ODYSSEUS RETURNS TO ITHACA: A JOURNEY HOME TO THE HIMALAYAS
My own journey to the stunning emerald forests outside of Mussoorie in Uttarkhand, India, came a few years ago when I felt called to leave my life in Denmark. The year was 2017 and a move to the himalayan regions seemed strangely compelling – as if fate had drawn an arrow.
In fact, the circumstances involved were tragic on a personal level. Both my parents had passed away and the forest they had lived in for forty some years was in danger of being sold to a real-estate consortium. Mussoorie was a world away from Denmark and I had little idea of what I could do or how effective I could be in the circumstances.
The ‘common sense’ advice I got from friends and family was to agree to sell my parents’ forest estate and return to Denmark. After all, I had lived outside of India for most of my life and I was quite out of touch – especially navigating issues around property. However, a series of mysterious dreams about a forest vibrating with green energy erupted into life and my resulting intuition about these images indicated otherwise.
Little did I know that my decision not to sell and to move to a remote forest in the himalayan belt to live in it would lead to an astonishing journey filled with adventures and discoveries – something I could never have imagined possible before.
It all began with a phone call in Copenhagen on the Easter weekend of 2017. I received news that my father had passed away from a heart-stroke. He had been in grief since my mother passed a few years before . After the initial shock and grief, I knew in a flash that the call had been nothing less than fate.
SECRET LIFE OF DREAMS AND HOPES
For months before my return, a series of mysterious dreams of a forest vibrating with green light energy had erupted from within as if portending or beckoning personal meanings. Somehow, my deepest longings were being suddenly expressed and with some force.
I had known already of a lifelong love of wilderness spaces and of wildlife. Like many of my friends, I had spent vacations traveling to national parks across the United States and camping in the open western spaces. Still, it seemed as if the beauty and life one experienced there had always to be forfeited for a cramped urban home and ‘realistic choices’ of work.
A sense of dissatisfaction remained and only grew persistent the older I got. In classrooms, I had to ask myself if teaching abstract systems of thought was really living life. Were my students secretly also dissatisfied with their choices? What more could there be for personal fulfillment ? There were longings to work with wolves in ‘Yellowstone Park’ or in Finland but were these ‘real’ and to be trusted for a life purpose?
There seemed no ‘escape’ from a world I had entered as a younger person. However, there was also a sense that life was in fact creative and filled with adventure and mystery. If one truly aspired for a deeper joy and meaning in life it would come at some point. Patience was crucial and then stars could open magically.
On a fateful day in late 2017, after a year of ‘commuting’ from Denmark to the Himalayas, I finally came ‘home’. A lifetime of wondering and wandering had been spent but I was home at last across the world in my parents forest estate.
The decision to making that final shift had been slow in coming but when it arrived it was irreversible. I had little idea at the time that the road ahead would be quite transformative, rich in new experience, and astonishing beyond my wildest imaginings. There would be battles – much like Odysseus on his return to Ithaca with Penelope’s ‘suitors’.
In my case, these were in the guise of real-estate agents and others interested in Penelope/ forest as ‘property’. However, stranger than fiction is life. These ‘suitors’ were dispatched summarily in a year and I could start a new forest existence unhindered.
NOT ALONE
As I entered the old wrought-iron gates leading into my late parents’ forest home, it seemed as if all was agelessly alive. The trees were thick with centuries of unbroken growth – almost green-black and uncountable. Every hillside of the deep valley was lush vegetation to a vanishing point of emerald green.
There was a distinct feeling of being watched – eyes followed my ascent through the driveway. Animals, birds in trees, ‘langurs’, flocks of starlings. The steep drive through the tall iron gates and ancient locks up a driveway seemed haunting – as if I was entering ancient and sacred grounds. The forest was a silent presence but I had an uncanny sense of not being alone.
TREASURES OF LOVE LETTERS
My parents home was empty when I entered the door – an echoing space of silent ghosts and distant memories.
I spent the first days of my new life in this empty forest home sitting on the wooden floors and reading my parents letters to each other. There were hundreds of personal letters written from places as remote as Ladakh and Kashmir to southern India and from a time that seemed vanished into air – 1967 to 1980. They revealed the secret life of two people and how they later came about buying a forest paradise and moving there.
