Himalayan Sands

An untouched, pristine dune would have been nice....I found one, finally, with no paw, hoof or footprints....came back when the sun was lower, and a four-pawed ...
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An untouched, pristine dune would have been nice....I found one, finally, with no paw, hoof or footprints....came back when the sun was lower, and a four-pawed friend had left an autograph....
the white sands of Nubra and the golden mountains of Ladakh in pre-sunset light.
" The subconscious mind became much more active and important. And this in the form of dreams, feelings. A growing awareness of the character of a particular place, whether it was a good place to be with a calming influence, or whether it gave me the creeps.
And this all linked up with Aboriginal reality, their vision of the world as something they could never be separate from, which showed in their language. In Pitjantjara and, I suspect, all other Aboriginal languages, there is no word for 'exist'. Everything in the universe is in constant interaction with everything else. You cannot say, this is a rock. You can only say, there sits, leans, stands, falls over, lies down, a rock.
The self did not seem to be an entity living somewhere inside the skull, but a reaction between mind and stimulus. And when the stimulus was not social, the self had a hard time defining its essence and realizing its dimensions. The self in a desert becomes more and more like the desert. It has to, to survive. It becomes limitless, with its rtoots more and more in the subconscious than the conscious - it gets stripped of non-meaningful habits and becomes more concerned with realities related to survival. But as its natrure, it desperately wants to assimilate and make sense of the information it receives, which in a desert is almost always going to be translated into the language of mysticism.
What I'm trying to say is, when you walk on, sleep on, stand on, defecate on, wallow in, get covered in and eat the dirt around you, and when there is no-one to remind you what society's rules are, and nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes. And just as Aborigines seem to be in perfect rapport with themselves and their country, so the embryonic beginnings of that rapport were happening to me. I loved it.....Although I talked constantly to myself, or Diggity or the country around me, I was not lonely - on the contrary, had I stumbled suddenly across another human being, I would have either hidden or treated it as if it were just another bush or rock or lizard." ~ from Tracks

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