What I love most is how seamless everything is. You walk through a forest and come out in in a village, and there's no difference, no division. You aren't in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

Time becomes a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. The colors are changing, the light that comes slanting over the rim of the mountains grows cooler. I have trouble remembering the date. I ask my students what day it is, but by the time I get to the next class, I have forgotten and must ask again...Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp, and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the kinds of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic. Her grandmother's stories do not annoy her, and what she wants is no different from her grandmother wanted at her age. When change does come, everyone has time to get used to it. Glass windows, a corrugated iron roof, electric lights, immunization, a school. Everything that happens in the village will be remembered, because what happens affects everyone, it is everyone's story. It is not something happening to strangers on the other side of the city, on the other side of the ocean, announced today, displaced tomorrow by newer news, the latest development, this just in. Just how fast development will change this is impossible to know. In school, kids are taught a new order of things. There must be many students...no longer able to tell their parents what they are learning. When the outside world catches up, everything will accelerate, and grandparents will shake their heads and sigh over their grandchildren. The wholeness that I love will be lost, and yet I cannot say that development is bad and that people should go on living the way that have always lived, losing four out of eight children and dying at fifty. Development brings a whole new set of problems as it solves the old set. I must not fall into the good-old-days trap.

For now though, I am glad to be part of the Time Warp. I feel exhausted when I remember my last year in Toronto, rushing to class, the grocery store, the bank, a movie, a meeting, always feeling that I had not caught up, fearing that I never would, because there was so much to do and see and buy and say you've done and seen and bought, to be on the cutting edge, to be where it is happening, not to be left behind. Now I have time in abundance. Thre is no one to catch up to, and I don't have to be anywhere but here. I have no idea what is happening in the outside world, what wars or famines are being turned into ten-second news clips, what incredible new technologies are revolutionizing the people die or dream or do their banking. I lost my watch in in Tashigang and the digital face on my alarm click faded out in the monsoon damp, but I am learning to tell time by the sun and the sounds outside, and I am hardly ever late.

I have fallen into this world the way you fall into sleep, tumbling through layers of darkness into full dream. The way you fall in love. I am in love with the landscape, the way the green mountains turn into blue shadows in the late afternoon light, the quality of the light as the sun rises above the silver valley each morning, the unbearable clarity of everything after rain, the drop to the valley floor far below and the feeling of the great dark night all around, and knowing where I am and being here. I am in love with the simplicity of my life, the plain rooms, the shelves empty of ornaments, the unadorned walls. I don't want to go home for Christmas (I don't want to go home, ever). They never warned us about this in orientation.

So thanks for your visit to my web slide show, and if you want, give me a call and we'll do some Buddhism, ok?