Tricycle | Awake in the World

I sit in a pink plastic lawn chair in front of my borrowed meditation cave. The afternoon is perfect, a warm cedar-scented breeze sighing through the branches of the deodar cedars on the hill. Tiny birds chirp in the underbrush. My rosary drops onto my lap, my mantra recitation slurs to a halt.

Past my bare toes is a gulf of bluish, haze-softened air. Far below, the sacred lake glints like dull-green jade. The high Himalayas are visible today, low and pale across the horizon.

I’ve wanted to meditate in a cave ever since reading those first hyperbolic yoga books as a teenager. But I thought I’d be eating weeds, fighting off leopards and even a demon or two. Privation and loneliness would be the whole enlightening deal. I’d end up luminous and scrawny, wearing nothing but a diaper.

Reality, here, is quite the opposite. I’m getting fatter by the day. By the time I go home, after a month, I will have gained eight pounds. My cave has electricity and linoleum on the floor, keeping dust at bay. It’s not exactly a cave, but rather an overhang under a cliff, beefed up with a front wall, door, and curtains on the windows. The effect is reminiscent of a rustic stone house you might see in the Alps, but with bigger spiders.

Yes, I’m surrounded by mini-beings. Spiders, centipedes, flies, mosquitoes, beetles, silverfish, moths, and cockroaches. Through the pitch-black night I hear them crunching in each other’s jaws, plus the scufflings of rats, mongooses, feral cats, and snakes, fighting and mating in the crevices of the roof. Not to mention the living presence of the mountain, dropping the occasional clod onto my bed as she takes another baby step toward the sea.

These things all provide occasion for forbearance, and a tale of hardship I can tell the folks back home. But vermin and the danger of collapse aren’t the main duress of being here. It is accepting the extraordinary love I’m being given.

One night I dream of my mother, alive. She died in 1983, but I know what the dream means. I haven’t been cared for like this since I was an infant.

Three weeks ago, armed with introductions and a few small gifts, I arrived in Rewalsar, as the Indians call the lake and town a thousand meters below this cave (for Tibetans, it’s Tso Pema, “Lotus Lake”). Ani Choe Lhamo was the first person I contacted. She is a nun, about forty, and speaks a little English. We hung out. “You and me, same!” she said, laughing, the day she learned we shared a root guru, the late Dzogchen master Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche. A few days later she offered me her cave. I’d mentioned envying her but honestly, I didn’t mean it as a hint.

“If you or I meditate in my cave, what difference?” Then she laughed maniacally again.

But I’m cautiously in agreement that we may have been sisters in some forgotten past life. It’s a feeling. Laughing together, lying side by side on a bed eating mango sprinkled with Chunky Chat spice powder, I feel inexplicably close to her. Rationally, I tell myself this is simply what it’s like to hang out with someone who practices being unselfish, compassionate, and wise every day for years. Still, being here seems like stumbling into the arms of a long-lost, alternate family. Or maybe I don’t even have to call it alternate. It’s real, with resonances deep as blood.

“I will miss you,” she said, and walked off around the shoulder of the hill.

So my cave is full of her absence, an austere, demanding gift in its own way. I’m sleeping in her bed, sitting in her pink lawn chair gazing out at this view—while she shares a room with her 80-year-old great-uncle at a monastery down the hill.

And this is only half the story. For the cave is a duplex, and another nun lives next door: rotund, gossipy Ani Choenyi, sixty-one years old.

“My” side of the cave is slightly bigger than hers. Still, from the bed, where I usually meditate, I can reach everything without uncrossing my legs. Book, teacup, incense, light switch. It is delightful to be snuggled into the mountain’s dark stone belly, upheld by the sturdy rhythms of Ani Choenyi’s practice.

I love listening to her drum and bell, the strange wail of her thighbone trumpet that wriggles through the air as soon as darkness swallows the mountain. She is practicing Chöd, offering her body to demons, hungry ghosts, and presumably the human being next door. I know she thinks I’m hungry, given the way she feeds me during the day.

I’ve been fantasizing a lot about my life unrolling forward from here, especially when it rains and the outer world literally vanishes behind low, rolling clouds the color of dirty rags. Or when morning light comes in the window. And even when dozens of spiders spiral around the walls. Of course I know this is like a dream. I won’t be here long—very soon, my karmic debt to this community would go from overwhelming to disgraceful. Like the New Yorker cartoon of a wife coming to retrieve her husband from a similar mountaintop: “Sheldon!” For now, it’s obvious that love is the practice I am meant to be doing here. Especially since this lake is where Guru Rinpoche—the yogi who converted Tibet to Buddhism, also known as Padmasambhava—fell in love twelve hundred years back.

A few hundred yards from where I sit, he and Princess Mandarava disappeared into the stony bowels of this mountain. Though her mind was freed by their Tantric practice, it’s hardly surprising that her father, the king, got upset. There are still some pretty wild ascetics wandering around India. Just a week ago, down by the lake, I got creeped out by the coals at the bottom of a pair of eyes I’d made the mistake of looking into. I wouldn’t want my daughter running off with him!

The king tried to burn Guru Rinpoche alive, but the saintly magician turned the pyre into a lake; and, as in all such stories, the king bowed down as a disciple.

The actual lake is kind of small; but around here, the mythical proportions of things are more important. There is an island said to migrate around the lake; I finally figured out it was a tiny mat of reeds, decked with old white offering scarves.

Tso Pema is in the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh, a region known for its prosperity. Indeed, the foothills seem less deforested than elsewhere and the villages better off: ample stone houses with slate roofs, a few satellite dishes. Each hamlet is rich in invisible wealth, too. Veritable armies of yogis have reached enlightenment in these green hills. Some have been famous, like the Buddhist saints Naropa and Tilopa, but many more are anonymous practitioners in a luminous tradition that continues to the present day. When I arrived with my list of folks to contact, some were unavailable, in tsam, sealed retreat. Old folks meet daily to pray and circumambulate; in the monastery dorm, many rooms have curtains drawn across the doors, indicating the tenant is in retreat.

You can’t miss it. Everybody feels it. A sweet energy dances in the air. How to absorb it? Do you just sit there? It’s fun, but weirdly difficult. Love, surrender, openness are clearly key points, but I keep bumping up against neurotic guilt and self-doubt.

Another dream: I’m in a Hindi spy movie, full of paranoid intrigue, but wake up just as I’m finding out everything’s actually okay.