Carrying Lut in Takhmachik

Our first day in Takhmachik we cleaned out three rooms of manure and moved it all by basket down to a pile in the road.  From there it went by truck and by donkey along the road and paths to the fields.  The baskets are simple to carry and to adjust, held by one strap across shoulders and upper chest.  To empty it you hold the bottom, bend forward, and make a toss over the shoulder into the pile.

Tashi, our host and friend from SECMOL, said that ten years ago their rooms were filled to brimming and they had many more animals; now the rooms are only about two feet deep.  At first I carried "lut" with about ten other people, mostly middle-aged or old ladies, two men, Nyilza, and Tashi.  ("Nyilza Angmo" is a suitable Ladakhi name Caitlin was given at SECMOL.  I am called "Phuntsok Dorje."  We introduce ourselves often with both our regular and Ladakhi names, and people gladly use only the Ladakhi ones.)

When I stopped to adjust my basket strap and get more comfortable, someone would say in passing "Chi wa?" or "What gives?"  Then on one trip back to the room I noticed Tashi was breathing hard.  So I helped shovel for a while, and fill people's baskets.  I was tentative at first, not shoveling hard, not knowing how much to load up these old ladies.  But they are tough in a humbling way, and one of them stopped me and showed me how to shovel, picking up a heaping scoop and speaking words I couldn't understand.  So I started working and breathing hard, loading them fast, not letting old ladies wait with a load on their backs.  It was our first day and I felt energy surging through me, wanting to rise to the challenge of these tough, amazing people.  When Tashi's dad came in one time, Tashi filled his basket faster than I've ever seen.  Later, Tashi told me to tip, not dump, the manure in, so it's easier on people.

These women, forty, fifty, sixty years old, are carrying forty pounds of manure up and down steep slopes and staircases two hundred yards at a time.  Singing mantras in soft voices, braids double and tied together at their lower backs, washing together afterward with soap and a bit of water from an old Indian mustard oil tin in the cow yard.

Arrival in Takhmachik Village

Night arrival, walk up slope, stone walls rising
higher, stars bright, "sang-sang" they say.

We are in a belly.  We ducked and climbed in
the stone alley stairs, up and around, hands on bricks of a castle.

Shovels full of "Lut", manure dug out with a pick,
the tiniest sheep, prayer flags spraying from its collar.

Desert scape spreads beyond the village edge.  Purple slopes,
white peaks, layers of rock and sand towering over the Indus.

Red Willow Baskets, the Lives of Young People

The red willow hedges last season grew thin leaders straight up.  We trim them and they are perfect for basket-making.  Caitlin and I start by making hoops and wrapping them with spiralling weavers until they are strong and can accept many tied-off ends between their parted strands.  Soon there is a handle and a belly.  The weavers mirror each other, over-under, and we wrap the edge and handle tight and neat.  The willow strand glow in the light, deep red and shining yellow like the desert sands.

The word for basket in Ladakhi is “tse po.”  We made a few as gifts.  Then there was a youth camp at SECMOL, and ten or twelve of the young women on campus joined us to weave gnarly little willow hoops.  Then we showed them how to lash and weave, and most of them left a few days later with a small completed basket.  Some of them loved it, and asked at every opportunity for us to help them weave.

“Chang ma” is the name for willow.  And they seem to grow everywhere people live in Ladakh, so these students should have a chance to make more baskets, if they want.

Basket weaving seems to be a new skill for these young people.  I don’t think that would be true if we were here twenty years ago.  At that time I imagine young people learned more of the old ways.  It was a time when Ladakh was being flooded with new products and new jobs.  If you could speak English or if you made it through school they would give you a stable government job with good pay, benefits, and a pension.  The parent generation these days seem to think we are still in that time, but we’re not.

Young people these days are sent to urban centers.  They help at home and learn farming only a few weeks of the year.  Textbooks and exams are written far away by people who know little about Ladakh, and most of the young Ladakhis are failing them.  The teachers in the government school by and large don’t want to be there.  Many of them hit the students with sticks and pinch them as means of maintaining “control” of the classroom.  This apathy and abuse is part of the lived experience of many teenagers we have met here.

