When the Foreign Becomes Familiar

And just like that, once again, a life has blossomed in various shades of Kira. A routine begins to mold around sleeping and waking and cups of coffee and the outline of the mountains through my window. Hot showers in the bathroom (when the hot water comes through- I wake up with my fingers crossed) where the shower head sits next to the toilet and steam covers my day in a haze of calm. I suppose this is what happens when you grow up and leave home often enough: the foreign, the exotic, the so far away begins to like a second skin you can slip in and out of. Our world bears the fruits of technology, and a global identity grows from it.

Sunrises in Thimphu

Bhutan has felt strangely normal after absence, a winter coat you put away for a season and took out to try back on, marveling at the still perfect, cozy fit. I take to the streets with the ease of walking the avenues of Seattle, my way of speaking and behaviors altering slightly to fit in with the Bhutanese way of being. I still wake up too early and go for runs, shorter distances up larger hills at altitudes that never fail to take my breath away. We dance between sets at the gym, the gym with a million dollar valley view that somehow feels mundane now. I see my friends, a hodgepodge of Bhutanese and foreigners pulled from around the world like asteroids, seemingly destined to land in this wildly quirky dot on the map. I host ladies night and we sit on my new rug in the living room, drinking bottles of wine and eating pasta. I remind myself that there is more yet to see and learn and understand. I may feel wonderfully comfortable back in this land of mountains and milk tea, but if you pay attention, layers are unveiled everyday, pulled back from a shiny surface to reveal grit in all of its painful authenticity.

This is what living somewhere gives you: a version of the truth of a place that is more complex than the one you initially discovered. Countries, like people, are eternally becoming. Bhutan is a juxtaposition all on its own, influenced by the outside world in ways it doesn’t always see and yet incredible at maintaining tradition with an intense fervor. Change happens subtly but slowly, until one day you wake up and the ground has shifted, the mountain shadows have moved. In some ways, I feel like I am watching myself grow right alongside the country through the lens of a vintage camera, 80 years old watching the film play back.

Thimphu Tshechu

What do you do when the foreign becomes familiar? When you realize that instead of looking at a painting on a wall you are suddenly a part of it, smeared in with the colors and hues of another culture. Coming back to Bhutan, all sense of objectivity is lost. I am entrenched in the canvas now, with not just an apartment and a little red scooter and a work contract to my name but also the invisible strings that meld you to a place. Emotional ties that weave your perspective through different loops and knots until it comes out as something wholly different on the other side. Now, I have friends and community here that I care for deeply, that treat me as their own.

Wearing my Kira and Tego feels as easy as wearing sweatpants and I make up for my lack of Dzongkha with a seamless ‘la’ inserted after every other sentence. Bhutan has adopted me as much as I have infused it into myself. The lines between Cate as a visiting American and Cate as a person working and living here have become blurred, and my worldview with it. I have adjusted, the fireworks have faded, and day to day life is as routine as it is anywhere. Sometimes my heart pangs with missing important moments at home with my family, accentuated by the silence of my room after ending a phone call with someone halfway around the world. The miles echo, eaten up by my still-blank walls. At the same time, I feel comfortable. I am independent and confident. I know things. I drive my scooter through the valley in the morning to work and grin, and don’t feel confused as often.

The famous Tigers Nest Monastery

Now I have been back for almost two months and autumn is opening the door with a creak. I can feel its cold, chill breath on my neck when I wake up in the morning. The clouds burn with an apple gold and slowly, so slowly, the rains fade away. I think, almost two months into my time back in Bhutan, I am fitting each puzzle piece together.

Sometimes, in the early blue dark of the morning when run, I swear I forget that the rest of the world exists. Time stands still here, trapped in a Himalayan shaped hourglass and endlessly abundant; a mountain of jewels hiding a dragon. I can spend it aimlessly and frivolously, far removed from the bustle of cities choking on traffic lights and one too many to go cups of coffee hustled out onto crowded streets by men and women in crisp suits. Especially before the sun rises, I convince myself I have travelled back in time to a place frozen by harsh mountain winds, compelled to stand unwavering for centuries. Bhutan is so many things, spoken and unspoken.

Multicolored layers fall on each other until the old and new, modern and traditional, mindful and hedonistic blur together into one green hued tapestry imprinted with the wings of a dragon. My adventure has only started, and it’s almost as riveting as Bilbo Baggins own journey to a place of lonely mountains (I am, sadly, not accompanied by thirteen dwarves). So it begins.