The Tibetans of Ithaca
Oct. 23rd, 2024 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Hanging with RTT was good, but hanging in Ithaca was not good. Was it the mood I was in or the time of year, so close to Dia De Los Muertos?
Ithaca was filled with ghosts.
They weren’t quite strong enough to materialize, but I could feel them everywhere I walked (and I walked quite a bit)
A blur that might have been Justin, leaning against a church wall in DeWitt Park.
A bright banner, flapping in the wind outside the Unitarian Church on Cayuga Street where Janet had been the first African American deacon.
The 7/11 in whose parking lot, Jason—Justin’s brother, Janet’s grandson—pulled a gun on someone. (Jason’s still alive but a horrific childhood plus juvie destroyed him mentally. He’s a floater in the land of the living.)
Ben on that stretch of State Street between the Diner & Gimme Coffee the time I first realized, He’s very, very sick, isn’t he?
How did I know Ben was very, very sick?
Well, because I was walking down that stretch of State Street one day a couple of months before I moved away from Ithaca & I saw Mark Conly, beaming broadly, arms outstretched. And this was odd because Mark Conly had died from complications of his multiple sclerosis just six months before.
Mark didn’t coalesce into Ben until he got within two feet of me.
As a sidebar, I will note this is often the way visions work. They are rarely hallucinations created out of thin air. Most often, they build on something that’s already out there in the physical universe.
Which, of course, makes it difficult for the person who’s having the vision: Are you becoming mentally unhinged, or are you actually vibrating on a supernatural frequency?
There is no way to answer that question.
Another fallacy about occult visitations: People always think they’re most likely to occur in the dark.
In truth, prime time for the supernatural is preternaturally warm days when the wind is high, and yet, and yet: There is an uneasy feeling of stillness.
Which described the weather in Ithaca while I was there to a T.
Anyway, I was so creeped out by the ghosts I could almost (but not quite!) see in Ithaca that the morning before I took off back to the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I insisted on visiting the Namgyal Monastery to purify myself.
Long-term readers of this diary—I think there may be 1.8 of you—may remember that when I lived in Ithaca, I was the English-As-a-Second-Language tutor of choice for the surprisingly large Tibetan population living there.
They also all wanted me to do their taxes!!!!!!!
The student the Tompkins County Learning Center assigned to me was Lopsang. (I forget what name I referred to her by when writing about her so long ago.) She’d grown up in the province of Kham, home of the Tibetan warrior princesses. A Tibetan monk smuggled her out of Tibet to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala, India, where she lived for some years before emigrating to the U.S. and marrying the man who’d rescued her, now a medical coder & Tibetan monk no longer.
I improvised my ESL lesson plans. I didn’t see much point in teaching Lopsang the finer points of English language grammar. Did it really matter if she knew how to conjugate the past tense of irregular verbs?
Instead, I went over to Lopsang’s house & played her three-minute clips culled from old episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Then I’d make her talk to me about them. Full court babble—that was my goal. It was not important that she speak grammatically; it was important that she overcome her self-consciousness about how badly she spoke English and just speak.
Little House on the Prairie was about life on a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy, right? Lopsang had grown up a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy. Maybe she could relate.
Pretty soon, we were joined by other Tibetans until 15 or so were showing up for my thrice-weekly lessons.
It seems to me Tibetan Buddhism is very unlike other types of Buddhism.
The Tibetan Buddhists I knew weren’t into detachment at all. They were very materialistic! They loved Black Friday above all other holidays and could hardly wait to describe to me (in broken English) all the fabulous things they’d bought at BestBuy for a discount! They loved electronics.
The one thing that seemed to differentiate their conversation from other people’s conversation was that they were constantly throwing in allusions to past lives.
So, if I’d describe something that happened to me over the weekend, Lopsang might nod vigorously & say, “You know something like that happened to me two lives before this one—”
They were very serious about past lives.
Anyway, Lopsang & her husband were instrumental in raising the funds to build this monastery complex, and I’d gone there that morning half in the hopes I’d run into her.
I’d run into her there several times in the past.
But today, there was no one there at the monastery at all though the gates were wide open.
Still, the place seemed to do its magic ‘cause when RTT & I went back to Ithaca, I didn’t sense the ghosts anymore.
The vehicle above is the Dalai Lama’s very own jeep!!! He used it to power along all the back trails of Tibet, Mustang, & Nepal back in the day.
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Date: 2024-10-24 07:55 pm (UTC)Tibetan monks disposed of one of their sand mandalas in the garden of a friend of my mother's, by her rhododendrons that had never bloomed. They proceeded to bloom--out of season. (I probably have told you that story before.)
Love the story of your vision and intuition about Ben. And I'm nodding at your observations about those sorts of visions more generally.
My oldest's first girlfriend, who I'm very close with, messaged me the other day. "What's new?" she asked. "I had a dream about you."
"Hmmm, not much," I said. "Have you talked to A [my oldest] recently?"
"No--what's new with A?"
"Well, he's getting married to his girlfriend K! And he has other news, but he should tell you."
"Oh--are they expecting a baby?"
"YES!"
"Makes sense. I dreamed you were holding a baby."
Pretty cool ^_^ (also--yeah! my son and his girlfriend are expecting a baby and at last I can tell people!)
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Date: 2024-10-25 01:20 pm (UTC)I absolutely loved one of Max's Xes and would have adored keeping some sort of friendship with her after they broke up, but she was not receptive. We still follow each other on Instagram, though, so I keep up with her life. I miss her. 😥
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Date: 2024-10-25 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 09:52 am (UTC)But no, not their place to come home with you. There's something so reassuringly about Buddhist enjoyment of the tangible here and now, good and earthy!
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Date: 2024-10-25 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-25 10:01 pm (UTC)