Asking · Eleven Steps From the Edge · Pulse Beat

He went up alone, to the high pasture, in the first snow. It was a four-hour walk through rhododendron and juniper, past the last of the yak herders' huts, to a flat shelf of rock from which, on a…

He went up alone, to the high pasture, in the first snow.

It was a four-hour walk through rhododendron and juniper, past the last of the yak herders' huts, to a flat shelf of rock from which, on a clear day, you could see the whole range. He sat there for a long time, wrapped in a blanket, with a flask of tea, and watched the light change.

He did not pray, exactly. He sat the way his grandfather had taught him, with his back straight and his hands open on his knees, and let the mountain be there.

Gradually, as the afternoon wore on, something loosened. It was not an answer. It was the sense that the question had been asked too long in the wrong form. He had been asking: Can I go back? And the mountain, with its enormous indifference, was not the thing that could say.

What came instead was a memory of Dorje, laughing, on the glacier, with his arms out wide. I am showing her that a man can do hard things. And Tashi understood, quite suddenly, that a man can also do the hard thing of coming home.