Extract no .2 from Shadowmothers- A Memoir of Motherhood. From Darjeeling to Dunlaoire. I have lived among Tibetan refugees for a large part of my adult life. And with Indian people. I am not a racist. I have been trying to get Tibetan refugees into this country for years and the Irish government do not wish to give them asylum. WHY? Read more here. SURPRISED? YOU SHOULD BE ! BRILLIANT DELIVERY BY SENATOR DAVID NORRIS IN 2000 IN THE DAIL. NOBODY COULD BE BOTHERED ABOUT IT NOW. CHINESE BUSINESS IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT TO THE IRISH CORPORATION.
I WRITE ALL MY MATERIAL FOR FREE, ASKING FOR NO SUBSCRIPTIONS. I WOULD HUGELY APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORT BY SIMPLY ‘LIKING’ IN THE SUBSTACK PLATFORM, SHARING MY POST- BLOGS AND / OR BUYING ME A COFFEE.
Extract no .2 from Shadowmothers- A Memoir of Motherhood. From Darjeeling to Dunlaoire.
SHADOWMOTHERS
CHAPTER TWO
Three years before, I had been told about a Tibetan man in Dublin who could teach me Tibetan language. He was from Mugum, a small kingdom near Mustang on the Nepali Tibetan border. When I met him one sunny August afternoon outside It’s a Bagel in Dunlaoire, he looked to me like a Tibetan wide-boy: he wore a black bomber jacket and shades. Good jeans and fancy trainers. He was giddy and flirtatious and altogether good fun. His name was Karma and I had no idea that he was a lama. Within twenty four hours we were a couple and the Tibetan lessons went out the window- yet that was the language we mostly communicated in.
He brought me to his home in The Dublin Mountains, a mobile home that he had been allowed to squat, after the break up of his marriage to an Irish woman who lived down the road, with whom he had had a child. A daughter called Dolma. He wished now, he had said, he had a son. He was from a good lineage of lamas, and if he had a son, he would send him to a monastery school in India to become a lama.
He pruned trees for a tree surgery company. He was agile, almost Mowgli-like in his boyishness. We fell in love. We did not know why, but we did. Does anyone ever know why, when it happens? We planned a great trip to Mount Kailash in Tibet, where his father’s people were from. He could get me Nepali papers, he said, that stated that I was his wife, and we could go over the Nepali border and into Tibet, guided by nomads to the most holy mountain in all of Asia- home of Shiva and Parvati and of the great guardian of Tibet, Palden Lhamo.
KARMA LAMA TURNED TREE SURGEON
He gave me a Tibetan wedding ring which he pulled out of box of coins and amulets from an old Roses tin. It was a three- piece amber and silver ring, typical of those that were worn by Tibetan nomads.
I lived like a lama’s consort in that mobile home, making dal and noodles and green tea, opening boxes sent from Nepal sent from his family: jars of exquisite honey from the mountains. Massage oil. Carpets. Incense. All the treasures of his homeland, which he tried to sell at markets around Dublin. Every Sunday, we went to my parent’s house for Sunday lunch. There was a time, yes, that my mother made Sunday lunch. It didn’t last long but Karma got the advantage of this passing trend. He would rattle on about his week among the trees and his philosophy of nature and love and life, none of which my father understood.
“What in the name of God is he talking about?’ asked my father, again and again. Karma spoke English with Tibetan syntax. Plenty of words with no structure, and gusts of laughter that left my father irritated and confused.
“Life is nature is lovely and natural I’m a natural kind of person you know what I mean?” was the kind of thing he used to say, which irritated my father to no end. What a pity I had not chosen a man that could talk about the North, about Gerry Adams’ latest statement. What a pity this man knew nothing about US foreign policy. My mother never understood him either, nor why I was in a relationship with him. They were perplexed and perhaps a little concerned. Was I going to marry him? They never asked, but I knew they feared it.
“And how do you manage, up there on that mountain?” asked my mother. Easy, I said. We practice together. He has given me scriptures to recite. We will go to Mount Kailash together. This was my idea of settling down. Finding Karma, I found a home in my own homelessness. Living in a mobile home in the Dublin Mountains made me feel I had a home. He was a nomad, I was a nomad. We were nomadic pilgrims and one day, we would go to Mount Kailash and all of our sins would be absolved and I would find out that really, really I was one of them. I was not from here at all.
THE BLUE SATIN SHELL FERTILITY BELT
It was not long until I discovered that he was a deeply insecure young man who had no ability to trust. He had trouble with the truth and told many versions of it. He was so frightened of being abandoned that he compensated by flirting with every woman that he met -young, old and middle-aged. But perhaps especially middle-aged: they were the best sponsors, after all. He wheedled around those women who were potential sponsors, driven by his secret plan to build a temple in Nepal. Like all great lamas, he would have his own temple.
