Untethered

It’s 4:30. Silence. No roosters crowing or small feathered ones calling to friends and neighbors. Evan has yet to assert his three year-old self and not a single motorcycle in the distance.

I prefer not to get up this early but I’ve been sorting through something the past hour and need to process. Nikos Kazantzakis in his autobiography, Report to Greco, mused that he couldn’t think without a pen in his hand. It’s like that.

I’ve been noticing the past few weeks what I initially labeled “a shift”. But it’s not that. It’s more of a phenomenon. A different way of being in the world. A different way the mind is in the world. Someone wrote the book, The Untethered Soul. Perhaps it’s like that.

There are the obvious things. Home is half way around the world. There’s no work to attend to. No radio in the car or television nearby. Spotify, Audible.com, even Kindle hold little interest. The NY Times app seems irrelevant.

It’s just the mind bumping up against the world without a buffer or intermediary to intervene, soften, protect.

Years ago Shunryu Suzuk’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was published. It’s like that. Everyday, everything is new. There are no boxes within which to neatly store observations and interactions. No patterns constructed on past experience to rely upon. Ram Dass taught, Be Here Now. It’s like that.

And it just happens. There’s no effort, no process, no method. The will plays no part in it nor does the “little self” have a say in it. I guess it’s the product of stripping down, of being stripped down.

Everything in a backpack, moving from one room to the next, one culture to the next. They all contribute. And then there’s the “just being out there.”

In some ways, Kathmandu is the culmination. The West appears to have little influence here. It probably does but it’s not apparent. And everything seems to happen in plain sight. Stuff happens behind closed doors, no doubt. How could they not. Otherwise there’d be no little ones running around. But so much of the business of daily life is on the street. And you grow accustomed to it.

Take the traffic here. I had some preparation. The cities that came before, particularly in Italy and Greece. But they weren’t quite enough. The first day I could feel it in my stomach. It was unaccustomed to that level of chaos. But by yesterday, it just was.

A few photos provide a glimpse.