While eating lunch, Palsung points to my chin. “This name?” she asks.

“Pimple,” I tell her a bit shyly—my skin seems to be going through puberty these days, and it’s the third time a Nepali person has commented on this. “You pimple, me no pimple,” she points out cheerfully. She repeats the word all through lunch, and it becomes another ani-haru favorite.

A line in Peter Mattiessen’s The Snow Leopard catches me: “It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet this new.” I try to find time to read, to write, to do my own practice: but the ani-haru work so hard at cooking and cleaning that I like to help at least for a while each day, and then the time flies. And the truth is I prefer cutting vegetables, and hoeing the garden, and hauling water, to sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time. I like this life, I like the simplicity and the rawness of it. But once I do sit down alone (escaping to the rooftop often, like today) then I fall in love with writing all over again, and long for three or four uninterrupted days, and a printer, and I want to spread things out and cut them up and rewrite them and scribble on them. I miss my friends from Naropa University in Boulder, their sharp minds: arguing cheerfully over some point of interpretation, comparing responses, speaking a language of our own, all of us knowing immediately what others are trying to convey in their writing and helping to do it better—being surprised time and again by my friends’ brilliant scribbles, glad that I'd read their work even if I didn’t know them. Missing the community. My own work here feels like a drop of oil in a jar of water—nothing else to connect to, except the few books I can get my hands on—nobody to toss a notebook at and say just read this quickly will you.

This trip is turning into more than I ever expected; at first it was very simple: go to Nepal for 6 months, teach Tibetan Buddhist nuns English—now I see that was only the vessel to get me here. The ani-haru have changed me, of course, made an impact—I'm glad they were the vessel and not something else—but Nepal is a place I would have ended up sooner or later. I'm grateful it was now; I'm grateful I have the rest of my life to explore this labyrinth.