Because our weather here is out of alignment with the heat in so much of the world today, I’m  reflecting back, drawn to files of the past.  I come to a poem I wrote years ago about an evening on a month-long trek in the Everest region of Nepal.  It was a day where I’d crawled, literally crawled to the altitude sickness clinic to have a doctor who comes from America as a volunteer lecture me on the insanity of what I was doing at altitude. He gave me a shot of antibiotics and sent me on my way.  He said in one more day, I would have been carried down on the back of a yak. 

Today I read an article on the wisdom people my age know, on what we’ve lived through, and how important it is to convey the transitions we’ve lived through to the young.  I offer a time when I saw how simply one can live, and also the value of medical care, something not available, even now, all these years later, to all.  This was the fall of 1993.  

Khumbu: Everest Region of Nepal

We leave our tent to huddle inside a hut for warmth.

A child dances naked, the wash hung overhead.

The child has no age, no birthday, only grace.

Prayer flags wave, clothes washed in the stream,

A stream wheeled in prayer.  

We tramp through their home like a park,

celebrate and denigrate our day of birth,

as we try to pack their religion 

in the wood and dung smoked scarf

we wrap around our throats,

like a crown, slipping down to our knees

where prayer might be 

as we kneel to cleanse 

in the movement of air 

circling mountains and clouds.