It is an unusually sunny day with a blue sky.  Comfortable and sleepy in the sun on this winter’s day, I pick a point of departure and muse backwards in time and finally, after many weeks, begin to write.

I am in the mountains of Gansu Province.  So high am I in this valley surrounded by mountains, I’ll never really warm up not even at night.  I’ve traveled almost a month now discarding a trail of old clothes… a coat here… pants and a skirt there… socks and shirts… a sweater.  There is hardly anything left in my small suitcase… just two tablecloths I’ve bought in the Grand Bazaar of Kashgar… tiny hand-stitched carpets from Khotan… a bag of sand from the Taklamakan Desert… smooth stones… tail feathers from a pheasant… some wild flowers I’ve gathered… books… some essentials vaguely necessary for daily living.  I’ve spoken English only once this month… to another dusty American woman, an archaeologist.  We’ve had breakfast together in some place long ago forsaken by God.  She goes her way.  I go mine.

I am almost as empty as my suitcase.  I have few thoughts left.  I don’t care if it’s cold. I walk anyway.  I stay away from The Everest Cafe, a backpacker hangout in Xia He.  I have no interest in talking with anyone, really. Don’t want to drink.  Don’t want to smoke.  Don’t want to have my journey managed from the inside of a backpacker hangout… have no desire for pizza… hamburgers and French fires… Coca-Cola.  I take my meals in the hotel restaurant as DVD’s of Tibetans dancing play on the TV. It’s cheap there… the food delicious and hot… and clean… the Tibetan waitresses are nice like all young women in China who see an older woman traveling alone.  It’s pleasant there, and I like it a lot.  I walk in the garden after dinner and, then, over the churning river and out on to the road next to the Tibetan village and saunter with the cows and the yaks as they walk home from the grasslands.

The grasslands never stop drawing me. I’ve taken long walks under the dome of a perfectly blue sky.  I walk and walk in that green that is endless, past ger camps with drunken men reeling from liter after liter of beer. Motorcycles polished and shining in the sun… gleaming, gasoline powered versions of pack horses whiz by.  Some stop to give me a lift, but I smile and wave them off. This is my last day here in this peaceful place along the river where women wash their clothes and monks debate.  Later I will spend a moment at its side as the mountains turn to blackness and the crickets begin to sing.

For several days now, I’ve taken a measure of this place I’m passing through.  Tibetans walk along turning their prayer wheels and the horses wear prayer flags as they gallop and graze just as the Wind Horse… unattached to anything… not even the green earth beneath and the sky above… joined only in just one mantra… Om mani padme hum… Behold! The jewel in the lotus.  For a moment it seems as if I am riding bareback with prayer flags blowing against my thigh … feeling all that is me from the day I’ve been born… impermanent… without contradiction.

Back on the road, I ask to rest on a broken, wooden kitchen chair in front of an old shop… buy a plastic bottle of barley tea.  An old Tibetan woman gives me what she has to share… three tiny, green pears with a matter-of-fact kindness reserved for passersby.  I wipe them on my pants and munch.  They are bitter.  The air is filled with the fragrance of juniper as it trails up from the incense burner in the junky front yard.  Tibetan Buddhist mantras fill the air.  In the small living room of the adjoining house, people sit in a circle.  They chant as if they are drinking water… preparing dinner… going to bed at night.

I think of my mother… her life, the same mantra of a different sort.  I am sitting with her in late October in the woods in back of her house.  We’ve spent the late afternoon under the trees with a carpet of leaves beneath our feet drinking tea from the samovar.  We’ve put incense used in the censor of the Orthodox church with the charcoal and the fragrance wafts toward us as we hear our own remembered chants, “Dumnezeu să ne binecuvânteze.” We watch the light leave… the imagined chants… these invocations imploring the blessings of God fading in the suddenly cool air.   We converse less and less… two women sitting arm in arm on tree stumps holding hands.  My head is on her shoulder.  Nothing more can be said about this moment except that the stars come out one by as we sit there in silence for a very long time. The leaves glide to the ground… lace handkerchiefs floating against the starlit sky… there is no need of them, because there are no tears for now.  Our essences mingled together rise, blow away in the soughing of the bare branches of the trees and meet many years later in this place of mantras that travel on the wind.

I am sitting on this bare, broken chair in the sun.  I am not alone.  The old Tibetan woman is sitting next to me inward and quiet… her lips moving noiselessly. She could be the Bodhisattva of Compassion.  She could be my mother.  It has taken me many years to understand that my mother is no longer in need of a voice… she is in the air of this place that I breathe… the proof of her presence in the movement of the prayer flags entwined with the horse’s mane as it gallops across the grasslands… now free… without sorrow.

I breathe into the breath of the wind.  I am earth-colored sand carefully sprinkled to form a mandala of mountain and sky. I am unseen to the unconscious eye… I am disappearing into the landscape… but I am there all the same.  Here, so faraway, I am hearing nothing.  I am listening for nothing.