Such were his jealousies that I was not allowed speak to waiters, tree surgeons, bank tillers, mechanics: men as a rule. Most forbidden were ex-boyfriends, especially the one that preceded him. Tom, from Donegal. A great curator, a man of wit who could, to my father’s delight, speak about Gerry Adams and US Foreign policy. Tom was an intellectual with three degrees. We continued our friendship long after we parted ways, we collaborated on Arts projects. He was the deepest threat to my Tibetan lama friend. Nobody should communicate with an ex, he said. Ever. You just shut the door, and that was that. And I began to wonder, would that be that between us, when it was over between us? Never, ever, ever again? Would we last the year? It was tumultuous. When I met Tom for a meeting about a future publication in his Arts Centre, I came back to a raging child in the mobile home: Karma overturned furniture, cursed at me and pushed me into a corner. I had a panic attack which he nursed me out of, ironically, with Medicine Buddha mantras and tea. He loved me, he said, but never ever meet that man again. Love. That what love was- keeping a rope around someone. Not trusting them. Tugging at the rope any time there was a sign of interest in anything other than you, the centre of a stagnant world. After a year, our relationship would be over. At least our living arrangement would be. In another way, this relationship would never be over.
Karma had lost his mother at 14, when he was in training as a lama. His grandfather, Sherab Lama, had trained him in Buddhist practice and ritual use of the Tibetan religious gya ling (horn) and damaru (ritual drum ). He put Karma into a three year, three month, three day retreat at the age of twelve. Things fell apart, however, when his mother died in childbirth just as Karma had just turned fourteen. He was called out to conduct the burial rites. She had a sky burial- meaning that her body was chopped up into pieces, prayed over and offered to the vultures, as a gesture to the Buddhist edict of impermanence. There were prayer ceremonies for 49 days until she had been, according to the Tibetan Buddhist belief system, reborn.
Meanwhile, they frantically tried to keep the family together. The village was in a frenzy: witch spirits were interfering with the peace. Rituals had to be conducted. Karma’s family’s fortune nosedived. There was, he said, no way to go back into the cave and finish that long and arduous retreat. Things were different now. It was time for him to leave, to go to Kathmandu and finish his training there. Motherless Karma went to Kathmandu.
That was Karma. Once, he had given me a blue satin belt with sea shells sewn into it.
“There.” he said, handing it to me. “You wear it.”
“Why?” I said. “Why would I want to wear such a strange looking thing?”
“Women wear it in Nepal, when they want to have a baby boy.”
“I see. I don’t know if I want a baby boy.”
“If you have baby, it will be a beautiful baby boy. It will be a lama.”
“I don’t want a baby boy. If I have a baby boy, I’ll bring it to Kathmandu, and your aunties can mind it.” We laughed about this. How could he be speaking of children, already? Was this really a custom, giving your girlfriend a fertility belt? What a pity that Henry the VIII hadn’t known about those belts- at least two heads would have been saved. I was afraid of having a baby, and not knowing what to do with it. I was afraid because I was afraid of my own mother, and afraid of my own motherhood.
Studying Tibetan elevated me not only by several thousand feet- as I usually chose very high hill stations in the Himalayas to study, but from my own body. I could live in my head, and ignore my body. Sometimes, over those years of studying and researching, a little voice would come into my head: would it not be nice to be a mother? How would that be, to do what my mother and her mother and her mother and her mother and her mother had done since forever, until I came along?
Mothering. It seemed important, but it also seemed very unreal. And very impractical, in the kind of life I led, researching and studying in the Himalayas, travel writing and never, ever having a home. A home was a place to rest after spurts of intensive traveling. It was a place to write. But there were no roots. I had no roots. I was comforted by Bruce Chatwin’s theory in Songlines, a book about the Dreamtime creation songs of the Aboriginals of Australia: that we are not, as Homo sapiens, made to settle, but to move. We are essentially nomadic and settling is unnatural to us.
“Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”
― Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
ON BEING A NOMAD
Settling, baking, having a filing system, building shelves, painting walls were not on my radar. Finding a husband and having children hardly entered my mind. Then I met motherless Karma. Why did I keep meeting motherless men? Was I myself motherless, in some way? My mother never bombarded me with pies and cakes when I arrived home and I harboured a great envy for those who had mothers that did. My mother was acutely aware of her own shortcomings, and that she often had nothing in the fridge but sauces in jars that had gone beyond their sell-by date. I felt a hopeless lack, which is what drove me to find mothers in far-flung parts of the world. And men who had no mothers themselves, who sought mothers like me, a mother who felt she had no mother and could not be a mother to anyone. I did not dare to dream of motherhood. Not, at least, until I met Karma, several years later. Not until he gave me a blue satin belt with seashells sewn into it and a big Tibetan ring from his tin box of savings.
(Extract from Shadowmothers, A Memoir of Motherhood- © Siofra O’Donovan, 2016 )
Tis the truth dear friend . Has to be told .
What a marvelous tale. I have visited Nepal and being a weird South African third generation Irish woman, tree, animal and animist it was a wonderful trip. I was recovering from stage 4 cancer which I sorted out by pulling out the chemo needle 5 minutes after it went in and told them to f - off, if I die it's on my own terms and nit by being poisoned. Well here I am 15 yrs later and I was supposed to be gone within 6 months. I digress. I was quite weak still then and spent some time in Kathmandu and then off the Pokhara. It was one of the best times of my life. I hired a guide and with out two mountain ponies we explored far and wide and he took me to a Tibetan refugee camp and art center and I still treasure the little mat I was able to buy.
I often think of those times.
The funny thing I feel that pull and connection to my Irish roots but I think I must have the blood of the Tuatha de Denaans and May son Fir Bolg because when I was finally able to go to Ireland I kissed the ground and so much of my weird life made sense. Presently I am delving into Druidry and Celtic and pre Celtic studies. There are many inter connections between the two. Weird that we are always searching...... for a spiritual home. Namu myo Ho renege kyo.