THEY CALL IT THE TOP OF THE WORLD

mt everest

Watched a documentary yesterday, EVEREST: 50 YEARS, a National Geographic film. The camera followed a climb by the sons of Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay, the first people to reach the top of the world's highest mountain, 29,029 feet above sea level, by one measurement. Another says 29,035 and another 29,028. Close to six miles up in the air. That's where passenger jets fly. To the local people of Nepal, Everest is the mother goddess of the world. Their name for the mountain is Sagarmatha. The Tibetan name is Chomolunga. In that part of the world, it is a sacred mountain. I appreciated the emphasis on the lives of the Sherpas who carry supplies in to the base camp and accompany climbers. I've seen several documentaries of Himalayan mountain climbing expeditions and have read a few accounts of climbers. I enjoy reading a climber's account of the ascent. None of the ones I've seen have paid much attention to the Sherpas but as beasts of burden. In this film, they go into the homes of a few of the Sherpas to meet their wives, mothers, family. The women spoke of their apprehension over their men climbing the mountain. Several have died. It's good paying work for money to get by on where money is scarce. Talking with different Sherpas along the way gave a sense of them as conscious, thinking human beings. I used to think Sherpa was the name of the occupation. Sherpa is the name of their tribe. Several tribes live through the mountains there. It just happens that the Sherpa tribe is in that territory. Others from different tribes are among the Sherpas in a climb. It is work that pays so well the men turn up in a big crowd to be chosen from. Edmund Hillary took an interest in the local population. Over a period of years he provided a large number of hospitals and schools. He provided them with foundational necessities they had little to no access to. 

mt everest / chomolunga / sagarmatha

Hillary's son, Edmund Jr, planned the climb with son of Tensing Norgay to scale the mountain on the fiftieth anniversary of the first to reach the summit. The chances of reaching the summit once a team sets out are slim. Weather on the mountain changes instantly and by surprise. Sometimes climbers have been caught in a blizzard with hurricane wind for a couple weeks at a time, stuffed into sleeping bags and the tent walls flapping like a flag about to rip from its pole. I've read that when climbers get trapped in their tents for a week or two, they never want to see each other the rest of their lives. They come out of it despising each other. Fortunately for the National Geographic project, the weather allowed the team to make it to the top. A time came when they were close they believed they would have to turn around and descend. One of the Sherpas was heartbroken. This would be his last chance in his life to go with an expedition to the summit. He broke down when the decision was made to turn back. He quit. He walked to base camp with intent to go home. He said, "I hate God." He was furious with God. It was his only chance and he wanted with all he had to make it to the top. His fury settled after a few hours, the storm settled and the team called him back. He went on and was one happy Sherpa at the top. The guide, Peter Athans, said he made five attempts before he was able to climb all the way to the summit. Hearing Athans talk about his experiences with the mountain that he knew intimately was one of the many dimensions of the mountain the film covered. Sherpas talked about the difference between the way they see the mountain and the how the climbers see it. The Sherpas are in the literal lap of the mother goddess. For them, the mountain is the holy of holies. They are in awe when they are on the mountain. They say the climbers call it a challenge, a struggle, a fight, though the Sherpas are at peace in the lap of the Mother.

a climbing route up mt everest

Edmund Hillary Jr appeared to be at peace with the mountain too. He grew up and spent his life with his dad working with the Sherpa people of the region. He knew and appreciated the Sherpa people as people with lives. I have to say that before this film, the Sherpas were faceless to me, like Japanese pilots in WW2 movies. I never saw them in the films in any way but carrying heavy packs on their backs like donkeys. White people all over the world tend not to take people of any color seriously as valid human beings. That's just the arrogance of whiteness, which we white people have in abundance. I saw that neither father nor son Hillary showed a trace of the arrogance of whiteness. They were privileged and used their privilege to help the Sherpa people. Edmund Sr climbed to the top with his Sherpa partner. Neither one has ever told which one set foot on the summit first. Hillary's attitude was they climbed the mountain together and they reached the summit together. He saw to it the white press gave Tensing Norgay equal attention for making it to the top. I don't know it, but would guess the two Edmunds know the language too. The documentary following the climbers, the scenes on the mountain, made a good film in themselves, but I felt like including the Sherpas like Hillary did made it all the more interesting. Seeing the people in their world talking about their lives added a great deal to the film for me. They seem like they are living the way people lived here in these mountains before electricity, a simple community of people who have lived there and among each other all their lives for many generations. Here, it's looked back on as the golden age, though nobody would give up tv, recliners and flushing toilets to go back, or move to Kathmandu. 

