We leave SECMOL in the morning on the (lunar) 29th and stand in the sun on the Phyang Thang, waiting to catch a ride or a public bus heading west. In only a few minutes a small red car stops: it is Skarma in his monks’ robes, with Stanzin from Parkethangpa. Before we can drive away Kargopi Konchok with Ache Phuntsok and Palmo arrive in another car, and we join to travel together. We meet Acho Tsondus with his family in Nyemo when we stop for lunch and it becomes a caravan, everyone laughing, talking, feeling the goodness of being together again after a long time.
When we arrive to the bridge at Nurla Aba Stanzin is there from the thang, with a pot of hot rice and vegetables and thermoses of tea. The road up feels good, easier than it did a month ago. We all walk in an easy pattern of travel and rest, little boys running ahead, Konchok following behind with a dzo laden with vegetables, meat, and a bag of children’s clothes.
We stay that night, rgu, at Kotipa. The men and boys of the village gather around a fire on one of the upper fields, sitting on the earth together. Fireworks exploding, flowing chang, the pale-green barley beer. We all watch the fire and talk. The women tend the hearth fires and make rgutuk, a special soup of nine ingredients.
In the morning we feast the ancestors. Konchok Palmo and her brother and sister prepare a great platter with a mountain of paba at the center, a volcano with a crater filled with oil. It’s ringed with bread, fruit, nuts, and sweets and studded with walnuts and apricot kernels. Another plate of rice, meat, and roasted root vegetables is also prepared, along with shining brass zhapskyang of chang and thermoses of tea. When everything is ready we carry all the food and drink and a poksbor of coals and cedar to the small shrine above their upper field. Angdus makes two small plates, careful to include all of the offerings. His older sister quietly instructs him: “This one now. Don’t forget the chang.” He pulls a handful of paba from the mountain and deftly shapes a small butter lamp, fills it with oil, places a twisted cotton wick, and makes another. He lights them, puts down more cedar on the coals, says prayers, and then we all return to the warmth of the kitchen to eat. We share from the common plate.
After breaking fast we walk on, up around the village into the sunshine. We find Azhangpa and Yokhangpa sitting together on the sunny field above the prayer wheel, beginning their feast. We join them, so glad to be gathered like this– with dear ones, outside– though we are too full to eat. At length the meal is finished and we continue, following the sun. The three houses of Drakchanpa are gathered together on their upper fields and we sit down with them again, giving our thanks, too, to their ancestors, all the ancestors of this place, for making it all as it is.
On the third day after Namgang (new moon, “full sky”) we spend a long morning in the warm sun in the orchard, enjoying the spaciousness of winter in our small home in the gongma. We come down to the village after noon and find all the men gathered again, this time at the central village shrine with a great heap of ibex horns at its base, right beside the ice- covered stream.
Drakchenpi Konchok, in his late thirties, has just left the army. He is wearing kos, the traditional woolen dress, rolling balls of dough in his hands. He passes them one by one to his cousin Rigzin who rolls them flat on a board. Rigzin then pats them hard between his hands, slapping them back and forth, then lays them on a big flat piece of iron in the center of the group, on stones over a roaring fire. Kotipi Angdus waits for it to brown then slides a smooth curved piece of willow under the flatbread. He lifts and flips it expertly flat. When it is done he nudges it off the sheet metal and into the coals. Azhangpi Thinlay, darkly bearded and the youngest of the bunch, keeps adding wood in a v-shape and scrapes a bed of coals into the space between. He pushes the flatbread so it lies on the coals, puffing up like a balloon. He rotates it, finishing each edge in turn, flips it, does the same. Then he grabs it, blows it off, checks it, and tosses it onto a growing pile across the fire on cold stones.
(This to my eye is unique and beautiful manly bread making. What if by age fifteen or twenty all our men could know the wheat and the water and the fire so well?)
Meanwhile, as chang and tea are offered all around, other men and I chop and cook meat over another fire, all of this with wood from the great trees that tower over us, the yul sa, the village earth. This is the only place in the village where trees are not cut periodically at head height, for full timbers or pollarded for poles. Here they have grown in rich soil, drinking stream water, reaching to their full height and massive girth.
Acho Tashi (Drakchenpi) dips water from the stream with a hollow black dzo horn. He climbs the earth altar, speaking prayers, and splashes the water all over the old dry cedar. Then he takes away that old cedar. The wood and bone spikes to which it was bound, he blesses with butter. He ties new cedar in a fresh green ring all around. Last, he places an arrow tied with cloth point-down in the center.
The bread, meat, and a pillar of barley dough are all shared out equally to everyone present. The kids, who are playing on the ice and in the trees, come by for tea and food. It feels to me like the renewal of life and blessings, the sharing of abundance between all households equally.
