Over the past months we've spent much time moving slowly through and experiencing the ways of living and the changes in ways of living in the high desert regions of rural Spiti, Zanskar, and Ladakh. Our experience here has us feeling very passionate about sharing perspectives that challenge one size fits all global development as we see how it can lead to the deterioration of culture, environment, and a people's happiness, health, and sense of place.
In this post I try to paint a picture of the traditional past, the transitioning present, and a future continuing in the direction of western development using a the typical situation in a rural village here as an example.... The direction we are heading feels like a dramatic loss but we are inspired to find much hope that the people here and people around the world are gaining the awareness to find a middle way...
A village in the high desert Himalaya...
There are just 7 homes, each large and spacious, with grass, sticks and cow dung stacked high on the roof. Prayer flags flap in the wind above the grass, sending prayers of love and compassion throughout the lonely mountain valley... Each house was built with local materials and with the communal effort of the local people. The large size is not for show but for functionality, with space for storing grain and other human foods, large amounts of fodder, and keeping animals and humans warm and comfortable over the long winters. Yaks of different breeds spend their winters inside after a summer of grazing in the mountains, alongside them are many sheep, goats, and a couple of donkeys.
In one room one finds many buckets fill with each days milk as it ferments and turns into curd, much of which will later be turned into butter. The leftover liquid is then boiled and made into the local dried cheese and used in soups throughout the year. Nothing is wasted, all resources valuable.
Alongside the fermenting dairy is fermenting grains of barley, producing the local beer, 'chang' that is drunk by all either watered down as a refreshing drink during heavy work or stronger as a relaxing top off to a long day or an enhancement for enjoyment at local celebrations.
Stocks of dried vegetables, root vegetables, and grains fill the rest of the space.
In this house an entire extended family has lived for generations. Grandmother and grandfather now have a more relaxing indoor role as the spend more time near and in the home, praying, making tea, and doing small chores, feeling secure and well taken care of in their old age. Mother and father are out working in the fields, with the animals, and cutting grass with the help of their children and young grandchildren that follow around and play among the flowers and grains.
Everyone in the village is up just before dawn and asleep much after dusk, working in the fields or surrounding mountains, cooking, taking care of animals, spinning wool, building and repairing homes... the work often involves much physical effort but no one appears stressed, no one is over worked. Much time is spent throughout the day drinking butter tea or chang with tsumpa, along with breaks for meals, all cooked over a cow dung fire with simple local wholesome ingredients.
Families and friends are often found sitting together laughing and relaxing under the shade of a rock wall or a tree.... leisure is built into the day. Everyone feels that they belong, that they have a meaningful role in this world, that they have a community they can count on.
Everyone in the village knows how to grow the food the need to sustain themselves, they know how to take care of, raise, and obtain needed products from animals, they know how to build a house, how to make clothes, ropes, and shoes. They have an understanding and connection with the mountains around them, they have a religious philosophy that keeps them grounded peaceful and compassionate.
They are completley at home in these mountains and within themselves.....
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Walking through this same village today the surface appears to be mostly the same, but a deeper look shows a creeping shift...
There are less children and young adults around as they are now sent away for school, off in search of jobs in the cities, or away leading foreign tourists on treks and transporting their luggage on donkeys.
A look out in the fields and around and in homes find mostly elder couples, some alone, some with just one son or daughter around to help with the farm work. The only children are those under the age of 5, still running around with each other among the paths and fields.
Durong the summer months foreign trekkers on holiday come through in big groups. They use their large cameras to take photos of local people in their daily work and they surround the remaining young children, snapping photos and handing out chocolates...
In homestays and camps they eat rice, dal, white bread, eggs, powdered milk tea and other non local foods. Locals expect that foreigners won't like their traditional meals and the trekkers have learned these foods to be the trekking staples, hardly knowing that there are much more nutritious options available grown right in front of them... options that they could choose that would give local people a greater sense of pride in their culture in place rather than seeing these market goods as the more advanced sophisticated options...
Plastic wrappers and bottles are found scattered around the water channels and fields. In the homes chemical soaps, packaged biscuits and butter, and other market products replace the local, free, and more environmentally friendly traditional cleaning products and foods.
Rice and dal become a common meal for locals as well, transported thousands of kilometers to reach them and providing far less nourishment than that which they grow right outside their door.
