Oh My Buddha!

Things are wrapping up here in Kathmandu and I am going to a sitting retreat for my final week here, I hope. I won't know until it is too late. So, if you here from me after August 14th, that means it didn't work out. Anyway...

Kathmandu and Lhasa did a good number on me. I am pretty happy with the way things have gone, all things considered. Staying in Lhasa would've been good and nice and career advancing and all that, but coming to KTM was like coming home. And that feeling itself was worth all the expense and pains in the arse.

Learning or relearning that Kathmandu is a home for me is valuable because I had been doubting, before this summer, that I had a home in Asia. I have had several historically, but this past spring I was all up in a knot about to abandon Asian studies altogether. It feels good not to do that.

Now I need to reconcile the world I created for myself in Madison that is anchored around that former distance from Asia. I need to see if my revived love for the mystical orient is tenable in that situation. I think it is.

I am very excited about the retreat. I am trying not to be to excited because it could very easily not happen, due to the deeply accomplished incompetancy of filing systems at the Jyoti Bhavan. So, if it happens, it will be a joyful walk through a bunch of shit I have accumulated in the last year and maybe I can do some housecleaning of that nastiness.

The perennial "I am going to change everything about my life so that it is better and healthier and good" feeling is creeping up on me and I am going to give it a shot. Between returning refreshed from Asia and sitting inbetween and a monstrous Issan feast during my five hours in Bangkok and the joy of returning to the motherland, I am feeling pretty positive about my ability to do some serious work where I work needs be done and some serious chillaxing where chillaxing need be done.

(My mom used "chillaxing" in an email to me the other day!)

In love and respect for balm and poison,