Struck by Surprise

During the taxi ride back to Cloud’s End, I sat in the back seat with Arturo and he told me about his experience at the teaching this morning, in the courtyard facing the Dalai Lama. When the Tibetans were moving into the center after the Dalai Lama passed through, people were trampling him and someone stepped on his hand. A beautifully-dressed Tibetan woman took his mat, held out both her hands to keep people out of the way, and turned to him, pointed at the mat, and said in English, “You sit here.”

When a monk came along with butter tea, Arturo said he didn’t want any tea because he didn’t have his cup with him. The Tibetan woman who had already helped him pulled out the only cup she had, meant for herself, a Styrofoam cup. This was after someone came by with bread and she said, “You have to eat this. It’s blessed by the Dalai Lama!” The tea was the same situation: it’s blessed by the Dalai Lama.

During our drive, I learned from Arturo that he’s also a solitary practitioner, though in Tibetan, not Insight Meditation. He lives in New Hampshire (although he has a Spanish accent) and the town has a local sangha, but he doesn’t like it; they’re mainly into socializing, wining and dining. There’s a place for retreats three and a half hours away, but that’s too long a trip for frequent practice, and once he went on retreat at Shambhala Mountain in Colorado, which I’ve heard of since they send me brochures. I mentioned it’s fine to take long drives to go on retreat periodically, and he said that’s what he did, once or twice. I mentioned the sangha that I’m displeased with but through which I’ve found out about Mid America Dharma, an organization that holds retreats in location around Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri. That’s on my to-do list.

After the taxis arrived back at Cloud’s End, the sangha gathered into the little living room with the dais and we had our evening discussion. Shantum made announcements.
Dharma Rain—book that Jeff recommended and with which Shantum was involved.

At the beginning of “Strucks,” I heard Shantum say the name “Natalie,” and my ears perked up. I looked up, and Shantum was saying that Natalie, a former pilgrim, has come to join us. In a minute, Natalie indeed came into the room, and we looked at each other and exchanged a big smile. I was on the floor in Tibetan clothing with my new Kashmiri hat and shawl (the embroidered cotton shawl), and during the talk she took a photo of me. People had profound and amazing things to say and some were “coincidences.” For instance, Etiel had picked up a brochure on a retreat here in Dharamsala, and she turned to an Australian nun and asked her if she knew about it. The nun pointed to a picture on the brochure and said, “That’s a picture of me.” Also, Paula saw a young man with blue eyes, a Jew, who turned out to be the son of someone close to her who recently died. Natalie said that being here with Shantum and me and with a sangha was like déjà vu from last year’s pilgrimage.

When it was my turn to speak, I said, “Yesterday morning I was a yard away from the Dalai Lama, and when I saw his big smiling face, I couldn’t help smiling, and for the rest of the day, I was as bouncy as Tigger. Today, while we walked to see the prime minister, and we went down a steep and very rocky path, it was an example of mindful walking as a survival skill. And when we saw those mountains by the Oracle monastery today, I was mesmerized and wanted to become a bird and fly toward them.”

Shantum said that tomorrow we have the opportunity to visit the Oracle at 6:30 am in order to witness him in trance, at the Nechung Monastery. If we wish to attend (which of course I do!) we have to get up at 5:30, leave at 6:10, and afterwards go back to the guesthouse for breakfast, before we go to the Dalai Lama’s teachings. There will also be a trek through woods with Jagdish, and if we want to go, we have to leave Cloud’s End by 9 am. After the trek, we should still have time to get to the translator’s 4 pm English-language teaching. We can attend a dance performance at the Tibetan Performing Arts Center. Dinner will be at 7:30 or 7 pm. Thus we have tomorrow all planned—quite a busy day. Meanwhile, Shantum would be leaving Dharamsala after the Oracle event, because a friend invited him to a wedding, so we won’t see him again until tomorrow morning.

Shantum talked about the Mindfulness Trainings Ceremony, which we have the option of taking toward the end of the Dharamsala retreat, and he said, “It has protected me and is a doorway to enlightenment.” Those of us who want to go through with the ceremony are to write an explanation for why we want to do the Mindfulness Training, and give it to Shantum by Friday. Also, we should share an Insight Poem later, before the group splits up, and this will be followed by a discussion on generosity—what you want to support.

When most of the sangha had left the room, I talked with Natalie and looked at the photo she just took of Shantum in the steadily darkening room. She said that she read the two e-mails that I sent today (both of which were travelogues I sent to many people), and so she had quickly called Shantum and they had arranged this meeting. So it was my e-mails that brought her to us! Thanks to an e-mail Natalie sent months ago, I had known that Natalie would be in Dharamsala at the same time as we, but I had anticipated spotting her in the audience at the teachings.

