Every year until I was 18, I used to spend some four months in my hometown which was some 10 miles away from where my dad used to work. Those months were my favorite because they afforded reunion with cousins and running around with windmills made of worn off bamboo barks and foraging hazelnuts in hilly jungles. But those were also months when my mom and I would stand in line for hours at a village tap, waiting our turn to fill our water gallons for the day. Sometimes a brawl would start among villagers as to who came first to the tap which was nonetheless quite a spectacle. If we did not get our turns before the ‘tap hour’ was done, we would walk a few miles to a spring at the foothill of a mountain. The spring water was usually tastier.
The rest of the eight months, we lived in a quarter inside a school where my father worked. Here we mostly studied and lived like everything else was unimportant. Yet daily power cut was a requirement for all Nepalese and we were no exceptions to that. The evening hours were difficult when power would go before my siblings and I had finished our homework. I particularly remember studying under a street lamppost for some of my school exams, a time period when every household used to have up to 16 hours of power cut every day. The winter nights were not very friendly under the lamppost and I would catch a cold sometimes.
But when the summer months came around, we went back to our village - my birthplace which now is quite a suburb with the exponential growth of houses. With both my parents having come from an agricultural background, they made sure their children knew the hardships of farm life. So, we sowed and weeded and harvested paddy when the time came and drove oxen around and over cut rice stalks to make hay. The sun shone as sweat trickled down our chins, and often a villager would tell about the many times he jumped off an airplane because he knew we would believe him. But as August rolled, thunderous clouds took over our village, sometimes accompanying tennis ball-sized hailstones and sky-piercing flashes of lightning. With the hailstones, the harvest was sure to be dismal. As for the lightning, I must say I was fortunate to experience an electric bolt myself without serious injury.
Our quarter in school lay high above but very close to a deeply gorged river. By the river lay a gigantic tree-covered mountain. Each year, we had a lot of rainfall around here, and when the monsoon season rolled by, floods of water rolled down the mountain and disposed tree branches into the river. One year, the river flooded bad and took away lives and properties and also bared the mountains. The harrowing catastrophe and the way people living by the riverbanks adjusted to it made me think a little harder. A few years later, a 7.8 Richter scale earthquake shook about as I made an escape out of the window in my room. But devastation no one perceived had been done in various cities around the country and it would change entirely my perspective on nature and how we interact with it. With thousands of people dead, billions worth infrastructure gone to dust, and historical monuments and culture buried under rubble around the country, every breath for many Nepalese was a reinforcement of a struggle to live, a fight to survive. ----------------------
And then I came to the United States. Not only did it demand a new way to see and a different way of thinking, but it also demanded leaving behind my way of living, the only way I knew how. Everything seemed to be at a surplus. Everything seemed so systematically placed as though nothing would ever go wrong. As long as I was a functioning cog in bigger machinery, there seemed to be an unspoken promise everything will turn out fine and great even. But it felt somehow artificial, perhaps so to me, because I manufactured this way of thinking instead of growing up in it. So, to preserve my sense of place and identity, I decided to actively interact. In this course, I found UC Sustainability and was able to work for the office and to build a connection to nature surrounding me.
Why should I care? Problems seem to appear in front of me endlessly. Why should I listen to a man or a woman who knows nothing about my culture? My sense of identity seems to be constantly interrogated. Why should I revolt against the evils of capitalism? The idea of success in society seems to be so much intertwined with capitalism. Why do I ask that we all become more nurturing of our Mother Earth? Even nature seems to be playing odds against us sometimes. Why do I try and seek more sustainable ways of living every day? My actions seem to have so little consequences. Why raise awareness, why advocate climate change as an existential crisis? The bigger, more forceful companies seem to have convinced people already that everything is fine. Are we fine, will we be fine? We do not seem to be.
Or is it really so? I tell myself these are the way things are. Can I move beyond the notions I conceive about the dimness of things? There are ways forward.
The earth is a synchronous song of natural elements. I am no accomplished traveler, and yet one does not need to be, to establish intuitively the kinships among the earthly processes exhibited in different corners of the world. The centuries of biological and anthropological studies stand also as a testimony to such synchronicity. Perhaps this is why, often when an individual relocates to a different part of the world, the first and foremost thing they find coherent when everything else is chaos, is the immediate environment offered to them. Like Steinbeck would say, it (the coherence) is an ancient song that every human is attuned to hear and understand. Or I should suggest, at least to my experience, this holds true. And to me, a feeling of great joy comes from the fact that I have been able to connect myself to these seemingly disparate ways of interacting with nature. And even though it might sound like my vanity speaking, it feels as though I am a vine bridging between two trees. I like to imagine that we all are trying to be vines to connect and produce a luscious forest of humanity through our deeds on Earth.