monsoon The blustery rain these days reminds the Tibetans around here of the monsoon in Dharamsala, when it rains pretty much straight for a couple or three months, dramatically expanding your normal precipitation vocabulary. There are squalls, spits, drifting hallucinatory mists, thoughtful poetic showers, quiet cold rains that chill your bones and others that beat drums or drone on or sizzle. And drowning monstrous deluges, sheets of pounding water falling heavy and fast, running in wide, muscly rivers on the mountain roads, tumbling rocks and stopping taxis in their tracks. Remembering those infinite, crazy rains, the Tibetans get a kind of faraway look and a wistful smile. Their smiles take me back to a day with a sky full of racy puffing clouds, and a dark, kind of dangerous wind throwing around the leaves in one of the monastery courtyards. My friend went skipping down the stairs before me, all billowing robes, brown calves, Hi-Tec hiking boots and happiness. Like the moving, quiet eye of the storm that I only that moment guessed was on the way.

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