Living in Ladakh: Erebuni

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Erebuni

Hacob, myself, cousin Anna, statue below Erebuni

My host family and I went to visit family in Erebuni, which was the ancient capital of Armenia, two thousand eight hundred years old, sitting atop a hill in what is now Southeastern Yerevan. From his castle there King Argishti could survey his kingdom and the surrounding hills in case of an invasion.

Today the walls of the apparently ancient fortress have been built up and capped with cement, which as to what is new and what is old. In one section of the fortress there were some clearly very old stones, the remains of the king's pre-Christian church, with ancient Armenian writing, a script of triangles and lines, on its stones. This was the writing used in the kingdom of Armenia before Mesrob Mastots gathered and compiled the letters of the current Armenian alphabet in the early fifth century C.E.

one of the old chambers of the fortress

the King's sigil

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Living in Ladakh

Ladakhis: village-rooted people of a portion of the vast Himalaya, who have raised families and built soil for thousands of years on glacial melt, in a land where each year only four inches of water fall from the sky. Most Ladakhis are Tibetan Buddhist or Muslim. Paved roads have been built only in the last fifty years, and the passes still close for about six months each winter. The sun is hot, and the nights are cold. Roasted barley flour, wheat bread, vegetables, noodle soup, butter tea, meat, and apricots are standard fare.

Caitlin & Jason: we are white middle class US citizens who recognize the disastrous folly of American economic imperialism and feel great joy in working with people of real resilient cultures still deeply rooted in land. We feel deep desire to know the plants and to learn how to draw food, shelter, and clothing directly from the land. Even while we seek nourishing ways of living, we participate in and benefit from systems of white supremacy in the United States and abroad, and we seek to challenge those unjust systems and dismantle them in every way we can. We come to Ladakh to live and work and learn language and song with a highly skillful community of farmers and a web of youth and educators centered around SECMOL. We feel like family here, and we find in our relationships with the people of Tar a great source of inspiration. We are always reexamining how our lives interweave between here and the lands and people where we were born and raised in occupied chkuwabonakik, "the land where the sun's rays first look our way," in Maine in northern New England.

We long for a lived understanding of humans as part of the natural world, reciprocal, responsible, and striving for justice while cognizant of past and present lived understandings of racism and injustice. We see practices of meditation and mindfulness as central tools for bringing about meaningful, long-lasting change in the world. We love simple good food, the exquisite beauty we find each day in observing other living beings, music, and making our own tools, clothes, and gear. We strive to live mindful of our ancestors, awake to the reality of what we do today, and mindful of the consequences of our actions on lives of many generations to come.

Living in Ladakh

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Erebuni

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