If you have a lot of money you can send your kid to a private school in the capital where they will learn a lot more, but they still aren’t learning the old ways and there still won’t be enough jobs for them afterward.  Many educated people “collect” masters degrees until the jobs they want open up, and it takes a long time.  People who don’t succeed in this system of education join the army or work construction to make money, and build cement buildings and roads and power lines, all of which the people of Ladakh did not “need” until quite recently.  Their old homes of earth brick are holding strong.

So who is farming?  Who is practicing the old ways?  Most families are, but the participation is a bit different than it used to be.  Growing staple grain crops with hand work is common practice.  Most families keep animals for milk and fiber and manure, and some keep many and live a herding life, especially at higher elevations.  Most families in the villages grow most of their vegetables, their fruit at lower elevations, and everywhere people harvest wild greens from cultivated fields and pastures for fresh use and drying.  

All the students here at Secmol can describe the basics of farming and the cycles of village life, but most have not really lived there since they were six.  Since then, they have learned, in their daily practice of life, to achieve academically in a setting where their success is determined by writing appropriate things on exams.  These exams are created in Jammu, a world away.  They have been graded in past years at a wage of 2 Indian Rupees per exam.  (This comes to approximately four cents.  It is clear that the graders are sometimes not even reading them.  Students in India have been known to staple money to their exam papers.  It is common knowledge at SECMOL that if you merely handwrite a copy of the Urdu language exam’s questions you will likely pass.)

These young people also learn that food fills the stores from far away, that loud pop music and smart phones and pre-packaged snacks are cheap, fun, and easy to come by.  And the voices of their ancestors pour from their mouths as they sing ancient songs, and they dance beautifully together with a confidence and grace that touches my heart to see.

Irrigation and the Ice Stupa

In the desert at the top of the world, people spread water and plant seeds.  From dry sand, sprouts and saplings grow.  

With all plant matter returning to the soil as manure, slowly organic matter and soil build.  Ancient stone wall edged terraces hold the soil in place.  With the first spring flooding and the plow each year, seeds are mixed in and the rich brown earth is revealed.

Barley, wheat, peas, vegetables, and fruit trees are essential plants for cyclical human survival here in this high desert of Ladakh.  They all depend upon spring and summer flows of snow- and glacier-fed melt water, brought to them by people.  In springtime it is so clear: the steep banks of the Indus river appear as dry sand and rock, then a human settlement appears and there is abundance: leaves bursting out, countless fragrant white orbs of apricot blossoms, grass growing, crop sprouts rising from soaked soil.  Irrigation canals channel water across even-sloped rubble valleys, around terraces, and across impossible slopes so that it can pour down and feed the soil.

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Snowfalls have decreased in Ladakh in recent years; glaciers are shrinking here as they are around the world.  These two things provide much of the irrigation water.

Many Ladakhi families today do not go hungry as they sometimes used to.  Now plastic-packaged snacks appear, even if people need to carry them an hour’s walk up a steep canyon to serve them for tea.  Eating imported staple foods from the lowlands of India has become a daily reality.  How these are grown, and what that means for people and land, is another story.  Punjabi rice farmers sometimes drink pesticides when they get worked out of business by harsh economics controlled by powerful seed companies.

The umbilicus that connects people to earth in this place is shrinking.  Yet in many places it is still strong.  When I ask people in Tar village if they would have enough to eat without imported rice, they say that they absolutely would, yes, without question.

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The Ice Stupa is an attempt to capture some of the winter stream flows in the village of Phyang, lock it up in great statues of ice, and delay its release until it is needed as air and soil warms for cultivation.  Phyang is not far outside the capital of Leh.  This winter’s project is a test case to discover effective techniques and assess how well this project could benefit communities all over the Himalayan desert.

It requires pipes, sprayers, pumps, a good winter water source, and a crew to work continuously assembling and maintaining this gear.  It also requires an initial input of machine power, to level a large area and create pools below it from which water can gravity feed into canals or drip irrigation further downslope.  This year, it also required a shipment of pipes from Jammu, which broke en route, followed by a supply of donated replacement pipes, 2.3 kilometers of them, which were airlifted over snowy passes by the Indian Air Force.

Workers, volunteers from SECMOL, start a stupa by piling branches around a central pipe.  The pipe stands vertically, about twelve feet tall, and sprays water into the air that then settles and freezes on the branches, forming icicles that grow into connected mounds of ice.  Now the main stupa is three stories tall and forty feet across, a lumpy cone shape.  It is solid enough to climb all over it.

