The Same Sunrise

Paul Pritchard

I was taught at university not to even bother describing a sunrise. What more can possibly be said about a sunrise? It has all been said before. And, after all, the apocalyptic scene that lay before me was beyond description anyway. I mean, how could you describe a glowing ball of plasma a million times bigger than Earth and 15 million degrees. An immense star that orbits the Milky Way once every 250 million years, dragging us in our solar system with it at almost a million kilometres an hour. One of an infinite number of such stars.

Everyone knows we really cannot comprehend such big numbers (we’ve all seen the clock face analogy with the whole of human existence occupying the last second). Our brains are simply not equipped for it. And that is why the sunrise is beyond description, precisely because that star is beyond language.

However, that star, that sun that is rising on my little suburban home in Australia, reflecting over the surface of the mirror calm timtumili minanya¹, is the very same one that will bleed over the mighty Himalaya in just a few short hours.

The same sun that rises over the Himalaya is also rising over me now, as I write. Out of my window, the forested land descends steeply to a broad river mouth. The sun edges toward an opaque cloud.

I take solace in this unity of the world.

The twilight gives way to a stark white halo as the solar disk inches up towards the horizon across the river.

For the last quarter century, since a sizeable rock fell on my head causing a disabling brain injury, I have been hemiplegic and not been able to go where I want or climb what I want to climb. For the first few years, I castigated my half-paralyzed body for not being able to traipse across glaciers, and hated myself for not being able to climb rocks.

Mountain by mountain the shadows slip downwards and the granite walls transform from sombre grey to pure gold.

It took me years to discover the reality of my condition. Like Jean Dominic Bauby, the author of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly², I could go anywhere, in my imagination. His mind would take flight “like a butterfly” He thought there was so much to do, “You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra Del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.”

I am not trying to put my state in the same realm as Bauby’s, who could only move one eyelid. Nevertheless, my condition was, and remains, significantly disabling.

Far, far up above the upper snow fields are glowing now with an unnatural, atomic iridescence as the morning pots clang in Base Camp.

It was perhaps fortunate that I had retained a bank of exquisite memories to recall—the squeak of fresh alpine snow, granite’s rough texture, the Milky Way overhead from a freezing mountain bivvy.

Like Bauby, I would find myself building wild landscapes of the mind, I would catch imaginary odours in my nostrils and feel the Himalayan chill of the night air. The mountain is within us. What is outside is not really solid anyway. It is a vibrating mass of particles that will one day, sooner than you imagine, disappear. Further, it could be said to be an illusion if we take the Mādhyamaka school of Buddhism's approach which states that, “there is nothing that is not empty”.

Black as black pointillist eucalypt trees in the distance, and nearer, the dark fur of peppermint gums against a wall of fire.

As the restrictive nature of pandemic lockdowns stays fresh in our minds, many people with disabilities have pointed out that they have been banging on about the loss of freedoms they face every day, long before much of the world ground to a halt in the spring of 2020. Many are in a permanent state of lockdown, and have been campaigning the chance to work from home for decades. That it took a global pandemic to make this the new normal is incredibly telling—the disabled communities are used to being locked down and used to not being listened to.

The coming of day brings nothing familiar or mundane in this place. Even for the sadhus and porters, the yak herders and monks the new day will usher in surprise.

Before pandemic the world, or at least the western world, seemed very selfish, filled with consumerist ideologies. The impact of Covid-19 seemed to punctuate the madness and we began to find a more grounded place. Dare I say it, we seemed to be finding more spirituality in our lives. Seeing our mortality laid bare like that brought us together. We reached a more transcendent shore.

The cotton-bud silhouettes of the forest swaying in unison. Day is breaking now and the colour becomes less intense and more washed out like a water colour.

The pandemic exposed people’s vulnerabilities. Our tendency is to build up barriers around us and to feel safe and comfortable within our walled garden. To feel this lifted, to have this fear and vulnerability forced upon us, is an infinite gift that exposes one of the great paradoxes of humanity. The greater the number of material objects we own, the more we distance ourselves from others in order to protect those objects. In doing so, we lose the vital sense of community that throughout history has supported and nurtured our wellbeing.

The first drop of water drips earthward from an icicle. The ice roses that dot the pastures of Tapovan begins to magically disappear, only to appear again the next night.

But far more than this, we have caught a glimpse of things as they really are.

Humanity was presented with a challenge and, for a brief moment, we rose to it. We went on a collective journey, time slowed down. Forced retreat made people kinder, and it seemed wiser place to be. As we pull out of this pandemic it is my hope that we retain some of this wisdom.

People are moving now in the fragile post-dawn Himalaya. A baby cries, the sadhus sit outside their rough dwellings and smoke cigarettes, the clinking of climbing gear as the climbers sort gear in the sun.

For me, mountains, whether I go to them or not, are always there representing a kind of hopeful spirituality. And when we finally get back to the distant mountains, they will mean more than ever.

As the sun climbs the day snaps to attention. The morning is no less beautiful but is nevertheless it is slipping unavoidably into familiarity.

An aspect of my own personal journey through disability is that I have had to slow down. Under-employment for people with disabilities, where I live in Australia, is rife. Consequently we tend to have more time on our hands (this is an unfortunate benefit of being the most discriminated against cohort in society).

Yet, through this process of enforced leisure, I see the little things that able-bodied people might not witness, or at least have more trouble seeing—micro-expressions on a dog’s face, the beauty of a fleck of dust in the morning sun.

Having said that, a corn the shape of Poland on my little toe is preventing currently me from doing all the things I want to do in the mountains (my hemiplegic gait means I walk with a marked supination of the foot and so on the top of me pinkie toe). On the face of it inconsequential, it is the most painful thing in my world right now.

The quilt of cloud that is sitting on kunanyi is slowly evaporating as the earth warms itself by the fire.

I am reminded of the words of Julian of Norwich. She survived three pandemics in the 1300s and wrote these words in her Revelations of Divine Love—“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Summary

Writing from his home in Tasmania, in this thoughtful piece Paul Pritchard uses memories of previous Himalayan expeditions to take him to the mountains. Alongside this, he discusses some of the things living through pandemic lockdown showed us, asking whether it will possible for us to retain some of the positive knowledge gained while being forced to step outside of ‘normality’ during those strange days.

 

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