The Wooden Bowl

Posted on August 23, 2008

Dear Torie ~

Thank you so much for these wonderful and heartfelt comments.

I have felt truly privileged to be a part of this book, and Sandy’s images were the inspiration.

Thank you for your intuitive understanding of what we were hoping to convey, and how wonderful that you were there curled up on your chair with the wood burl bowl, grown on Bhutanese soil, sharing this other journey with us.

The picture of you drinking from the bowl brought up another precious memory for me:

My maternal grandmother’s house stood next to her family temple at the tip of Tangsibji village. In honor of its favorable location, her temple was called Lhakhang Chewa or “the Forehead of the Village”. Immediately below the temple the slope falls steeply, far below, to the milk white coils of the Mangde River. To my child’s eye, I could easily believe the river was a live thing, like a great cloud serpent winding its way south through the deeply forested valley. Sometimes the mist would rise from its surface and blanket the lower half of the valley. That’s when my Angay said Ama Mangde went to sleep. It made sense to me because those were the only times when the liquid rush of the river that always pervaded the valley grew muffled, as if at rest. On the opposite slopes the mountain rose high and steep as they always do in Bhutan.

In the middle of the day when dragonflies stayed suspended in mid air and the screeching of unseen cicadas rose even above the sounds of the river, the broadleaved forests were a dense holographic shade of green we sometimes saw when the sun reflected off the backs of shiny unicorn beetles we found behind the temple. After dark the entire mass of the mountain we called Taktse or “Tiger’s Crest” was the looming shoulder of an immense giant whose head rose all the way up into the starlit night. We had no electricity in the village then, and the flickering flames from my grandmother’s gaping wood stoves only heightened the mystery and magic of everything. Then, at a certain hour, my Angay would push apart her sliding wooden window and we children craned our necks out, hearts pounding with fear and excitement.

Far off, at belly level of the black giant on the opposite shore of Ama Mangde, a hesitant line of bright blue flames ignited and died (the flames were the kind I later saw in Bunsen Burners in Chemistry lab at my high school in India). Then a whole line of Dremi, “demon flames” formed and began to bob, as if dancing in a circle. Angay told us naughty children who did not listen to their grandmothers would be spirited away into this circle and never find their way back home. But keep your senses about you and remember the exact location where the flames were dancing and you would find an old tree in the morning. Look carefully on this tree, and there would be a large and ugly goiter on its “neck”. Cut the goiter out and take it to old Ap Tashi, the village carver, she said, and he could polish and shape the goiter into a beautiful bowl. This bowl would be worth a treasure because even if someone served you poison, it would turn it to nectar in this bowl.

Clean it, and cherish and love it, she said, and the Dremi in the bowl will keep bringing you good fortune, great beauty, and good health.

So, Torie, like Angay said, may your wood bowl keep adding to the great fortune, beauty, and wealth you already have!

Cheers, or, rather, Chaaps!

Karma

Experiencing your book!

Posted on August 23, 2008

wow! is most of what i’m feeling right now.

your book came this rainy day and i took it to the couch with a cup of tea (butterless, but in my bhuantese wooden burl bowl), and absorbed every page. what a presence this volume has - your “union of word and image,” enlivening the whole experience for the reader/viewer.  i feel especially privileged to have seen some of the places and met some of the people described.

i love your writing style, karma -
so full of poetry, humor, and grace.  and your essays are such moral tales - a rarity in contemporary literature - something from which we can all benefit, especially in these unthinking days.

and sandy!  what exquisite, wavery images….and a beautiful palette…. and all those white flags in that ocean of sky. i have too many favorites to count.  the same things i saw and shot, were something else again in your eye -  transformed, elevated….losing the details so that all things flow into each other….. therein lies another lesson.

so thank you both for your great work.
torie

Posted on August 23, 2008

Oh wow! I received your beautiful, beautiful book and it has exceeded my expectations! The art is so amazing! I can look at each photo ( although I haven’t drank up all of them, YET!) and I’m transported and I drift away. My husband was also so touched with the “photos”- so proof one needn’t have been there to appreciate your artwork, Sandy.
The writing is absolutely beautiful, Karma. I seem to keep starting at the beginning, and then I re-read it. I can’t help but reflect and then savor the memories triggered. So , now i have new writings (along with the new artwork) awaiting to spark my senses.
Thank you, both, for this beautiful gift of yourselves.

~ Mary Corti - USA

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