Two years ago I traveled to Nepal and trekked into the Himalayas. There is a village on the route called Ghode Pani, or often "Ghorepani", interchangeably. The name translates roughly to “water for horses.” It was here where the full scale and scope of what I was doing came rushing at me, in excitement and mostly in a panic. The peaks of the highest mountains came into view and we had crossed the altitude threshold where the lack of oxygen in the air can be consequential. I did some very questionable analyzing and determined that at this altitude I was higher than I had ever been in my life and that I had no idea if I was one of those people who might spontaneously fall into cardiac arrest or suffer a stroke with such low oxygen levels. I was playing it very cool but I was freaking out (later I would discover that my guide, Astin Pun, was far more keenly aware of my inner state than I believed possible…an uncomfortable realization but also one of many small blessings). The village provided some welcome distractions: a charmingly dingy bar with two massive pool tables (at which Astin handed me my ass several times in a row); a large wood stove in the common area of the lodge; lots of sleeping or resting donkeys standing around in random places (at that point, donkeys could still climb the staircases and paths and were the main vehicle by which supplies of any kind were delivered to the high villages). Despite these comforts, my ever-present low hum of anxiety was reaching such a pitch that I didn't sleep more than 1 hour that night, even though our climb that day was equivalent to ascending the Empire State Building times 3, and the next morning we would be departing before the sun rose to catch what was supposed to be the greatest sunrise maybe on the planet from a nearby hill (it was).

The next day I was exhausted but alive and grateful for everything I'd seen and done thus far and seemed to be metabolizing the available oxygen just fine. The hike that day took us through what would be endless forest preserves of almost exclusively rhododendron trees. The trees were twisting, textured trunks and branches, sprouting out of the ground in impossible curving angles. The branches didn’t fracture into smaller and smaller twigs in that bushy way an oak or maple does but spooled out in a somewhat vine-like uniformity, the effect being that the forest was both thick with the trees and cavernously delineated by them. Later, I learned these massive forests of rhododendrons would bloom in the spring so that the hills and valleys would suddenly be bright red and pink, wholly transformed.

The rhododendron is a special plant for me. It is very prevalent in the forests of southern Pennsylvania, where I spent my childhood, though there it is a smaller, shrub-like plant. It lines the trails of the state forests and recreation areas we would visit as a family, and it was on these trips that I recall feeling the most secure and relaxed—like I was in a place that was always waiting for me. And here, on the other side of the planet, I found a piece of home.

It was in that forest in the Annapurna Sanctuary that I (finally) encountered myself on that trip. Its strange to recall this as a moment of self-awareness and not the moment I finally encountered this wildly new and exciting place I found myself, finally saw the Nepal or the path or the forest upon and in which I had been traveling for so long. The more I understand the extent to which my perspective and posture in life is seen through a scrim of threat and concern (anxiety), the more I can explain why, when that scrim is pierced or falls away, it is a feeling of self, self-containment, that I recall; and also explains the nagging suspicion I have that when I travel I’m really just taking my personality for a ride with the purpose of getting to know it again.
To move through the world on the eggshells of anxiety can mean I often feel very far from myself, from others, from love. Somewhere in the bushes of Pennsylvania, a long time ago as a child in solitary play, I felt the presence, not of meaning or purpose, but of Cosmic Love and Connection held within me. I see and feel it acutely, sitting there in the dirt, alone, five. It is a memory I often return to.
This has all been to try to explain why I appear to have written a love song about my time in the Himalayas.