The winning photo for my new anthology, coauthored with Chris Parish, Great Awakenings: Radical Visions of Spiritual Love & Evolution was photographed in March 1983, on a trek north of the Kathmandu Valley, in the Langtang mountain region.

How I got there is a story and a promise that happened a few years before. In the blacklight room of my friend Sugar (that I described in the writeup about Be Here Now) Sugar and I made a pact that one day we would go to the Himalayas in Nepal. We didn’t have a specific date or even commitment to go together. We just wanted to set a marker in the timelines of our futures to carry through with our spiritual quest and to seek wisdom where the mystics meditated in the clouds.

In the intervening years, I did volunteer work with Russian and Moroccan refugees in Northern Israel, and went to Cornell where I was trying to cobble together an academic program that released me from any pre-requisite courses (yes, I was a child of postmodernity and I didn’t like restrictions) and that allowed me to put together a program that would give me the academic theoretical and practical skills to understand how to design a new type of community.

It was the early 80s, business was opening up with Japan and Ivy Leagues were pushing programs that trained their flocks in Japanese for Business purposes. I was in luck. I love obscure languages. I had just done my first Zen meditation with Eido Roshi. And my father, a particle physicist, was going on sabbatical outside Tokyo to work on a new particle accelerator one of his colleagues was in charge of building there.

(If you’re wondering how this relates to a photo of snow mountains some thousands of miles west of Japan, in a round about way it does. And my sense of direction was never all that great anyway, just ask my husband when we’re driving.)

So, fast forward 3 semesters later, less than stellar success at Japanese Language for Business Purposes, but great work on Eastern Buddhist philosophy and post WWII Japanese literature. My public agenda: take a Junior year abroad, study Japanese, teach English, return and complete degree. My private agenda: learn enough Japanese to be able to study in a Zendo in Kyoto. Needless to say, I kept my private agenda to myself.

I stopped in Bangkok en route. The exoticism of Asia lit my imagination. Giant sleeping Buddhas, tribal villages in bamboo groves, the color and chaos of shoestring travellers. One thing led to another.

I took a left turn.

Bangladesh, the wetlands. Burma, tightly restricted 7-day travel route, mist and magic. K-k-k-kathmandu.

My mother was writing me long aerogrammes about how her sterile new apartment  only had a microwave oven with 40 buttons in Japanese and she couldn’t figure out how to cook. I was writing back about learning to cook on buffalo dung in my unheated reed hut on the far side of Fewa Lake in Pokhara.

My first Buddhist retreat at Koppan Monastery, learning about the graduated path to Enlightenment, the preciousness of the human birth, how very little school-age monks know about hygiene, and how hard it is to tame the mind even in such simple surroundings.

After 10 days of teachings from the resident Geshe (Tibetan monk and professor), little went in though I captured much for posterity in simple children’s copybooks. I took my notes and aspirations to somehow find the discipline and training to be able to get even a little bit of clarity and develop a tiny bit of the boundless compassion of a Buddha I seemed so far from, I went to explore the crown jewels of Nepal.

Strung like a diamond necklace straight across the Southern edge of the crescent-shaped country, the Himalayan peaks are a rugged jumble of grand rocks thrown like dice across the land. Inviting and forbidding, they lure with the promise of adventure and awakening and punish with harsh winds and pangs of loneliness.

I walked, a relatively simple couple week route, the spring being a kinder gentler time, blood-red crimson rhododendron in bloom, goats and black bulls happy for the fresher shoots, mischievous and destructive rhesus monkeys in the lower elevations.

The snow mountains were my companions. They seemed to speak with the changing light. Their ridges and smooth rock faces transmitted some undecipherable geometric code, sometimes promising, sometimes wise, sometimes foreboding. I’d recite the mantras I learned in time with my steps. I scouted for wildlife. I looked for trails of Yeshe Tsogyal’s scarf in the great cloud swirls. I lost myself and my concerns in the play of sunlight and snow.

This photo, which is now the cover of Great Awakenings was taken on one of the highlights of the trek. Three or four days in a row climbing up and up and up, on a ridge beside the range of peaks. Their ridgeback was my guide, my navigator. The peaks had presence, watchfulness. I felt their compassion, the way that millions of years wears away the challenges of the day. And I felt oddly supported by their aspiring majesty, as high as they reached they seemed to push yet higher, stretching for the heavens above, stretching for the future.

They were my first snow mountains. That trek set in motion a year of adventure in the mountains, making those far away heights familiar, and challenge and distance and the search for spiritual insight possible, with patience and perseverance, one step after another.

For more on the mystics and their writings that inspired me then — and now — sign up for my 4 part free eLearning course here.