Writing from the dining room table, the sun glances off the wet leaves of a cherry tree, flowers long since fallen. I’m back at home but my mind remains in another world on the other side of the globe. Moments of gentle abandon and deep sleep remind me that I was there just a few days ago. Memories are unshackled from their organized structure and waves of images and feelings wash over me as I write these words, thinking about how it was and how it is.

The culture shock of returning from Asia to the U.S. is powerful. While we tend to see and feel the world as compressed by electronic media and the lack of distance between here and there, now and past, the reality is much more powerful in that, culturally, the life I live in the U.S. is worlds away from Bhutan. Everything from the mundane, like daily routines, or the more complex, like how to put food on the table shake the ways in which culture and society are shaped.

In Bhutan, there is a rhythm that drones in the background of days and nights. If you sit, for a moment, you can feel the sensations and the echoes of songs that resonate across mountains and valleys of the place. Walking into a temple and hearing the chanting, songs, drums of the monks and nuns wakes something inside that rattles out of a cage, freeing the spirit and allowing a more joyful, hopeful experience to take over from the dullness that is part and parcel of life in the United States. That’s what these days, here, in New Mexico feel like right now. To return to a structure that limits, that presses down, and that is all about just making ends meet and making life less meaningful than it could be.

The expression of this cultural shock is referenced by the return of oppression. Sure, being on “vacation” tends to do that to anyone. At the same time, I’d argue it wasn’t a vacation, is was a release. An opening into the possibilities of a what a life could be; not just bound by capitalist finances but shaped by the words and songs of Vajrayana. For our minds to be agthered up, shown to us, and offering us all a path that does not talk about things like heaven and hell, but offers community, collective identity, and the chance for a true, lasting freedom.

It’s all of these things that have captured my mind. And while I struggle with spiritual materialism and the possiblity that, in fact, I’m idealizing and romanticising moments in the past, I find that those cyncial arguments collapse as everything moves toward the idea that there is, in fact, something beyond this worldly existence. So, what is left on me, in me, as part of me, is the impression of what can be. Here I sit, dwelling in this afterglow, knowing that I have a part to play in this understanding, and that it is possible to reconfigure my heart and mind toward something different, and, most importantly, as part of somethiugn beyond me and closer to we. That’s where “I” am right now.

May you be happy, May you be well.