The mountains called me, but in my sorry state I couldn’t answer. I stayed on the ground, firmly on the ground in Kathmandu. The mountains overlooking my shoulder like a teacher. God whispered through those silent hills like a serpent in the wind, reminding me of my fragility. I was fragile, I was broken, in more ways than one.
I could understand with their magnificence why the mountains are gods to some, their immense volume, their impending doom, their ability to hold or conduct the weather.
“Shiva is up there somewhere” I heard a fellow traveller say to his family. They were on their own kind of pilgrimage, completing their own story of religion.
I’d lost my faith. I’d lost my health, my bones were broken and my heart was shattered. But those mountains, so large and overbearing held onto me like a parent. I leaned into their largeness. I needed someone but all I had were those mountains.
In the street the prayer flags lining the shops rustled with the stillness of a forgotten city. How long have these people been waiting for me, waiting for anyone to come back to support them. Covid was over now but the desperation was lingering along with a sense of hope, finally the doors are open.
Experiencing Nepal with this silence was a privilege, no tourists, no foreigners, just a world trying to breathe again. But the loss of tourism was also a chasm, the locals desperate for trade, their hope of an open country.
Those mountains showed me a truth I didn’t want to admit—that you don’t always heal by moving forward, sometimes you heal by being held. The mountains held me, even when I could barely hold myself.
Kathmandu carried that same lesson. The quiet streets, the shuttered shops, the fragile return of life after silence. Everywhere I looked, people were surviving on hope, on patience, on a kind of stubborn faith that tomorrow would come.
And in that place, among those mountains, I began to understand that brokenness is not the end. It’s just another shape the journey takes.
The mountains never asked me to climb them. They only asked me to see them, to stand in their shadow, and to remember what it feels like to be small—and still belong.