From Inside my Tent

22 April 2007 (Tibet) by Kendon Glass

Photo: Cycling the Tibetan winter

The real journey of discovery consists
not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

Most of what will go online over the next weeks comes largely from my diary entries penned in the moments after dinner and before the sun would decide to opt out with the mercury spiraling to below freezing. During this window I would alternate between penning my thoughts and reviving my hands by placing them directly on top of the hot camping stove. I already had clammy finger tips, an early sign of frost bite and sometimes I would smell the singeing of flesh before I would gain any feeling in my hands.

Not long after dark, nestling a full flask of coffee, weary and fighting the cold I would be lured into my enclosure by thoughts of clean socks and a ration of chocolate. That's about as lavish as things got these days. Several moments lying on my back and staring at the roof would be long enough for my base instincts to surface, tempting me with sleepy visions of better places to be. It must be said though, that I can't remember chocolate tasting so good.....

Through the faint light cast across the interior I watched my breath rising and fading into the cold air. I am utterly spent and in my last waking moments I make seemingly involuntary movements as I conserve batteries and turn off my head torch. Preparing for a minus 20 degree night, in the final act of the day I cocoon myself in three separate sleeping bags, making a two inch breathing hole, my lifeline to the outside world.

It’s usually that moment just before falling off to sleep, when the flurry of decision making abates and the mind slows that I am able to encapsulate my circumstances with increased clarity. It’s hard to believe that I am all alone on the Tibetan Plateau, on the rooftop of the world. Up here it’s so remote; the silence of night is disturbed only by the cold nocturnal winds, nature’s watchdog to tear through any facade, to keep it all real.

I realise that there exists nothing artificial out here; the wind sculpts not out of fear but in an act of timeless grace and beauty, and if not with grace or beauty then certainly, like a new born child it howls into this world without prejudice. The keystone philosophies of the worlds religions are mirrored in Mother Nature, where every moment is an act of truth shaped by an all pervading life force, so absolute that it can never truly be threatened.

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Photo: White Tibetan prayer flags representing the water element

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