Touching MY Father’s Soul

In the Footsteps of Tenzing Nrogay: Touching MY Father’s Soul is a story of courage and passion to conquer the fear of limitations that lies in the core of each of us. These limitations are human constructs that the mind wants to constantly challenge. It is human nature to challenge ourselves in a physical world. One wants to constantly push the human flesh to reach the ultimate pinnacle where no man or woman has dared to go. The goal that one sets is often risky- that you cannot do without. You will not know what lies at your core until you have tried, even if you well know that this could befall death. Climbing Mount Everest is for most that journey to find ones core.

The climb is an adventure. It puts to tests the limits of human endurance, courage, fortitude, preparedness, failed attempts, valour, meeting death and understanding the futility of human desire. You must have an unshakable faith in your abilities – enough to defy the gods and nature – to rewrite your destiny. The little streak of fear can be your worst premonition that can be your doom. Despite this, people crowd to climb mountains. Today the Mount Everest is one of the most crowded real-life adventure sports.

In the Footsteps of Tenzing Nrogay is a pulsating journey of mountaineers who desire only one thing – to climb the Everest. They are made of every metal-varied, each displaying unique physiological dispositions. It is the journey of Jamling Norgay, the son of Tenzing Norgey wanting to touch his father’s soul at the highest peak in the world.

Jemling Norgay was invited by David Breashears to join the 1996 IMAX expedition to Mount Everest. The expedition saw the death of 11 people at various stages of the climb. 1996 was the deadliest year for climber’s trying to reach the world’s highest peak at 29,029 feet. It saw the death of 15 mountaineers’ that year. It is a mountain that shows no mercy. There may be several fatalistic reasons for the tragedy. However, what strikes one the most is the fragility of human life. One life is insignificant and miniscule when it comes to the evolution of nature. The clear-sighted desire to conquer the overpowering mountain can come to nothing. Sometimes the fate that befalls us is in direct relation of how we treat our earth.

The Earth OUR Mother

Jamling Tenzing Norgay follows the footsteps of Tenzing Norgay, a sherpa who climbed the Mount Everest along with Edmund Hillary. Tenzing Norgay had made a couple of failed attempts prior to the one where he succeeded in climbing to the summit with Edmund Hillary.

Jamling grew up under the grandeur of a name – that often distanced him from his father. The desire of a young boy to love his father simply and to grow under normal circumstances was impossible. Tenzing Norgay was a larger than life embodiment of human strength and courage. Growing up under the shadow of a celebrity father made the distance terse. The young Jamling pined for the affirmation of his father for many years, knowing that he could only meet his father on top of the mountain. The only redemption that Jamling had was to discover the steps of trepidation, spiritual awakening, discovering his father, awakening his deep consciousness in the belief of the hundreds of years of Tibetian spiritual insights and truth, walking slowly on the snow paths of internal struggles that his father did to climb Chomolungma* on May 29, 1953.

“I felt that only by following my father up the mountain, by standing where he had stood, by climbing where he had climbed, could I truly learn about him. I wanted to know what it was that drove him and what it was he had learned. Only then would I be able to assemble all the missing parts of a father’s life that a young man envisions and longs for but never formally inherits.”

The book takes you through the different cultural attitudes we have towards nature. One can often call it “pagan practises”. Buddhism (like much of all the eastern religions) rests its belief in nature. Disrespect to nature is disrespect to god. Climbing Mount Everest is often a “western” drive for adventure and thrill. The mountain is a manifestation of the divine that requires one to have an insight into the mystical understanding that nature is life giver, preserver and bestower of kindness, prosperity and life. You need to take the goddesses blessings and hold the mountain sacred with reverence. This is often an alien concept. The divide between spirituality and scientific pragmatism are often two languages that do not connect- and yet the power of the divine being omniscient is brought out beautifully in this book. This is a book on Zen and the art of Mountaineering.

Jamling who grew in a western world, takes to spiritualism the way as skeptic does: “I imagined that my propitiations were little more than superstitious gestures…. Buddhism hadn’t fully captured my heart. It wasn’t a subject taught at St. Paul’s, and my father was off climbing and traveling too much to teach me.”

Yet, at the end of his journey, he is still alive, unlike that of his fellow-climbers. He knows it is Goddess Miyolangsangma has been by his side all along. The ancient Buddhist traditions, the blessings of all his ancestors and the heritage of compassion, kindness and awe towards nature are his strength. Climbing Chomolungma (the Tibetian name for Mount Everest) is a metaphor to a spiritual journey. The storm enveloped the peak on May 10. It saw the death of nine climbers. Nature was angry. Jamling experiences the greatest religious transformation.

“Once I arrived in the lap of the mountain,…surrounded by Sherpas who believed, and confronted by a rich history of death - and death itself -I could no longer remain cynical.”

He adds, “the more I witnessed the garish displays of ego and individualism in some of the foreign teams,...the more I felt they were inviting misfortune.”

It is believed that Miyolangsangma assisted Tenzing Norgay in his successful climb to Chomolungma. The spiritual lamas believed that Tenzing Norgay's first wife was the incarnation of the goddess herself. If not for her, Tenzing would not have made it to the summit.

“What I learnt most-from both my father and the mountain – was humility. They both demanded it. At the end of six previous attempts to climb Chomolungma my father retreated, he said, not in defeat but in reverence...he was finally able to reach her summit in 1953 – as a visitor on pilgrimage – only by virtue of respect for Miyolangsangma.”

