June 11, 2022 | Leave a comment i was not hoping to be loved again, to bring back something that doesn’t exist, to make you mineor was i?that’s the beauty of traumayou’re not sure of anything any more wow new content! two simple recipes Hemp Breakfast Bowl and Mouse au Avochoco nosy for my own good Nepal’s Trekker Lodge Menu, Dissected And Digested animal rights reflection The Face Behind The Eggs storytelling My Mixie And Me Monthly Mood: Oui I Am Angry 5. When others, out of jealousy,Mistreat me with abuse, slander, and so on,I will practice accepting defeatAnd offering the victory to them. 6. When someone I have benefitedAnd in whom I have placed great trustHurts me very badly,I will practice seeing that person as my supreme teacher. —Thubten Chodron, Cultivating A Compassionate Heart: The Yoga Method of Chenrezig Nothing stingy happens when a beautiful one meets a beautiful one. —Rumi It is hard to see the person you have grown to know become unrecognizable, the face that could melt you to be clouded with anger and irrationality. Sarita says even life’s hardships are nice. There is something to gain. “Take it easy,” she says. Sarita is the lady with the unforgettable smile. She runs my Kathmandu homestay. I live with S, her parents, and the other guests. S is the youngest of five children and is not married. When I find a bed bug in my shirt and eight angry welts on my torso, S tells me to keep calm, that there are millions of bugs inside of us keeping us alive. In the past my allergic reaction to bed bugs has sent me to the hospital twice. This time I was okay. Spiritual travelers have expressed to me that my fear of bed bugs attracts the bugs to me and that I should love them. I try to apply this to the best of my ability. My transformational time in the East has led me to no longer blame the guesthouse for me being bitten. Instead I check my clothing, check the bed, inform the staff, and know that everything is temporary. If I am bitten again I can sleep in a different bed. I have the power to move, but I do not have to rush if my mind and body are exhausted. It is hard to recall the events of the last month but I know I cooked a lot and formed at least eight friendships. Emotionally I struggled. I was very hard on myself. Last week things escalated to an afternoon that I would like to attend therapy for. The further that time and kilometers distance myself from Pokhara and the reality that I was experiencing there, the more clarity I gain. Without falling into self-criticism and disapproval, the fact remains: I allowed myself to be in a situation where I was unsafe. Again. After all these years of working on that. I also accepted being put down by another and this translated to my thoughts. In my mind I devalued myself. I caught myself imagining that everyone finds me worthless or annoying when they aren’t even thinking about me. When something great happened, joy was quickly stripped away. Communication spiraled into misunderstandings and hopelessness. My picture-perfect life was riddled with triggers that resurfaced pains from my childhood and I barely noticed. Behind my laptop screen hang four squares of paper. They read que proteges tu paz ♥ agradecer herir ↔ sanar and límites. Protect your peace. Be grateful. Hurting ↔ healing. Boundaries. Last night I finished Ratajkowski’s My Body. While I am so grateful that society did not sexualize me, that physically I did not turn out to be of supreme desirability in the eyes of men, that my parents made me feel beautiful but did not create a huge deal of it, that I earned my financial independence with my mind and not my body, I see so much of myself in Emily. Her final essay helped me acknowledge that I, too, do not release my anger. I turn it into sadness (as seen in the above paragraphs) or play it off or release it onto my poor parents. So oui. I am angry. Voilà. I try to make anything resembling anger seem spunky and charming and sexy. I fold it into something small, tuck it away. I invoke my most reliable trick—I project sadness—something vulnerable and tender, something welcoming, something to be tended to. —Emily Ratajkowski, My Body On all other fronts my Lakeside life, as the Spanish idiom goes, spoiled me by the balls. I move upstairs to a quaint room with the best view in town. I slurp smoothies and pull off mint-cacao nib nice cream. When the power is cut, I always have one warm lamp running on back up. I take solar-heated showers and buy new pants with enough fabric in each leg to be its own bedspread. Within the fertility of the garden I find four Himalayan bulbul fledglings still being fed by both parents. When snack time of berries and insects is over, the four babies fly in different directions in a burst of stunted crests and stubby tails. The exasperation and exhaustion on the faces of Mom and Dad are palpable. I hack life: I make dal bhat and only ruin one pot: One time I did a little hitchhiking, and read Rumi and received a piece of a piece of banana bread from a beautiful Belgian doctor on the shores of Begnas Lake: With food I also reach a new breakthrough. The happy story is detailed in my newest post, My Mixie and Me. Some fun from my recent journal entry: Day 1582 7 June 2022 Lalitpur, Kathmandu, Nepal I am in Kathmandu. काठमाडौँ, which reads to me like “Kaathmaadaun.” This day greets me with the sensation of visiting a grandmother. The simple rooms look like, and the musty wash area smells like, China. There are no blue skies even when the sun is out. It is not hot. I dress in layers. Today I am fragile. I do not know if it is because I am dramatizing my situation, or because I am just uprooted and actually rotting in my own sad misery. Maybe it’s just the flip of the page between the last chapter and the next. After a distracted meditation, I step downstairs. Sensitive Sarita gently asks if I’d like to have something. I say no, I just want to look for blank notebooks. She quickly finds two in the house. “Why spend money at the shop when we have them at home?” They are aged, but completely unused. One is lined, one is blank pages. I am delighted. Everything this woman says is through a wide smile that reaches to her eyes. Every thing. Cheerily, she beckons me to return at half past eleven for