truly living is

Truly living is talking to my dad about Juliet’s SnowMan, telling me how he is thinking about buying a computer, hearing about my sister’s second pregnancy and feeling the cold of the mountain, when it is 34c in Colombo.

Truly living is when a dream that held my head in a soup of expectation is so close I can taste it on the tip of my tongue, as a word that you know but can’t speak. Since before I could know the reality of it, this dream has been with me, some would say a scar of inappropriate parenting.

While, those that are truly live would call it planting seeds. Growing inside me and sometimes filling my throat like watermelon so I cant help but gulp, gulp at smell of mountain air, feel the scrabbly ground under my feet, the feeling of a sore neck from looking up in awe all day.

This dream has ebbed and flooded the mud flats of my life, leaving me wanting and bare, desolate but fragile, usually while living in a city where I tend to forget the nuance of green and learn obscene things like bus timetables. But then when I could sneak away to a glen or get drunk and lay in gutters I would lookup at the skyscrapers and mistaken them for mountain peaks, shrouded in clouds of the monsoon or take the broom of the street sweeper for a Yak. But then snapped back, rather rudely, reality would flood in, and I would be sitting at my computer on Monday morning, yawning and wondering what happened to the 72 hours that were all mine but just got left behind.

Finally I escape from my own self importance and uncertainties and find I’m here sitting at my little portal to the unreal world, plugged in and pounding away at the shining keyboard where my fingers have etched my expression, my education and brought me back to the people that love me for the last 4 years. The beats of the dubbed freak brothers cat got me wiggling in my seat, head boppin and face sopping with tears for the expectation of joy.

For what I’ve been given brought up in the boughs of life’s tree, fed on the love of community and had my heart synced to the musicians beat with a little bit of marvel with the magicians feats. From radio fed stories about the world, to impromptu camping trips and nights where we couldn’t sit down for fear of falling asleep. Here in on this emerald island, abounding in dreams of its own, about to bounce.

Almost 29 years after leaving in my mothers whom I am set to return home to Nepal. Kind of like that song “my island home” but “my mountain home” (yes that cheesy). Stories past from a mother to a son are few and far between, a keen mind will take them and get tangled up in their blanket to keep warm from the cold sparsity of limited common ground. This is how I came to hear that I was found in the mountains, my little soul came along at just the right time (or actually at that time, it was the wrong time for my parents). I often wonder how it happened, or how it happens millions of times a day, and even after evolutionary biology I am nothing but furtherer away from understanding, but maybe its more about accepting.

Did my soul just come wandering along a winding path that night, looking for a tea house with a light on? Had it been following my parents, could it tell that they were ready to bear fruit, did it know, as Dad says, that; it would just take one good root!

Anyways, that’s history now, the hour is nigh, the plane will fly and I will land back in the hands of the mountain gods, and the knowing can’t keep the smile of my weathered face. Ragged and wild with the flood of dream filled nights, rationality is gone as cool mountain air already blown by the fan to quench the heat of the tropics, makes me shiver.

A sliver of light, only two more sleeps, and a few more weeks and I will be there, deep in the valley, standing outside that tea house, hoping to find where that little soul strolled from, and if there isn’t but a cup of tea waiting there for me.
Cause I beguest to believe that truly living is understanding where I come from and being able to able to

Drip like honey from the honey bee
Walk from the river down to the sea
Fly through the face of a thunder cloud
Rain down, down on the people who will allow

The missing is hurting like a broken bone, being so far from home. This is knowing that dreams don’t come without having to put out some lights of opportunity.
Truly living is, choosing. From dad telling me that he knows he is to old and doesn’t have enough time left to build a boat but just thinking about it is enough to keep him afloat.

Truly living is knowing that I can and am going to build my own boat, as the dreams are passed from generation to generation like the stories of old.