Natalie said that she really enjoyed reading my e-mails, and she went on to highly praise the journal excerpts I had sent for eight months after the pilgrimage. She said it was fascinating to read it through my perspective, to see the same events from someone else’s perspective, and that given how quiet I was, it was surprising that I had written so much. I said, “I don’t talk much, but when I’m writing I’m blaah-blaah-blaah.” She also said that the journal excerpts brought the sangha together, because people e-mailed responses and had some dialogue going, and they kept the pilgrimage alive for all those months.

Wow! That’s quite a positive thing to say, and it’s so in contrast with all the insecurities I had felt while sending those e-mails and thinking I must come across as needy, putting so much into these journal excerpts when the rest of the sangha wasn’t interested in communicating so often. I mentioned that I enjoyed sending the excerpts at first but after a while felt uncomfortable with it—especially my comments about nasty relatives and about living in Kansas. Actually, the word I used wasn’t “comments” but rather “whining.” It was astonishing to hear praise about the journal excerpts for which I had eventually come to feel deeply ashamed, after one of the sangha members went off on me in a holier-than-thou manner for having the audacity to express feelings. By the time I received that negative message, I was deeply depressed and had just finished sending the last of the journal excerpts.

“Do you mean you were uncomfortable with it because it was so personal?” she asked.

“Yes, exactly! It seemed so whiney.” She said that she really liked how personal it was and that it connected what was going on with me with the pilgrimage. In short, she didn’t find it inappropriate at all. Since coming to India, for the most part I haven’t been feeling those insecurities but have instead lived very “here and now,” but this conversation faintly reminded me of them—how before I came here I was, for four months, deeply depressed and firmly believing that I had been making a complete fool of myself by sending these e-mails. I had gotten so distressed that I resolved to stop confiding in others, and I actually went without sending a single personal e-mail for about a month…and developed acid stomach. Natalie’s feedback allayed my fears. What a relief! Maybe only one person was so extremely unimpressed, but I don’t want to think about that right now; I want to enjoy this trip.

Natalie, Shantum and I left the living room and walked away in front of the guesthouse, and Natalie told him that I had sent journal excerpts to the sangha. He asked me if I had known Natalie was coming, and I said, “Yes, she sent me an e-mail.”

“I also sent it to you,” Natalie said to Shantum, “but I don’t think you read it.”

“I haven’t been getting to e-mails,” Shantum said, and I’m now totally convinced he doesn’t know about the manuscript that I e-mailed him about six months ago. I still might mention it, because I would really like to send him the latest draft and also ask him if I could, for the sake of getting my travel memoir published, please have his typed and signed permission to include in my travel memoirs the notes that I took during his storytelling about the Buddha. It’s going to be kind of hard to get to asking this, because I’m squeamish about asking such a huge favor, especially given how busy he is. It’s especially hard to broach such a topic, given that the chance of my being anything like alone with him is really small. Still, I hope I do this before we’re saying good-bye and I’m thinking it would be appropriate to do it before then.

Natalie had a business card with her taxi driver’s phone number. The driver had said that she could call him anytime for a ride back, no later than eight that night, and she noticed that it was getting close to that time. Shantum offered to call the driver, and when he did so on his cell phone, we heard an answering machine playing Bollywood music. I commented on this with a smile, and Natalie, who also enjoys Bollywood movies, asked me if I’d seen Om Shanti Om, which is playing everywhere, and here in Dharamsala you can go see it with English subtitles. It sounds fun, but I probably won’t see it till it’s on DVD in the States. It’s the most popular Bollywood movie right now, and hearing about it filled me with anticipation. After Natalie spoke with her taxi driver, I mentioned that my favorite Bollywood movie is Veer-Zaara.

Natalie didn’t stay for dinner with us, since she didn’t want to miss her ride. So Shantum went on to the silent dinner (we had agreed to practice mindful eating in silence). Since it was chilly now, I dashed into my room to get my bright red coat before heading for dinner, which included three delicious curries, roti, yogurt, and a dessert that was very delicious: it was a pastry that tasted similar to halwa and contained an almond, a cashew, and a pistachio. With all this delicious food, I drank water. It was hard to eat mindfully, in terms of keeping my mind here and now “in the present moment” because I was excited after talking with Natalie and was indeed, at least once, wondering how on earth to broach the topic of getting Shantum’s written permission to include the notes I took on the pilgrimage.