The younger generation now live outside the village, all off in schools in cities, staying in hostels and being exposed to a drastically different way of living and thinking. Consumer culture media, and their own teachers in school teach them that the way forward is to live in the cities, make more money, and buy more consumer goods. They learn that the ways of life in the village of their parents and grandparents is backward and only for the uneducated.
They spend nearly their whole upbringing away from their roots, not knowing how to grow food, build a home, cook traditional foods, or make clothes. Their bodies become more weak than those of their ancestors as they eat chemical foods and are un accustomed to physical labor.
This generation is more educated than their ancestors but lesser in wisdom, they lack a sense of community, contentment and belonging. They are taught to strive for more bigger and better and distract themselves from the confusion felt on the inside. They are trained to fit into city jobs, and into the global economic system and become less and less fit for self sufficient survival....
---- (A look to where things are heading and where some places have already gone)----
Back in the village things become quieter and survival more difficult. Leisure time becomes less as there are less hands around to help with the work.
Elders become more and more alone and less secure in their old age as their children and grandchildren are now off in the cities.
Villages are now mostly a relic of the past, used for tourism as trekkers explore these world of the past.
Roads begin to replace these trekking routes and motorbikes and taxis rip through the valleys, throwing plastic wrappers on the side of the roads, polluting the rivers, hardly feeling the reality of the place they are coming through. Taking selfies and snaps, gaining photos of memories they never had..
Most of the food eaten now is trucked in from the plains after its grown in vast chemical monocultures. The rice and dal don't fit with the cold climate, they don't make the body as strong as the traditional barley and peas but they are seen as the way forward. Sickly sweet milk tea replace the local salt butter tea... Chang is replaced by packaged soft drinks. Few people have tasted real thukpa made without refined flour or the other strong nourishing foods of their ancestors.
While it used to be common for people to live into their 90s people are now amazes at those who make to 80, while middle aged adults are facing a variety of new diseases..
The farms that are left are now kept going through the paid labor of Nepali and economically disadvantaged Indian workers. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are subsidized and encouraged by the Indian government and applied in abundance. Much of the food grown here is shipped to markets in the cities of the plains, much of the food eaten here is shipped up from the plains... following the logic of 'free' global markets thanks to subsidies that discourage local markets.
Back in the cities some people begin to become aware of feelings of discontentment, and a lack of belonging. They hear stories of the lives of their ancestors, a life that existed without the need of the outside world. A life where the air was clean, the water fresh, the food nourishing, bodies strong, minds clear and needs few. A life where everyone had a role, everyone was needed and belonged, where everyone could count on one another.
A life where there was no notion of needing something more, where each person lived simply in the sickness of each moment.
People begin to want to come back to this simpler life but now feel stuck, stuck in the comforts they've become accustomed to, stuck in the need for money and things, stuck in a body that doesn't know how to carry loads of grass and cow dung and how to spend days harvesting grain and and cutting grass...
Within a generation traditional seeds, knowledge, and strength that had thrived for centuries are lost.. and people don't know how to find their way back...
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This is the direction that globalization and a craving for the modern can easily head if people don't remain awake, if they don't question, and listen to their hearts and the truth.
But here we find much hope in a middle way... in the cities and the villages people are becoming aware of the danger of where they can easily head if they follow blindly.
Some few young people who have experienced city life become tired of the chase after desire and look toward the farming life of their parents..
Many are still racing blindly 'forward' with the encouragement of government subsidies, media, and uniform education.
But a more awake few are beginning to question. They are looking for a way back home, are looking to find a middle way....
------------ a plea for a greater awakening------------
May this new generation have the strength and wisdom to see with clarity through the chaos. May they remain rooted in the wisdom of the Buddhas. May they see value in preserving traditional knowledge, saving seeds, conserving scarce resources, eating tradition foods, and maintaing physical strength.
May they maintain the knowledge and ability of how to survive and continue to know the freedom of self sufficiency and a clear balanced mind.
May they find the middle way.
May we all have the courage to question with honesty what 'progress' , moving 'forward' , and 'development' should really mean.
Not by definitions given to us in schools and in the media but by what we expereince to give us the most fulfillment and inner peace.
May we each have the strength to look at the direction we are headed in our own lives and question if it is where we truly want to go. If we are truly moving towards inner peace for ourselves and others or if we are blindly following this endless cycle of desire and attachment to the impermanent.
May we have the strength to change.
May we all begin to see with clarity, wisdom and an unwavering mind.
May we find the middle way and live in the simple suchness of this moment.
May all beings be free of suffering.
OM MANI PADME HUN
