Bhaktapur. Kathmandu. Lamjung. Shermatang. Lean closer. Can you hear the soul of Nepal? It whispers. Cries. Prays: Our heart lies buried in the rubble, in stones turned to sand. Oh, humanity, come to our time of fire! Lift every stone. Lay your hands upon our valley. Dig with us. Dig as we retrieve our country. Our dal bhat of memories that have always filled our bellies and strengthened our resolve. Dig, as we retrieve our families. Our stories now loose in the Himalayan wind. When the ground shook, it took. Our breath. Our floor. Our ceiling. Now the sky is everywhere it is not supposed to be. Where have our rooftops gone? Even mighty Everest has sloughed its skin. In the dust, we search for kin. For friend. For then. The way it was. Now, our mothers cry sacred lakes of tears. Fathers wield their hurt in spears that have no landing place. What is this blistering of our souls? In the holiness of our bones we ask, who will rebuild our temples? Our shrines? Our holy places? The gardens where we gathered? Now we hear our valley whisper through the dust: Grace will bring up what has been laid low. Sure as the silence of the leopard stalking in snow. But we are frightened. Where is Shanti, our willow of Peace? What will become of our Samjhana, our tribal memory? The world is upside down. Reality unzipped itself, surrendered its tectonic shelf. Our dud chia has soured, become butter tea. Strange fruit hangs from the banyan tree. Gather. That’s what we must do. What we must be. Gather in tea houses. In streets and fields. On glacier tongues and river sheets. Earth has opened, pouring us into each other. Now we are, in this seasoning of our grief, a great ladle of Tibetan stew. We Namasté on the same ground that swallowed us. We bow down to what has fallen down. Look up at what will make us rise again. We are splinters dreaming of being a tree. A valley whistling bansuri flute song, harvesting wind. Wind Horse bucks and snorts and grazes, near. We smell its musk, and fathom: We again shall drink from the brook of Peace. We perform sky burial ten thousand times. Sky buries us in Mercy, fills with great flocks of prayer flags, migrating to our truest temples and shrines: the one beating of our Nepali heart. We will need time to sleep. We need pani, pure water, in this time of the great earth monsoon. Oh, Holiness, break through the rock and pull us into light! Sing us songs of safety. Cradle us through the night. Someone wake the pahelo sun, our children need their hope. Put the world back together. We want to walk on solid ground. Our valleys run with sorrow, and yet our children… our children expect to eat and drink and bathe and breathe tomorrow. They are the vines to which we must hold. Their gossamer eyes tell the sacredness of Hope. Of grace on the bellies of prayer wheels. Of grace on the lips of singing bowls. Ek. Dui. Tien. We begin our count from scratch again. Pokhara. Banepa. Gorkha. Lalitpur. Helambu. We breathe with you.
April 28, 2015
Jaiya John
SOULWATER.ORG
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