By the end of May Tenzin Palmo could begin to garden, planting her vegetables and flowers – cornflowers, marigolds, calendulas. She enjoyed gardening even though it demanded much fetching and carrying of water. For the last three years of her solitary retreat someone sent her a packet of flower seeds from England and her much to her amazement they flourished in that foreign soil, transforming her Lahouli Cave into a cottage garden.
’There were dahlias and night-scented stock. So beautiful! But I was the only one to see them,’ she said. By full summer the entire landscape had turned green – the fields, the valleys, and the willow trees planted by the Moravian missionaries to halt the erosion of the landslides. ‘Now, you could burn sitting in the sun while the part of you in the shade would still feel chilly,’ she said.
In summer the birds started coming back: the choughs, a red-legged crow, were regular visitors. She would watch them perform the beautiful aerial dances for which they are famous, and would sometimes cut pieces off a mat to provide nest furnishings for them. Once, one evening when she was coming back from a rare visit to the village, she came across an extraordinary scene.
‘As I turned a corner I saw hundreds upon hundreds of vultures sitting in circles. They were grouped on the boulders, on the ground, all around. It was as though they had come together for a meeting. I had to walk through the middle of them! There was nowhere else for me to pass. Now these birds are big, about three feet high, with hooded eyes and strong, curved beaks. I took a deep breath, started saying the “Om Mani Padme Hung” mantra and walked right through them. They didn’t even move. They just watched me out of the corner of their eyes. Later I remembered that Milarepa had had a dream in which he was a vulture and that among Tibetans these birds are regarded as extremely auspicious,’ she recalled.
With autumn the world around her was transformed into a blaze of brilliant colour. It was spectacular. ‘The mountains in front of me turned blood red crossed with lines of dazzling yellow – the willow trees whose leaves had turned. Above these were the snow mountains soaring into the bright blue sky. This was the time when the villagers would harvest their crops. I could hear them from my cave singing in the valleys below as they worked their yaks.’
A letter home to her mother dated 8 May 1985 when she had just begun her long three year retreat revealed how easily she was managing with her difficult situation, and how, inspite of her extreme isolation and singular way of life, others were not forgotten:
Dearest Amala [Tibetan for ‘mother’],
How are you? I hope that you are very well. Did you have a nice stay in Saudi?
No doubt you have written but Tshering Dorje hasn’t been up so there has been no mail. He is rather late and I hope that this is only because of being busy with ploughing and other field work. He did come up in early March as the SP [Superintendent of Police] had brought new forms to be filled out for the visa. Fortunately this year there was not too much snow and February was so mild that most of the snow at that time had melted (it snowed again later, of course). However, poor Tshering Dorje has now developed arthritis in both knees and can only hobble around painfully with a stick – so imagine having to come all the way up to the cave through the snow just so I could sign some papers! He should have forged my signature. Anyway I do hope that his bad knees are not the reason for his not coming now. Lahaul is all up and down and also TD earns his living by leading trekking parties in Ladakh and Zanskar so this is really a big problem for him.
Here everything is well. This morning I planted out potatoes and more turnips. The weather is still rather cold and it snows from time to time but my cave is not as wet as usual because there was never a really heavy snowfall at one time. My water supply happily kept running all through the winter though it got covered in a canopy of ice every night. What a joy to have water so close by and not to have to bother with melting snow. This also saved on wood.
So the winter was quiet and pleasant and February so mild and gorgeous that in Keylong they had rain! (The weather made up for it in March and April!)
My hair is getting long and falling out all over the place. A great nuisance – no wonder the yogis just mat it.
Because of being in retreat and Tshering Dorje only coming up twice a year you must not worry if there are long intervals between my letters. I can no longer go down to Keylong to post them. Tell May that I wore her sweater (and yours) all winter and indeed still have them on. They have been very useful so many thanks. Stay very well, All my love, Tenzin Palmo.
For all the physical hardships she endured, the misgivings of others and the prejudice against her gender attempting such a feat the truth remained that Tenzin Palmo in her cave was sublimely happy.
’There was nowhere else I wanted to be, nothing else I wanted to be doing. Sometimes I would stand at the edge of my patio and look out across the mountains and think, “If you could be any place in the whole world, where would you want to be?” And there was nowhere else. Being in the cave was completely satisfying. I had all the conditions I needed to practise. It was a unique opportunity and I was very, very grateful.’
Chapter Nine
Facing Death
For all her easy dismissal of her friends’ concerns and her own genuine disinterest in her own safety and physical well-being, the dangers that Tenzin Palmo faced in her cave were real. Calamity struck more than once and as had been feared there was no rescue service, no doctor, no telephone, no friend to come to her aid. Tenzin Palmo faced each crisis head-on and alone. It was what she had bargained for when she had decided to enter the cave.
‘When you go into retreat you make a vow for how long you are going to go in and you stick to it. It’s considered part of the practice. Even if you are sick you pledge that you will not come out. If necessary you have to be prepared to die in retreat. Actually, if you do die it’s considered auspicious,’ she explained.
Extraordinarily, considering her medical history, in those extreme conditions she was never as ill as she had been as a child. She did not break a leg, get appendicitis nor contract any of the diseases Westerners often get in Asia like cholera and hepatitis. But she was often sick. In that damp cave she got frequent chills, which brought with them high fevers. She simply lived through them. ‘You cope because you have to. The Tibetans have a saying: “If you’re sick you’re sick. If you die, you die.” So that takes care of the problem,’ she said pragmatically. Once she discovered a lump under her arm, but carried on meditating regardless. ‘I forgot all about it and at the end of the retreat I suddenly remembered it but it had gone.’
There was also an eye infection which brought with it excruciating pain. ‘I had to have the cave in darkness because I couldn’t bear the light. I couldn’t move, not even flicker my eyelid. That meant I couldn’t get to my stove to cook, so I didn’t eat,’ she reported. ‘I couldn’t even meditate because the eye would go down. I couldn’t do anything. I just had to wait, to sit there and watch it. If I tried to lay down it got worse. Actually, it was quite fascinating. I’d sit there and observe the pain. It was like a symphony. You’d have the drums, the trumpets, the strings, all these very different types of pain playing on the eye,’ she said in a detached voice.
‘When I counted up how long it lasted it was forty-nine days, which was interesting because that is said to be the duration of the Bardo, the period of transition between death and rebirth. In fact it was really like a kind of Bardo, I was having to wait. Then it gradually got a little better. What I learnt from that was that the exhaustion that pain brings arises because we resist it. The thing is to learn to go with the pain, to ride it.’