The Days in Life: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 2

Working in the fields is a family and community affair.

June is planting time, and just as Norbert-Hodges had described, we watched the men of several families plowing the fields together, singing (!) to their dzos (a hybrid of yak and domestic cattle), occasionally sipping chang from a metal jug that sat in a corner of the field. The chang tasted something like what a thin fermented buttermilk might, not unpleasant, slightly alcoholic. Not delicious like a fine wine, but neither would one need an accountant to estimate its carbon footprint. In these desert mountains the Ladakhis enjoyed an affluence that could be the envy of billions on the rest of our resource-rich planet.

They actually sing to the dzo as they work. The dzo will spend the rest of the year freely roaming the local mountains.

We spent the chilly mountain evenings in our hosts’ kitchens, relaxing and eating with the family. Every kitchen was large by even western standards, about the size of an American living room, the walls covered by a rich array of shiny well-scrubbed brass and copper pots and other cookware, with the fire of the stove providing light and warmth.  The pots were acquired by bartering with Tibetan tradesmen who still traveled between the villages along the ancient mountain paths. This room was designed to be the heart of the home. We sat not far from the low stove, upon cushions or mats around a long low table. We ate a simple meal of ground barley called sampa, with some lentils and a few greens, and we drank buttered tea. There’s not much variety in the Ladakhi diet, limited as it is by the short growing season, the elevation, the soil. This led us to wondering how even more luxuriously people could sustainably live in much of the world where the growing seasons are longer and the soils are fertile and support a wide variety of foods… if we could re-learn some simple lessons from the Ladakis.[1]

A typical kitchen in a Ladakhi home.

On the first floor were housed the animals, equipment, and a room that collected the human wastes which dropped from a room above. It was this second-story bathroom that particularly impressed me. About the size of a large American bathroom, it was empty save a shovel standing in a layer of sand a foot in depth.  In the middle of the room a hole about two feet square had been cut through the floor. This was the toilet.  “Flushing” meant shoveling some sand through the hole onto the floor below. Simple and the paragon of efficiency, it was an ingenious use of the dry, antiseptic climate. The second floor also housed the kitchen and various storerooms for the long winter months.  On the third floor were bedrooms, including our guest room, and a ghompa, or chapel.  Every home we visited had a ghompa, a dark, windowless room set aside for prayer and contemplation. There were usually some rugs in the middle of this room, an assortment of prayer books to the side, some wood carvings, a few prayer wheels, old cloth thankas hanging from the walls, a small altar sitting on a shelf with a lamp, bowls, and other important objects, the smell of juniper incense hanging in the air. Far away, on the other side of the Himalayas, each thanka painting would surely fetch some hundreds of dollars in the impersonal coldness of the import-export shops of Kathmandu and the worlds’ many cities. But here they served the many-layered functions of art, emblematic of the room and of the culture, itself. Grounded, soulful, and holistic, economical yet miraculously abundant, stunningly beautiful, imbedding a sense of priorities developed through generations of living sustainably in a resource-scarce world.

A typical Ladakhi home.

A home prayer room.

Another traveler, Ingmar Lee, wrote eloquently of the world I witnessed:

In the Zanskari villages I passed through, wealth was not measured by money and there was no poverty. Every house was busily inhabited, they wove and dyed their clothing, they grew their food, there was no garbage, no pollution, whether visual, aural, or the physical soiling of water, air and earth. The arability of the land was not determined by any natural availability of organic earth. Instead, the placement of villages depended on where aqueducts could be engineered to irrigate the barren, sterile mineral soil, and all organic soil nutrient was carefully added with a clear understanding of the processes of composting. The size of a village was intrinsic to the extent of the irrigable area of its fields, which in turn depended on the people-power to cultivate it, and the supply of water from the glaciers above. The village grew to a size that balanced what it was able to produce, and the population stabilized at that point, regulated in part by the practice of polyandry and the celibacy of the lama and chomo who renounced the householder's life to live in the Buddhist gompas, which overlook every village in the land. At the bottoms of the farthest fields, one could see the browning off of the barley crops, as the water supply dwindled off to exhaustion.[2]

The Hemis festival.

It seemed to us—as it had to Norberg-Hodge and Ingmar Lee—that the people of Ladakh had evolved a way to live harmoniously with nature and with each other. We might quibble with the specifics of their cultural ways—their fashion choices, food, religion, entertainment, whatever.  However, as a whole it worked. People laughed easily. They were kind to us, but neither overly curious nor intrusive. They worked alone sometimes, but more often together for a common purpose. They lived abundant yet simple lives within an environment that was green only a few months of the year. The Himalayan winters are long and cold, and plant life goes dormant. And so its products are precious and are used time and again, in their naturally deteriorating form. A fiber, for instance, might be used for clothing, then as a rag, then as lining for the gutter-sized irrigation canals that come off the mountain streams. Yet, contrary to our expectations about the lives of people in harsh and resource-scarce environments, the Ladakhi’s life is neither laborious nor impoverished. And the long cold months, we were assured, were spent indoors mostly, in a spirit of rest and celebration.

She was a child in 1994.

ENDNOTES

[1] Lee, I. (2011).

[2] Relearn because—extrapolating from the studies of modern-day forager societies—pre-agricultural societies supported happy, cooperative, and sustainable lifestyles. It was with the advent of agriculture (and the consequent acceleration of the autocatalytic process of innovation, wealth, and population) that the quality of human relationships with the Earth and to each other radically changed.