“The Real Himalayas” - Introduction

In March of 2015, seven years after I moved to Aotearoa/New Zealand, I knew it was time to leave. I had moved to Invercargill, a small city in the South Island, at age 25 and married the man with whom I would build my first adult home. But after a move to Auckland, completion of a teaching degree, a divorce that followed, and then two years rebuilding from almost nothing, at age 32 I was exhausted, beaten down, searching for some kind of understanding that my 7-year journey had been a mythic one—with a birth, death and rebirth of my own.

Equal to hearing the call to leave New Zealand, I felt the call to return to the U.S. I felt asked to move toward restitution and reconnection with my parents, siblings and the webs of relationships and dreams I had left behind. When I had left years earlier, I had departed with bravado and terror in search of myself and my place in the world. I had cut ties to important people thinking it was them or me. Now it was time to begin my return and my re-integration.

Like the Greek hero Odysseus, my journey home was not straightforward and involved great reckoning and the inner experience of being shipwrecked, my true self unrecognizable to the family and friends awaiting me. Like the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, my journey home involved underworld descent and countless doorways, threshold guardians and new invitations to try my hand at the overland world to prove my prowess—so that I came home as empty as I came home full.

One of the countries I passed through on the way home was India. When I landed in Delhi, I took my seat on a passenger train headed east for the Himalayas. As I disembarked I was met by a driver who my hosts had sent for me. A middle-aged Indian man who spoke no English, he drove me for hours on one lane windy roads into the mountains. Mule and donkey cart drivers shouted and cabs honked as they made their way around blind curves toward us. I didn’t know how long the ride was supposed to be or how I would know when I had arrived. At one point along the drive, as the sun melted into orange in the sky, the car stopped in a small village. My driver pointed to a shop with a handwritten sign in a flowing script I couldn’t read. He motioned with his hands and mouth and I intuited he was suggesting I get something to eat  here. I did and we were back on the road. Another few hours passed. It was dark before we reached a village lit by several wooden street lights. Men were outside laughing and talking, throwing rocks at dogs while gray monkeys freely jumped all around them. 

I spent three weeks in Satoli, a village about 6,000 feet above sea level. Here, a local agency called Aarohi had created a small network of social enterprises that employed men and women in the town to plant apricot trees, harvest the apricot pits, and use the oily nutty interiors to make refined face and hand creams they sold in expensive stores in Nainital and Delhi. The profit from these sales was used to fund a free local school for the children in that and neighboring villages, where young women who lived nearby were trained and employed as teachers. These teachers were the first generation of young women in this village to earn income independent from their husbands. Having spent a few years teaching in New Zealand, I came to work alongside the young women here—as a kind of learning exchange.

The first week I was at Aarohi, I paid for room and board in a local family’s home. I had a private bedroom that was dark but kept me cool, and the husband in the family brought me breakfast and dinner that his wife prepared in their small fireplace in an open flame. The meals served on metal trays were pungent with the aromas of toasted cumin seeds and sautéed garlic, fried onion and curried peas and potatoes, spicy dahl and nutty rice, roasted chickpeas and fried naan. I had never eaten such divine and wholesome food anywhere.

At the end of my first week, just as I was settling into this flowing rhythm, another volunteer—a young Indian woman—came to Aarohi from Delhi. She was given a cabin in the forest a couple miles walk along a cliff’s edge from the school and the main Aarohi office. Ultimately, this setup did not suit her, and because I felt drawn to the privacy and fantasy of magical solace in a forest hut, I agreed and we switched abodes.

It was during these last two weeks that every day I walked two miles each way through the wooded jungle from my hut with swinging gray monkeys to the school where I spent my days. Then, when I had completed my activity in the village, I returned by flashlight to my little cabin where I cooked a simple meal from staples purchased in the village market, read and wrote a little, and went to sleep.

Every morning, as I walked in the early light along the cliff’s edge to the village, I overlooked the greatest mountain peaks I had ever seen. To say they were gigantic is to underestimate them. They were majestic, wild, enormous, soaring, proud. These were the Himalayas I had heard and read about.

No, actually, it turned out they were not.

