We were 12000 feet up, and we were freezing. Everyone slept fully clothed inside their sleeping bags, and we all huddled together on the beds for collective warmth. The first hint of morning was a very slow and subtle change in the glow filtering in through the open, barred windows low on the wall from black to the darkest of blues. I remember thinking of how amazing it was that that relatively small elevation in energy, between none and a barely measureable some, made such a palpable difference. Where previously had stood a squarish orange outline now stood a wooden door with latches on the side faintly aglow, its perimeter still haloed in shabby electric light from down the hall.
We rose, creakily, the temperature making everything brittle and difficult. The air, though quite cold, had a brisk and clean quality to it that is unique to the mountains. Certainly thus far in India, it was the cleanest air I’d breathed, and a welcome relief.
I heard the monks up in the temple stirring, clinking, chanting. There it was again: that feeling you sometimes get in India that you are connected to a human ritual that has gone on for thousands of years without you, and will continue on for thousands more after you’re gone. We were in the tiny village that had grown up around one of the most ancient temples in Hinduism, way up in the Central Himalayas. We’d climbed to the summit of the mountain the previous day, but had been teased and taunted by high, fast-moving, occasionally all-enveloping clouds. The monks, and our Principal-Ji, had noted that the best time for a good view was sunrise. Feeling ambitious (perhaps brought on by the mild effects of oxygen deprivation), we had decided the previous evening to
rise before the sun did and re-complete the last stage of our trek.
We set off in the rising blue glow, now notable enough for us to not require flashlights or anything like that to find the path. The path set out rather south-east, towards the south-facing, nearly sheer cliff wall of the mountain. It hugged a well-trodden path above this dropoff as it turned more directly east and up.
The path itself was a miraculous thing: it was assembled by thousands of pilgrims to this holy spot over thousands of years. Stones of mixed sizes and shapes all elaborately placed together and cemented in with mud and gravel. In some places the winter had obviously washed away parts of the path, and we walked in the beds of what must have been the ad hoc streams of the metling snows earlier that year.
The path zig-zagged for, to guesstimate, a thousand feet up the steep side of the mountain, hard grasses and snaggled, tough-looking shrubbery on all sides. Up and up, back and forth across the mountain-face we went. It was notably easier than the previous day, perhaps because we’d just slept a bit and hadn’t had to climb the whole rest of the mountain that morning. There was a section, closer to the top, that was a slight plateau, a respite before the last leg. From down below, the plateau looked decievingly like the top. The realization that another few hundred feet lay beyond and above the plateau was not a welcome one.
A holy man sat on a mat in his bright orange robes, his hair silver and gray and partially dreaded, in his hand a lit and lightly fuming opium pipe. From his neck hung necklaces and medallions. He was very still, sitting there with his pipe idling away. He moved then, very deliberately as if in a Noh drama, and put the pipe to his mouth, inhaled and put it back down where it had been. He looked at me as I passed him, and he nodded. I thought I saw a crease of a smile, but if I did it was soon gone and he was looking back across the valley behind me.
I turned, after I’d passed him, and looked out at the massive valley behind me and the glorious, snow top peaks that passed away to the north and northwest. We’d seen basically none of this the previous day, due to the clouds, fog and light rain you commonly get at that altitude. It was a tremendous sight to behold.
Just near the top there was a kind of out-cropping beyond which I could not see. Where the side had previously been steep but not vertical, here it went basically straight up, the shrubbery boldly daring to grow out of the side of the exposed rock. The path straightened, cutting through the vertical out-cropping, then turned to the north. Up I climbed, quite winded and starting to question how wise this whole endeavor had been.
And then I saw God.
I stopped in my tracks and felt as if my body were inconsequential, that I, me, this, the element, did truly, unquestionably, exist and was part of something larger and more beautiful, something that far escaped my ability to describe it. There, atop an ancient and holy mountain, at just the moment the sun leapt from behind the far mountains to attain its own whole, I looked into the Eye of God. It was overwhelmingly, shockingly powerful. I just stood there, taking it all in. The sun, the sun, the sun, brilliant and whole, warming in every sense, lit the whole world. The peak felt like an altar, and appropriately so, because for the first time in my life I deeply understood what it was that made men worship God or Allah or Yahweh or Vishnu or Buddha or whomever. A creation of that beauty, power and magnitude deserved acclaim and praise and absolute humility before it.
I stumbled forward to where my friends, similarly stunned, were gathering, near the eastern edge of the peak. We just stood there for a while, just taking it in as a collective experience. Someone would occasionally get out a “Wow…” and trail off. We could see the opposite range of peaks, some many, many miles away from us. (Principal-ji had told us the day before that those peaks were so far away that most of them were actually in China. So, though I’ve never been to China, I can claim to have seen it with my own eyes.)
We stayed there for a great part of that morning. It was unbelievable and I could never describe it all. What I can say is this: the experience of living in India connected me, I believe, to many of the extremes of human experience. I came away knowing what the human extremes of misery, poverty, cruelty, corruption, humility, charity, tolerance, peace, beauty, and faith all look like. I cannot say that I felt and experienced many of these personally, and I am thankful for it. But the extreme that will perhaps be the most lasting, and is perhaps most important, I touched directly: the human existential experience itself. The experience of truly being human.
That is perhaps the best thing I can say about my time in India: I went there merely breathing. I came back alive.
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