In order to build size quickly, workers harvest and pile great limbs of thorn bushes onto the stupa.  Caitlin and I spent about seven days working with the crew, harvesting thorn branches, driving them to the site, dragging them up to the stupa, climbing and throwing them on.  These provide a lot more surface area for the water to freeze onto, and help us control the shape, too.  When the temperature dropped below freezing, the sprayers went on, and soon the fresh layer of thorns would become white, the branches and thorns fat and bulbous, icicles growing below them.

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The Ice Stupa is being built in the wide valley above Phyang village.  On one day in early March, the 1,000 families of Phyang village each brought five 8-10 foot cuttings of willow and poplar to the site.  On the next day, they all showed up again to hear speeches, watch traditional music and dance, and plant 5,000 trees in machine-dug trenches.  They did a very fast job and left a lot of earth work to be done, but they did plant 5,000 trees in one hour.  Having never seen it before, I am a bit sceptical that in this desert you can plant a cut green willow pole in the ground, water it, and expect it to grow.  But these people seem to know what they’re doing.

Phyang’s monastery of 80 monks is a major partner in the project, and asked this work of the people of Phyang as part of their annual tribute to the monastery.  They knew that this amount of tree cuttings and work time would not be a burden.  The monastery building is 450 years old and stands like a white and red walled fortress above the village, across the slope from the Ice Stupa.

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Can enough villages in Ladakh afford to feed a crew and airlift pipes and run a backhoe for weeks and summon the people power and money to accomplish something like this?  The people power seems abundant here, especially because people are invested in their communities, they still depend on farming and growing trees, and success in this sort of project could mean that in the future they have water when they need it.  

The money and equipment, who knows?  Forty years ago it might have been unimaginable.  Forty years ago, the first automobiles were brought to Ladakh.  Today, many people showed up in private cars, and drove home.  Today, thousands of soldiers of the Indian Army live in huge camps all through Leh valley as well as the border regions.  This is Leh valley, a “suburb” of the capital, and here at least some Ladakhis have been able to channel modern resources to the uses they see fit.

The Ice Stupa now sits above Phyang village, slowly melting in the April sun and turning slightly brown as the thorns are revealed.  How long will it last?

Masked Dance

The Dosmoche festival came in the latter half of February, on the last day of the old moon and the first of the new. We went with the students down the Indus valley to Likhir, for the masked dances at the monastery there. An hour on the bus west along the highway, past the confluence of the Indus and Zaskar Rivers, and through the large town of Nimmu: army encampments and electrical wires ran by the road as we traveled, giving way at intervals to desert, rock formations like eroding sculptures, and the sheer walls of the river gorge.

At Likhir we left the main road and climbed up a side-valley, old and new construction thickly together in the lower lands. Whitewashed houses with yaks or small shiny cars in the front yard alternated with concrete ones, roof trim painted in pastel acrylics, and red metal Airtel shopfronts, closed and locked. Terraces of willows and apricots rose at an incredible pitch on the other bank of the valley stream as we ascended from the outskirts of the town. An old farmhouse sat on the water’s edge just below the monastery, worn, well-kept, with faded red window frames and hay piled neatly along the edge of the roof. It was a world— entire, as it seemed to me— with neat fences and terraces, stables on the lowest level, a shovel leaning near the gatepost. Sufficient.

A parking lot had been built below the main monastery building, a forty-foot retaining wall keeping it from sliding down the cliffs to the fields below. We left the busses and walked up, taking off our shoes to enter the first of a number of temples.

I remembered these things from the last time I came to Ladakh: dim space, clean with the smell of juniper incense; elaborate, beautiful murals of the fierce protectors and their consorts, the bodhisattvas, and narratives of humans or devas I could not recognize; golden or gilt statues draped with white silk scarves (kataks), small rupee notes piled on dishes for offerings in front of them; dark red-painted pillars holding up the ceiling, the floor a similar color, worn smooth by devotees making prostration and centuries of passing feet. I felt grateful to enter the space as one of a stream of sincere comers. A young father in a puffed down jacket walked with his son at one hand and a string of prayer beads in the other, chanting mantra; an old woman in a goncha made prostrations near the door. We circumambulated slowly, each person moving individually but also a as a part of an unbroken flow of bodies, and of prayer.