Every morning as I passed others walking along the jungle path with me from their own nearby hut, I would point to the tremendous mountain peaks: “Himalayas!” I would shout ebulliently aloud. I would show with my face an expression of “Wow!” as my new friends mostly did not speak English and I was faltering in their local language. But every day, regardless of who my walking companion was, they would always respond in a similar way. They would listen to me, and point to the mountains: “Himalayas?” Then they would chuckle and shake their heads side to side, “No no no no no no no no no.”

I can’t tell you how confused I was. I knew I was in the Himalayas. I had seen them on the map. I was walking beside the most overwhelming mountain beings I had ever seen. How could these not be the Himalayas? Surely, something was being lost in translation. These had to be Himalayas. 

Every day I became more determined to ascertain my rightness. I looked for new people to prove my knowledge, and learned a few words in the local dialect so I could explain myself better. None of this helped. To me, a foreigner, these were the Himalayas. But to all the locals, who had grown up on this land, who knew this land, they were not. What was I missing?

Then, one day, three days before I was leaving, the clouds parted. Literally. A strong storm tousled through the region and blew apart the blue sky— or what I thought was the blue sky—but which was revealed to be a thick fog of pale blue clouds. Suddenly— how can I even explain it?— the mountains that had been enormous, majestic, soaring, proud and the most marvelous and enormous I had ever seen were dwarfed by the… by the real Himalayas.

Piercing the sky, these otherworldly peaks seemed to have come from nowhere. But in reality, they had been there– hidden– all the time. Masked by the thinnest layer of blue fog, I had not seen the real Himalayas because I did not know what I was looking for. But for the locals, these hidden mountains were soldered into their mind’s eye, these locals who lived headbowed to their greatness. 

As the clouds parted, time disappeared and my heartbeat silenced. This is how Moses felt by the burning bush that didn’t wasn’t consumed by its own flames or by the Red Sea with its sudden walls of flowing water. In that string of solitary moments that lasted until the clouds closed in again, not more than twenty minutes, I saw what lay behind the seen universe. I saw what mostly was kept unseen.

And then they were gone.

Though I never saw the real Himalayas again— they remained hidden behind the clouds of fog— every time I walked that cliff edged path over the last three days, they were forged into my view of that landscape. I could never not see them again.

This story, this image stayed buried in me until about a year ago. I hadn’t ever thought to share it. But one day, immersed in my research on elderhood and eldering, I was in the company of academics and work colleagues who looked perplexed by the ideas I was sharing. They seemed curious by my language that a different set of questions, a new soul adventure could be awaiting all of us after adulthood. A new threshold with a completely different set of premises, a threshold which made the goals and achievements of adulthood pale by comparison. Why didn’t mainstream culture all talk about this if this was so? Surely retirement—western culture’s noble hurrah to adulthood—was the final phase of life before physical and mental decline. Why disturb the current map of the known universe—where adulthood is at the top of the mountain and all after a slow invisible pathetic decline? How could there be another vision?

People— across generations, cultures, ages, languages, faiths and life paths— have seen and tried to correct the narrative about the real Himalayas of elderhood. They have passed on fairy tales and legends, biblical texts and mythologies, and they have in our modern world become doctors and ceremonialists, social workers and faith leaders, hospice chaplains and poets. In the same way, in every generation, there are those of us who walk along the cliff’s edge of adulthood wondering if the aspirations that culture says “this is what it means to be successful” and “this is what it means to be have achieved” are the whole story. We have had families in traditional or non-traditional ways, attained vocational accolades one way or another, acquired this or that material thing we have been told is big kahuna. We have done everything that culture has said: this is what it means to be an adult, this is what it means to matter. We point at the peaks in front of us that look noble and majestic and think—these are the real Himalayas. Right?

At middle age, how do we know if we have circumscribed our lives around the promises of the real Himalayas of elderhood or around the values of their adult counterpart? When I undertook the research for this thesis, I set out to better understand this question for myself, so that through my learning of it, I could add to our modern cosmology and rigorous understanding. I hope this thesis will offer additional insight and inspiration for what the journey of eldering can look like in the landscape of U.S. mainstream culture at this moment in time. I hope through the stories of ten elders, who themselves once saw the real Himalayas and never forgot it, that we may come to see the real Himalayas for ourselves.

Because once you see the real Himalayas, you can’t unsee them.

Once you meet an elder, you can’t forget your own soul’s call to become one.