food. She boils water for me with love and tenderness. My coffee brews in this tiny tiffin cup, a steel container with lid and handle, that Habibi and I picked up at the Haridwar ghats in the height of the 2020 panics. In Pokhara I would make myself a big cup, or even a french press of organic Himalayan coffee. Black. Medium roast. Or I’d go for a cappuccino or almond milk flat white. Or I’d make coffee at home, and later have a second one out. Or vice versa. Here my life is stripped bare of nonessentials. Today I really feel this stout little mug of caffeine. I savor. I appreciate. The ceramic is glazed forest green. The Peruvian placemat beneath, mustard. The desk, honey-brown. My aesthetic continues with these colors (the yoga mat, literal cork. My water bottle, a slightly darker shade than the mug). It is pleasing to my eyes. I have finally pared down my stuff. For years the accumulation of things was spiraling out of control. Renting by the month during the pandemic allowed me to pack and move with multiple incense holders and types of incense, bars for soaping the body and bars for laundry, the sequel of Shantaram that is twice as heavy as Shantaram (hardcover, from Gokarna of the South Indian coast to Pokhara of Nepal’s Himalayan highlands), two spoons, two straws, a brush to clean those straws, a small steel plate, bowl, mugs, all sorts of beige shirts that begin to look the same. Then there was food. Food was hoarded across state and international borders. My favorite treats from one region were parceled up to be enjoyed in the next as I discovered that the new place was also full of wonderful stimuli for the tastebuds. Glass jars of peanut butter. Kilos of crispy cashews. Whole cardamom pods and curly Ceylon cinnamon. Handmade chocolate bars, cacao powder, cacao nibs. Tsampa, oats, psyllium husk, flax, chia, apricot jam. Himalayan honey oozing with the consistency and sheen of butter. Then the coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee. I always thought the next place wouldn’t have coffee because hey, I’m in South India. Somehow the next place always would have coffee because hey, small Nepal has a very suitable selection of Himalayan beans. On my way out of India in March, I naively order a pour-over of medium roast, SCA 90+ beans from a Tamil nanolot. They weren’t kidding when they said it would be like drinking roses. Next thing you know two glass jars of the most expensive beans I’ve ever swiped my credit card for, packaged in a box of pretentiously thick cardboard, are added to my luggage. The coffee itself is 200 grams and cost something like $11; altogether the bundle weighs kilos. All this just before two flights, a motorcycle taxi, a night bus, and a kilometer’s walk at 5am. My room and clothes reek of high-end coffee for a month. Then the jars. Since July 2020 I always had in my possession at least one glass jar from a singular shop in Laxman Jhula, Rishikesh, India. The shop is known as the ‘organic minimarket.’ Nothing is actually organic and Hershey’s and Kit Kats line the checkout counter. But man does Rajiv make a mean nut butter. The tahini runs so thin you could chug it from a glass. The peanuts are roasted to maximum sweetness before getting blended into ice cream texture. Everything is packed and sealed in glass jars that you can return to the shop. Which I always did, and got 10 rupees back for each, except when I was hoarding stuff to bring with me when I left Rishikesh. The first time I left Rishikesh I had on me a good dozen or so of glass jars. Over the years I shed off the godforsaken jars until one remained. Its diameter was not much larger than a coin. Then a couple weeks ago when a friend left my guesthouse here in Nepal, I inherited two more. The jars were unmistakably Rishikesh Rajiv jars. I was amazed. They follow you like bed bugs. Stick to you like a leech. Today is my first day clean of glass jars. My stuff fits in one 36L Osprey pack and one tote bag. Plus there’s my lightweight yoga mat. The frequent packing on the Annapurna Circuit really helped me sever ties with the miscellany. The only edible items that made it were coffee (ofc), cinnamon powder, coconut sugar, and some dried fruits and nuts for snacking. The Vegan Way had gifted me a slice of cake of my choice (I had picked carrot); it was terminated within the first hour of the bus ride from Pokhara to Kathmandu yesterday morn. In Pokhara I had a larger food stash than ever: buckwheat flour, inherited rosemary and paprika, rice, strawberry jam, unopened packs of walnuts. But this time my pantry was so complete that it was ironically easier to abandon entirely, to the joy of the remaining guests. Except I put a trash bag full of clothes for storage in my that Pokhara guesthouse. So I guess I’m just procrastinating the issue until the next hiking season. Just writing about it is making me recall that I left behind flax meal and chia seeds. Why didn’t I grab those on my way out?!! obsessions: gin tonicemratasaritamy friendseka pada rajakapotasana ढाका टोपी (dhaka topi)matcha latte with coconut mylk at the juiceryavocadoPB&Jfledglingsvegan lemon barsmint cacao nib nice creamkaran’s cappuccinos at the vegan wayjust askingsharing my food because i believe in itdal bhatsarita’s homemade mealsmy periodmustard oil from the neighborhood millpukka vanilla chaimorning black coffeecumbianepali brown rice Bird of the month: Tickell’s leaf warbler The first bird I coquetted and identified with an audio recording in Yak Kharka on the Annapurna circuit in April. All warblers look too alike. This little guy disappeared and I played the audios of warbler calls in the Merlin Bird ID app, trying to remember what he sounded like so I could decide on his species. Suddenly he was back, flying back and forth over me trying to find his nemesis. A birder later told me to avoid doing because it is very distressful to the birds, although this case was rather accidental. Photo by me(: Current books: still working on The Mountain Shadow by Gregory David Robertsreally enjoyed I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron and My Body by Emily Ratajkowski Previous Monthly Mood: Ukalo Oralo Explore my full archive of Nepal and Monthly Moods. Learn more about this round-the-world solo trip.