On, through another temple where Dorje Vajrabhairava, the bull-headed fierce protector sat behind glass in a rear gallery, his face covered by a scarf. He was pictured on the left-and wall as well, not as Yama holding the Wheel of Life, but with his consort Vetali in embrace. A monk, agitated, spoke to me: “No ladies here!” He acknowledged my apology with a curt nod as I quickly left the gallery.

Outside enormous butter lamps in a glass case burned steadily, a pyramid of plastic bottles labelled refined soybean oil stacked outside (more half-full, inside among the lamps) from which they were continually filled. The offering of a butter lamp, I think, includes the morning milking, and the churning; in wintertime, the cutting and the drying of summer hay. I could not help but wonder about the fields (in the Punjab? In America?), the factory, and the landfill, all also present in the offering there.

Up—though it is difficult to speak clearly of above and below, the monastery a beautiful maze of stairs and narrow passageways connecting rooms and courts, ascending and descending in a complex tangle—to a broad roof, where a giant statue of Chamba (Maitreya) sat straight-backed in his chair. Recently I read something of him that has stayed with me: as the future Buddha, he is now one of the many beings wheeling in samsara. I had not thought of this before, Chamba’s image as a testament to the present, common possibility of enlightenment.

People circumambulated; a group of our students gathered for photographs (not with the statue, which felt at least a bit respectful) and we were pulled in. They were eating from large balls of firm dough made from sgampe, churpe, and chang (barley flour, yak cheese, and local beer); they offered more to us, pleased that we liked it.

Drums and horns began in the courtyard below and we went down for the dances. Standing first at the upper rail, we watched pairs of dancers come down the stairs from the monastery doors, every movement an act of full intention. They wore incredible robes, silk brocade with long triangular sleeves and silk banners down their backs from the crowns of their hats. The masks, too: fierce and fiercer horned monsters, antlered deer, others, many colors and expressions, teeth always bared. The smallest children would sometimes run out onto the court as the monks danced, risking being chased.

The oldest men and women lined the walls of the courtyard, cross-legged, respectable, wrapped in thick wool. Mani beads moved continuously through their hands, the motion breaking only, I think, for a grandchild to be pulled near. Closer to the dancers several rows of watchers sat on the flagstones, and we sat down next to three women in spectacular traditional dress. Each wore a goncha, and an up-curved, flat-topped Ladakhi hat (tibi) over two long grey braids bound together at the bottom. Two of the women had square shawls of sheepskin overlaid with silk over their backs, tied straight across their shoulders, as people carry baskets here. Lundup, in front of us, turned and told us that they were from Zanskar.

We managed a happy, broken conversation, learning where their villages were, speaking of wool. The woman nearest to me told me that she had three children, and asked me if I had any. We offered them some of our sweet dough; later, they gave us chapathis from the lunch that they had brought to share.

The dances climaxed in a stream of unmasked monks joining the spirits, spinning, circling, processing across to the cloister where the musicians sat. In one hand each held something that looked like an ornate iron knife. On the far side they received a set of cloths in each of the prayer flag colors before returning again, two by two.

The people dispersed quickly. On the road above the main temple men served rice and dal from giant pots, laughing, calling out for people to come.

After perhaps an hour the monks processed again, coming in a parade through the crowd, carrying a large plate of torma to which people added offerings of food or money. The oboe they played looked almost exactly like a European oboe, but decorated with flags; the smallest monks played the drums. The parade wound down to the terraced fields just below, where a pyre had been built. They placed the offerings inside the frame and set it alight, dancing again in a large circle while the fire burned quickly behind them.

The monastery sat not at the top of the village, but at the center. From where we stood I could see Likir continue up the valley, square whitewashed houses interspersed with the open spaces of fields and the grey haze of bare-armed Lombardy poplars. As the mountains drew in, the human dwelling seemed to grow more spacious, and gentler on the land. I find myself more eager all the time to be up a valley like this, somewhere.

Phey Monastery

Twenty tiny monks welcome us as we arrive each afternoon, standing together and chorusing “Good afternoooooon Sir, good afternooooooooooon Maaaam,” sitting only after we do. They wear maroon robes and many other things, old fleeces and sweatshirts (Gyatso’s is Chicago Bulls), scarves, hats, knit socks, all in shades of orange or red. Many have crocs, mostly pink, lined up neatly along the wall in the sunny hallway where we have class.

