academia and vice versa. Sometimes I can get very frustrated with the self importance that some in academics gives themselves. You see, I have always wanted form over fashion, function over decoration, so sometimes I have to ask myself “What exactly is a Master’s a PhD or even a Bachelor’s good for if you don’t even know how to change a car tire or grow a head of broccoli?” Thus there is a part of me that is very reluctant to enter into and support this world. Granted, I will not be trying to decipher the meaning of String Theory or trying to conceptualize an interpretation of Emptiness, but there is still some part of me that feels ‘real world’ education and experience is more important and more applicable to living a better and fuller life than ‘school’ education. However, there is another part of me that really wants to dive back into my own art and creative ideas and wants to seek a mentor or mentors who will help me rediscover my visual imagination. I have felt somewhat creatively stagnant and unsatisfied with what I’ve been doing recently with my documentary work and some part of me believes that I could find more fulfillment with getting back to my artwork. I still want to maintain a focus on raising consciousness about important (to me at least) contemporary issues. I definitely do not want to become one of those ‘artists’ who glorify themselves or only produce ‘pretty’ work. I have to feel my work tackles great issues like poverty, conflict and environmental degradation. There’s also the thought that after a MFA I may want to get into something slightly different like running my own gallery or possibly being a curator in a museum or getting into teaching on the high school or college level. I just don’t know so I felt it would be better to have the option of going (that is if anyone accepts me) than not. So I’ve applied and in a couple months, I hope to hear some good news. Desert or rainforest, either offers their own magic. But sorry East Coast, I just have to live somewhere else for awhile.

I leave you with a final thought….

What are we without adversity? How can we evolve as a person, as a human community, without struggle? Challenge is the catalyst for our development and as such should be welcomed. It is a mirror reflecting who we are in the moment, a vital and necessary crossroads in our progression from diapers to dad, and a snapshot reminder of who we were before in comparison. Life is suffering. Life is full of adversity, confusion, doubt. Everyone that has ever lived, or possibly will ever live, faces much of the same that we do now. What makes you you and me me and each of us our own unique beautiful souls is how we handle each day, how we face each moment – be it joyous or painful, and what we do with the shit that runs into our lives (or sometimes created by ourselves). Life is making us stronger all the time is seems to be knocking us down…..

PS…They absolutely LOVE the beard here, especially the Muslims….people have even started calling me “Honorable Beard” in Tibetan! HAHAHAHAHA!