The Sherpa- the Unsung Hero

All expeditions ever carried out since the first few attempts to climb the Northern Ridge around 1951, have often been assisted by Sherpas. They are the carriers of mountaineering equipments. They take to the mountains out of necessity. The book describes the plight of the Sherpas’, who risk their lives under stress and exhaustion of climbing. The strength of the Sherpa is the ability to adapt to the changing conditions in the mountains. They are the lifeline in a place where dead bodies are scattered all over the mountain. Most fall victims to the effects of altitude, bad weather or bad judgement. There is no luxury for error. The Sherpas’ love the mountains and take pride in what they do. The risks they endure is driven by financial needs that can become exploitative: “wealthy 'white eyes', or “mikaru (as the Sherpas called us), who hired them to risk their lives on our behalf...”

Underestimating Small Acts of Goodness

The book ends leaving you humbled. This is a classic in mountaineering literature. But for me, it is a book of self-discovery.
“What is the meaning of the few brief instants in human history when people have stood atop Everest? The answer depends on the motivation of the person standing there. Those prepared to truly see and listen will find something different, and greater, than that they are seeking. They will find that the spirit and blessings of the mountains can be found, ultimately, within all of us...”

“Life in the mountains draws out the character of those who journey there...maybe this is one of the reasons we climb- to see ourselves at the core, not packaged and contained as we are when living within the constraints of technology and consumerism.”

We are all climbers. The desire to climb the summit is constant– it could be the mighty Himalayan range or our own mighty trepidations of life. Every day of living is pushing the flesh to stretch. Despite the often-painful stretch of life, the last lines in the book speak evocatively.

I take the words of Jemling’s grandfather Gaga, as the real essence in the journey to climb the summit called LIFE :
“We shouldn’t believe that small wrong doing can do no harm, because even a small spark can ignite a giant pile of hay. Similarly, the value of the smallest good deeds should not be underestimated, for even tiny flakes of snow, falling one atop another, can blanket the tallest mountains in pure whiteness.”
~~~*~~~

PS: Chomolungma or Goddess Mother of the World is the Tibetan name for Mt Everest. Chomolungma was given the “official” English name after Sir George Everest in 1865 who was the then British Surveyor General of India.

In the Palm of My Hand

I hold my offerings of love to you
Of wild hibiscus plucked with tender gratitude
In the wilderness, where flows the steam
Afar the rugged Ghats of thick forest

I hold in the palm of my hands
The joy of being who I am
Stretching my hands of trust and comfort
As the wild flower is scattered into the winding stream

The giver of life flows
Unconditional. Streams down narrow crevices
Through parched land
Softening the earth baked by the sun

My offerings are to you
Of wild cactus flowers plucked with reverence
That grows through the path of the sacred stream
For the earth that breathes in shallow breaths

The stream has no strength to move on
The thirsty mother has drunk the nectar, consumed
There cannot be more water to flow to places parched
Dams built to hold water. No longer for the earth, the wild and the open

I hold oblations in the palm of my empty hands
To offer my longing, in the hope of finding scattered grains of life
Near baked fields that merge with empty clouds
Where the farmer has nipped his life with the hand that tilled the earth

I pick up grains, a few. My hands red like the earth that grieves
Half palm, half empty. Searching
I stretch out my palms to you. My only prayer, oh little Sparrow
Come back to peck the seed that nests inside the chaff

You flew away beyond the skies
Like the stream that seeped into the fissure dry
As the earth breathes softly in the hope it will rejuvenate
For in the palm of my hand, I offer the love of care, tenderness of touch, eagerness of compassion

I have my last dry tear to splatter on you
Of worship in my heart, that resonates through the earth
Like the blowing of a conch at the end of a war
The woodpecker cries, squall of hope reverberates far away to the depths of the universe
 ~~~*~~~

There Is a Place

There is a place to hold yourself still

In the tranquillity of emptiness a little longer

Yet to be aware of the little gush of foamy water that surrounds your knee

As the sand beneath your feet nudges you firm on the salt laden banks

There is a place to allow yourself to drift

Into the curling waves. Joining, entering, blending

Drifting slowly to meet the mighty oceans

Into a wave of cosmic energy that connects the horizon

There is a place to look out into the night

As you walk quite, on the terrace

An owl flies past with its catch of darkness in its claws

You look mesmerized at the flapping of three lives

There is a place for intimacy

To know your pain

Of mingled pigmentation of time, events, silence and stillness

To stumble each into each without any harmless intentions

There is a place to smile and not know the smile

As you look out into the still of midnight blue

Drifting into a dream of fleeting sacred clouds

Of childhood memories, flying kites on clear windy skies

There is a place to undress

To take off layers of accumulated memory

Looking at the impressions of grotesque folds of flab on the mirror

The act of undressing the robes of time that falls in folds on the floor

There is a place to make love

Through the pain that stumbles

The fallible heart of grief that tugs in the wind

Tempestuously on the staff that tells you, others have treaded this path before

There is a place to drop down your bags

Enough of backpacking with the soaps and toothbrush and floss

Sinking into the fluffy pillow

Bringing the carless laziness of nothingness to timid acknowledgment

There is a place to breath. Slowly. In and out

Of life other than that it is

To stop to be open to this moment of harmless intentions

Of love that lifts your heart to intimately dissolve the grief that has been

There is a place to be still

To silently watch the orange sun

Sink inch by inch into the large ocean waves that connect the world

As you go back to your heart that is home to the whispered joy of emptiness

~~~**~~~