Silent, Holy Night

Mother moon was waxing a blue Gibbous light.  The jungle at night filled with the faintest rattlings of a saucepan and the vibrato echoes of a goathide drum.  Hours of soft holy glow lit the mudstone route.  Emerging from the canopy of rustling shadows, a dome of stars held the Christmas sky in place - thousands of quartz crystal pins.

A Russian rocket scientist spends his days on top of this Himalayan mountain, in a stone room.  Nearly naked, caked deeply with dust and smoke, he makes Ayurvedic tea over his firewood stove.  Copper and iron cookware, piles of hand-split firewood, a few worn blankets and rags, and shelves of medicine from the mountain.  Nearly 8 months out of the year he is in a vow of silence, collecting his own foods from the jungle and living his own high altitude lifestyle.  My Christmas Eve was eating a crumbling root-bread and drinking herbal tea with this silent Baba (holy grandfather).  Only upon returning to the town did I learn of his life from those who repeatedly visit and sometimes converse with him.

I left him at the witching hour, to make a fire of my own on the bald mountain.  Lying next to the nightlong blaze, staring into the shapes and smoke, drinking my own herbal tea made from mint, ginger, nettle and ganga, the holy night passed in a neolithic dream.  Flute light and drum mellow rumbled in my empty bellows:

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain, moor and mountain
Following yonder star

 O Star of wonder, star of night
Star with royal beauty bright
Westward leading, still proceeding
Guide us to Thy perfect light

~