Book Review
EDMUND MILLER
A work of recovery of the lost Nepal,
thrust back into the past by revolution and earthquake
The first thing that one notices about
Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place: A Journey though the Nepal Himalayas is the beautiful earth-tone color photography (photographs are primarily by the author). This is a work of recovery of the lost Nepal, thrust back into the past by revolution and earthquake. While one expects majestic scenery in Nepal, despite the recent disasters, the interesting thing is how much the beauty of the country comes through in pictures of people and of places, that is to say, of ordinary people and things of the smaller rather than the monumental artifacts often highlighted to illustrate the grandeur of imperial civilizations past. These photographs bring to life subdued reality, not spectacle.
And yet the text is equal to the visual. An indefatigable epistolary, Diane Frank has saved and here publishes letters she wrote to friends before the loss of Nepal’s past. To Bret from Kathmandu, she writes reminding him that he told her to “Pay attention to every moment.” She recognizes the yantra symbol of wisdom painted all over school buildings as the Star of David. She picks up bits of language and chooses to observe local customs. As she does, she is hypnotized by the eyes of the children who sell trinkets in the streets to help their families live.
While climbing, she explains how Nepalese children help her group pass around water buffaloes on a high trail, mystified that the visitors seem to come from a place without mountains or rules of the road for a mountain pass. She learns how to survive a landslide. As she climbs higher, she notices that even the Sherpas begin to wear hiking boots. The Tantric gods pull her to “sacred places deep inside.” And when she must begin the climb down, she sums up this section of the book with a poem, finding herself moving up, not down:
Now we are climbing in the dark,
Straight up to the moon.
A “Pilgrimage to Buddhist Temples and Villages in the Solu Khumbu” follows as the second half of the book. Missing everything about the Himalayas in the flatness of Iowa, she takes to visiting a city nearby where she can hike up and down entry steps. Her “memories don’t follow the map anymore.” Dreaming herself back in the mountains reveals not the bigness but individual sensual moments of scent and colors and visual shards.
Returning to Kathmandu, she is invited to catch a glimpse of the Kumari, a goddess reincarnated as a beautiful young girl. She catches a glimpse of the child goddess at a window “blooming like a marigold” and discovers that no man will marry her because she is too powerful. Frank learns to walk the mountains unaided again, “trusting the future,” finding a “sacred place where every memory is a white rose.”
She acknowledges her first sight of Mt. Everest as the closest she has ever gotten to heaven. She dreams of her Buddhist friend, and her vision is of all the simple things of life. She opens her eyes after whispered secrets and finds herself “under the pull of the full moon.” A visit to the Everest View Outhouse finds it open on one side to the mountain. A visit to a tea house finds prayer flags waving everywhere to celebrate the sacredness of the place. Sacred and profane, day and night, awake and asleep, the place is a world apart.
After this illumination, Part II of the book turns back to letter format. She tells David of absorbing the spirit of the place in dreams, which dissolve “before breakfast.” Frank describes the altar in the lama’s house for John, writing by kerosene lantern. Afterwards, sleeping in a world “dark and silent,” she is awakened by an avalanche “full of demons” on a neighboring mountain. “Nepal lets you know nature is much more powerful than you are.”
About to leave Nepal by plane, Frank almost turns into a tourist, trying to buy two painted tankas, but the artist will not sell because he thinks she is haggling and these works are blessed by monks, not to be enjoyed as mere art. But when she tells the artist that she is building a Buddhist shrine in her home, he relents. In her last moments of this second trip, she listens to a fortune teller advise her friend:
“The peace has been inviting you.
Now you have to invite the peace.”
NAMASTE!
Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place
(Nirala, New Delhi, 2018)
ISBN81-8250095-8. Hardcover
Stories, poems and 55 color photographs $49