Their love and passion for each other seemed undeniable – each letter was saturated with pure feeling but this was inseparable from a shared passion for himalayan wilderness spaces and for the mountains of this region.
Some letters revealed dreams of setting up a life together away from the madding crowds and in forests. They wrote about a life they could lead without restrictions and compulsions of a consumer society – just being with the land at last.
DAILY LOG BOOK OF CONSERVATION FOR FORTY YEARS
Also in my parents’ modest cabin home, I found log books with scrupulously maintained records of their daily conservation and planting work in the forest. These entries showed a world of pioneers – a couple forging a painstaking relationship with trees, plants, flowers and wildlife in conditions that can only be described as harsh and unrelenting.
It was obvious theirs was a life was filled with daily challenges – no electricity at first, no roads to the forest and only leopards and deer for neighbors. My mother’s entries were particularly enthralling notwithstanding their precision in cataloging trees daily planted or grafted, minerals added in specific quantities to the soil and chemical formulas as elixirs for plants.
One entry from December 1980 stands out. It seems that winter, my father had to be away from the forest on important work. My mother stayed alone in their little forest cabin. It was a hard season with deep snow on the ground. Nonetheless, she and the gardener worked long hours by a nearby stream tending to trees.
She writes:
‘It is pitch dark and I am writing with the lamplight. The snow is piled to the windows and the wind strong tonight. I hope the leopard and her cubs have been able to eat – there are hardly deer around. I am concerned about the potash and zinc formula we need as mineral for the trees – the exact proportions are needed. Tomorrow, we will tend to all the peach and apricot trees and hope they make it through the winter.’
I spent the first days of my new life in this empty forest home sitting on the wooden floors and reading my parents letters to each other. There were hundreds of personal letters written from places as remote as Ladakh and Kashmir to southern India and from a time that seemed vanished into air – 1967 to 1980. They revealed the secret life of two people and how they later came about buying a forest paradise and moving there.
Daily Life inside a Forest
Making a forest my home – far from a sophisticated environment like Copenhagen – was quite an initiation. To my urban mind, a himalayan forest carried images of exotic beauty and of stunning vistas. In fact, I discovered was that these images were nowhere near the splendor of this forest.However, living daily in the midst of this came with something else – simply put, power. Kick-ass power. This was a world where an inexplicable force – or forces – was surely alive and everything here had its own reality. Trees grew into walls and opened stone fences as if human constructions were simply a nuisance to be worked through – a veneer.
Behind these signs of human occupation that was my parents’ forest home and estate – I sensed the presence of something far more mysterious. It a was living and breathing power of inconcievable depth like an ocean that could take itself back at any time.On spring days, birds flew inside the main living-room – a beautiful airy space jutting out of a cliffside – as if they had little sense of interior or exterior. Spiders could manifest out of thinnest air in the unlikeliest places – beside a computer, inside a beer glass, in a bathroom sink. One night, a leopard knocked on my window and her burning eyes sent a charge of electricity through the room that left both my dogs and I in a trance. The dogs were barking as if possessed for most of the night and next day.
There were other more immediate human risks. One came in the form of would-be encroachers inside the forest. Then there were legal dealings with dubious real-estate developers – but, these having been ousted, I could in time succeed in setting up house.
There was a first year of strenuous renovation and rebuilding of living spaces and repairing ailing greenhouses but slowly, and with help from a capable residential staff, I could make a home for myself and start afresh.There was surely a pragmatic and ‘practical’ need to be ‘efficient’ and ‘organised’ in how I ‘managed’ life daily in the forest. Slowly, however, this began to shift and morph into something quite different. The key factor here was ‘presence’.
Presence of something larger, silent, breathing, stunning in beauty – the forest itself. Everyday, when I opened the windows of my bedroom, I would see an extraordinary sight – a vast circle of forests set in hills that seemed as timeless as they were real.
The only experience I could compare it with was a time I had spent in Yellowstone Park and in the Tetons out west in the United States. It is impossible to be in Yellowstone and not feel the magnificence of wilderness spaces or be deeply affected by them. Often the impact on the individual is subtle and delicate, like a meditation exercise or a piece of music. The soul can open from within like a flower and breathe its real beauty. Air gives way to air and open light to light…