climbing up the mountain

Every time the camera focused on the Sherpa people, I was there, looking at true humanity in their faces, eyes and body language, from a golden age in our distant past in the western world. It would have to be all the way back to medieval times. Their religion, a form of Buddhism close to Tibetan, is clearly a religion of inner peace. I believe this is what makes them "inscrutable" Asians to us. The people of the Buddhist world value inner peace and stillness, which have no value in the Christian world, but in hymns. I was thinking I could learn something valuable living among the Sherpa people for 35 years. They surely have satellite televisions for ones who can afford them to watch soccer games, football there. I think it kind of follows that where you have a high concentration of people of faithful leanings, you have the opposite too, thugs, gangsters, bandits, thieves. The whole spectrum would be there. I wonder if places  high in spiritual vibration that draw the faithful would also draw all the different colors of the human character. I was guessing among the Sherpas that carrying a pack on a mountain climbing expedition was a macho thing for a man. It made him a good provider for his family. Much status in their village or town. On another level, these are the men who have been in the lap of the Mother, a high spiritual place to be. I had the impression that the climb for the Sherpas tended to be a meditation, what we call here a spiritual retreat. The Sherpas work together, camp together, pray together, support each other like family. They harken Prozac Nation to a gentler time of close-knit, tribal community that goes back for centuries where people really knew each other and lived their lives together. It reminded me about regarding my mountain sacred. Maybe I could hang some prayer flags about. 

prayer flags at the summit

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TOP OF THE WORLD WITHIN

     aquarium starter

A day of sprinkling rain that started with damp air. The air got thicker with dampness until it gathered into drops and gradually soaked into the ground. No runoff. These are the kinds of rains we like. The water table in the mountains is lowering every day. I read somewhere that the earthquake near Richmond, Virginia, last year, lowered the water table in the mountains a couple of inches. People moving to the mountains where they have a well that draws from the water table, waste water at the same rate they did in the suburbs with a reservoir system. Of course, they know nothing about water from either source. It's just water. It flows out of the faucet and goes down the drain. Out of sight, out of mind. The subdivision up the road from me, higher elevation by a hundred feet or more, using water unconsciously has lowered the water table at my spring to the place the spring only runs water while it rains. All the houses in my part of the mountain are above me in elevation. Their wells are drawing the water that once flowed out my spring. Who will they blame when all the streams around here have dried up and the waterfalls only run when it rains? No doubt, they'll blame the liberals.



I think of it a natural disaster like an earthquake or a war. I can't blame the people who use water as freely as people dump shit in the ocean. They're in unconsciousness that might be called absolute. Their heads are loaded with tv shows, worries about money, wanting things they can't afford. So many people are satisfied with tv, worries and wanting, that it can only be said they're unconscious. I'm not excepting myself, by the way. I don't use water, though, like it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. When I came to the mountains, I came here to get acquainted with the mountains, to become acquainted with the flora, fauna, with the ground itself. This region of the mountains had not been reduced to rolling lawns yet. I feel the strangeness the old people I've known have felt, gradually being surrounded by a world of people who talk continuously about nothing (that really is an art form), watch television while they're talking, want no input they have to think about or pay attention to, focused on wanting things that money buys, status included. What the mountain people see in the white middle class people overwhelming the mountains (self included) is absence of respect; they exhibit no awareness of respect, certainly not as something important.