For the first hour Jason teaches second class and I, third. My boys pile against each other like puppies, sitting cross-legged on cushions on the floor; they memorize with incredible speed and ease, and love to sing. We were give no books or guidelines for these English classes we were asked to teach, and so we are making things up as we go.

On the second day I gave them a song about winter (to the tune of Frere Jacques) and by the third time through they knew the words—even the new ones— without looking. I feel curious, too, about their imaginations, and we have begun writing stories sometimes, though it is a challenge. Every day I ask them for words in Ladakhi, which they love giving nearly as much as songs. Last week I learned that one of Jason’s boys is a Rinpoche, the reincarnation of a high lama. His attention is mostly elsewhere during class, except when there is the chance to dance, or run in place, or spin, which he will do with his full heart. As all the boys will: these games are the best way I have found of teaching verbs.

In the second hour I work with four teenagers while Jason talks with Thubstan Lama, the monastery’s director. The older monks’ understanding of English is good, though they are shy and hesitant to speak; it is hard, hard work getting three of them to talk at all. Most classes we spend working through texts they choose, talking about grammar and vocabulary.

Recently I brought the Longman’s Student Atlas—maps of every country and continent, with pages about land use, water access, plate tectonics, climate—I asked them to look through, and write down questions that they had. For the next week, we had the most animated conversations of our time together yet. “How do people on the bottom of the earth stick to it? Why don’t they fall off?” “What made the Himalayas?” “How do islands stay in one place?” “What does it mean, a black hole?” And then, “what is an atom?” “Does the ocean really go up and down?” One day Sonam asked me, “Does earth go around the sun, or sun around the earth?” When I answered he looked at Tenzin, smirked, and clapped his hands—as Tibetan monks will do when making a point in philosophical debate.

Namgial had written, “There is not much snow falling in Ladakh. Why?” We talked about the rain shadow of the Himalayas, but then Sonam said, “But in past times there was very much snow in Ladakh. Now very little. Why is it?” I began telling them what scientists have learned of climate change, and the effects of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. After some time, Sonam looked at me with patent disbelief: “You mean that what people do in America, these places, affects weather? In Ladakh? This is possible?” He wrinkled his nose, not convinced.

After classes we drink tea with Thubstan Lama in the small kitchen, cement walls radiating cold. The monastery was built only eight or ten years ago; the newly constructed buildings have a hard, hollow feeling to me. I remember conversations in college about how spaces inform the lives lived within them. It continues to feel like an important question.

Most afternoons Thubstan Lama walks us half of the way home, so that he may keep practicing English. He was raised in Phey village, with no intention of becoming a monk. He took vows in his late teens, then studied in southern India for some years before returning. We talk about whatever comes presently to mind: the students’ progress, the Dalai Lama’s visit for the Kalachakra initiation, Hinayana, Mahayana, and Tantric vehicles of Buddhism, monastic land ownership, relations between Muslim and Buddhist people in Ladakh, our plans for the rest of our time here. We told him about our wish to start a school in Maine, and he said, “The first thing you must do is build a Ladakhi toilet. Then you will never be worrying about fertility.”

We walk the last mile or so along the winding river road looking down on a rich, living slope, where springs come out of the embankment above the Indus. Small streams wind through an almost moss-like ground cover, and sea buckthorn gives the thickets a lavender cast. Many, many willows grow, pollarded and harvested by the villagers. This land is a commons; people may plant (and so own) individual trees, but nothing can be fenced. Often dzo are browsing there, and birds: magpies, chickadees, and little black-and-white ones with rust-colored tails. As the days grow warmer, more and more often we walk with their songs.

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At the beginning of class, several of the small monks will run somewhere to find the chalkboard and its stand. One day two of them, carrying the stand together, playfully fired it like a machine gun into the circle of other boys. “It doesn’t seem to matter,” I said to Jason as we walked home. “Even little monk boys will turn things into toy guns.” “Yes,” he said. “But little monks are much less likely to be carrying real ones someday.”

So maybe it matters after all—what people learn, and how. I wonder how different these monks’ lives will be from those ordained five hundred years ago, or fifty? Will their understanding of the world be changed if they can speak in English about gravity? Will their practice be changed? Will their hearts? How different are their thoughts from the boys their age that I have known in America? Or here, at SECMOL? And when the choice is fully theirs, how will they choose to live?    

An image to go along...

Hello all! Here is a photo from Caitlin which follows from her last post. <3