A companion reflection, for the same journey my mother wrote about with such love
Introduction
Last month, I sat down and wrote out my mother’s account of her Kailash-Manasarovar Yatra, in her voice, from her journals. Reading it back, I still feel the wonder she felt: the stillness of Manasarovar, the north face of Kailash rising in silence, a mind emptied of every worry for a few precious hours. I don’t want to take any of that away from her, or from anyone who has stood before that mountain and felt something larger than themselves. But this week, watching the news of a glacier breaking away along the very stretch her group once travelled, villages gone, hundreds of families still waiting for word of the missing, I found myself sitting with a quieter, harder feeling. Not that God had punished anyone: I don’t believe in a God who punishes. But that perhaps we, as humans, have confused our longing to reach the remote and the sacred with our readiness to actually be there.
The mountain isn’t angry with us
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about divine retribution, and that isn’t what I believe, and it isn’t what happened. I know how quickly people reach for that explanation: so many pilgrims, so much traffic through a sacred place, and then a tragedy nearby; it starts to feel like cause and effect, like the mountain finally had enough of us. But that isn’t what the science says, and I think it matters to say so honestly rather than borrow a tragedy to make a point. Scientists studying the collapse near Langtang point to something specific and measurable: a warming climate weakening the glacier’s ice over years, until a piece of it simply could not hold. This kind of glacial collapse has been recorded in mountain ranges with no pilgrims at all, no tourists, no human footfall for miles. The Himalayas are warming, and their ice is thinning, everywhere, regardless of who walks below it. So this isn’t the mountain lashing out at the faithful. It’s something gentler and sadder: a landscape already weakened by a warming world, and separately, wearied by how many of us have been asking it to carry us across it.
What we carry in, and what we leave behind
I think of my mother’s own account: the winter jackets waiting at the airport, the night at the Hyatt, the ten-hour bus ride, the porters, the yaks carrying the bags so pilgrims wouldn’t have to. None of this is a criticism of her, or of anyone who went with her. It’s simply the shape the yatra has taken now, a once arduous, self-chosen trial for a handful of ascetics turned into a scheduled itinerary for batches of forty-eight, several times a season. I read recently that pilgrims on the comparable Char Dham yatra in Uttarakhand leave behind seven to nine kilograms of waste each, over just nine days, with nowhere for it to properly go. It settles into the same streams that, this August, became the rivers that swept through Rasuwa and Nuwakot. I don’t think any of us mean to leave the mountain worse than we found it. But Bhakti, when it comes with buses and bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks for hundreds of people at a time, still leaves a mark whether we intend it or not.
A pattern I can no longer look away from
This isn’t the first time the mountain has pushed back against our plans, gently or otherwise. Landslides, monsoon floods, sudden border closures, they’ve delayed or cancelled batches of this yatra again and again in recent years. I used to read about these as simple bad luck, weather doing what weather does. Now I wonder if it’s something closer to a landscape trying to rest, and being given no season in which to do so, one group barely leaving before the next arrives.
What I would ask, gently
If I could ask anything of those who plan and long for this journey, it would be small things, said with love rather than blame. Let fewer of us go, and let each of us carry back out whatever we carried in. Let the fees we pay go toward healing the land, not just housing us on it. Let the monsoon months belong to the mountain alone, without exception, however much we want to go. Let small, quiet groups be given priority over large commercial ones. And for those of us who feel the pull to seek the divine but are not built for glacial passes and freezing camps, perhaps the temple down the road, the one we pass every day without really seeing, deserves the same reverence we save for the remote and the difficult. God did not make Himself harder to reach for the old, the unwell, or the simply cautious among us; we did that by deciding that only the arduous counts as devotion. And for the rest of us, myself included, perhaps our tradition already gave us the answer long ago: the Manasika Parikrama, the circling of the mountain done entirely within, in stillness, without ever leaving home.
Conclusion
I’ve come to think some places are loved better from a distance now, held in memory, in scripture, in the accounts our mothers write for us, rather than in the constant tread of new footsteps. Leaving Kailash to itself doesn’t feel to me like turning away from the divine. If anything, it feels like the more devoted thing to do, trusting that the sacred doesn’t need our presence to remain sacred. Only our restraint.