I came here to learn the mountains, to feel the mountains, to be one with the mountains, which I've done. I've not met anyone else who came here for the mountains, except in their minds as a Wow, We Have Another Home In The Mountains. As seen on tv. Spending is saving. We have a great view. The realtor was so nice. But there's nothing to do here. Always makes me want to say, There's plenty to do here if you could tolerate being near somebody from the working class anyplace besides Walmart. They'll call me a socialist, because they're always republicans, so I keep my mouth shut and go my own way. I like to keep it up front and clear that I'm an anti-republican. Word goes around quickly and republicans leave me alone, just like Jehovah's Witnesses quit knocking on my door several years ago. That last visit was the best. Usually, I close the door and tell them to keep moving. I let them in, said, You've come to my house to tell me what you believe. I'm going to turn the tables. You've come to my house, so I take it God wants me to tell you what I believe. They ran for their lives and never returned. And I really didn't even get started. Every time I pass their meeting place at Twin Oaks, I thank them in my heart for leaving me alone. They're of that mind, if you don't see it my way, you'll burn in hell. I'm here to save you from infernal damnation. 



Makes me want to say, Hail Far, Yeah!! and give them the forefinger-littlefinger salute. They bring out the contrarian within. All I want them to know when they knock on my door is they done started something they don't want to see finish. They acted like they had fallen into the pit of Hades, simply because I made up a way that was like their own but different names. They looked to the elder among them, a guy about my age, who gave them a glance of the eye that said, It's time for us to git. In my head I hear Fleetwood Mac harmonizing, You can go your own way, get thee outta here-ere-ere. I object to their presumption that God wants them to badger other people in their homes, showing how they can quote the Bible and run references like they're the only kind of people God approves of. I respect a preacher and someone from the old-time mountain way who runs references like a pro and can quote an awful lot of scripture, people who got that way from their own self-education, not because it's something to show off that looks good. The old folks around here study at home, like Jesus said, "in your closet."



The Way, whatever name it has, whatever path it is, goes up the mountain; the goal, to reach the top. The Ralph Stanley song comes to mind, On the high, high mountain was a beautiful fountain that shone with the glory of God. Somebody whose path is up the dark side of the mountain has the same goal as someone who climbs the light side of the mountain. It doesn't matter which trail up the mountain anyone goes. The way I see it, if you're looking upward within, you're climbing the mountain. I don't see how it gets anybody anywhere gathering around a leader, who knows no more than you can find out on your own, whose only credentials are that he has a bigger ego. A friend stopped by yesterday and we talked awhile. He was telling me about some church women who had ganged up on another church woman and excluded her, not by words, but by actions. He said, That's not Christian. I said, Yes, it is. He persisted that he knew them to be serious about their love-Jesus group. I automatically said, They're not serious. He bolted, How do you know? (I don't even know these people) I said, If they were serious, they'd do it on their own without the group. The group is social first and love-Jesus 8th or 9th, if at all, whatever the group is. We broke out laughing.



We talked some about group dynamics and individual dynamics in the climbing of one's own interior mountain. Like someone climbing a Himalayan mountain starts with a support group; Sherpas, equipment, cooks, radio operators, medical, etc. The group establishes and maintains the Base Camp. The climber leaves the support group and is on his own, no safety net. First day, he finds a shelf to put a tent on to get him or her, women climb mountains too, through the night where it's way below zero and no heat in the tent. He can make a little canned heat fire, enough to heat water for tea or soup. Next day, up the mountain to the next ledge for a campsite, and carry on up the mountain into the zone of air too thin to live on, the death zone. If a climber stays too long on the top, he may lose consciousness on the way down. The way back is part of the climb too. We do live in this world. It is our home. It's where we can breathe. We return to the world with the fountain of light seen at the top to guide us through the playing field of everyday life, not to brow-beat others with you-gotta, you-needta, you-oughta, you-should. The people who have seen the fountain don't brow-beat anybody about anything. People who want to know about getting there, go for counsel to the ones who have been there.



I remember a "beatnik joke" that was going around sometime in the late 50s, a long monologue about a beatnik wanting to find the guru in a cave high on Mt Kailash in the Himalayas to tell him the meaning of life. He worked his way across the Pacific on a merchant ship, crossed SE Asia along jungle roads on foot to northern India, working for food and a place to sleep at temples along the way, and eventually found the old man's cave. Of course, the old sage had long white hair and beard, and was sitting cross-legged. The seeker asked the guru to tell him the meaning of life. The man in the cave said, "Life is a fountain." The seeker exclaimed in surprise, "Life is a fountain? Is that it? I went through all I went through, travelled half way around the world on foot for you to tell me life is a fountain?" The old feller said, "Ok. Life is not a fountain."

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