Thanks to All

If you bought a copy of MARRIED TO BHUTAN in 2011 and especially if you took the time to write me and say you liked it, which so many people did, thank you so much. The book is doing well and I'm happy to say I'm working on the next one about our life in Bhutan and elsewhere. If you haven't gotten a copy of the book, what are you waiting for?

Hands with Lotus by Phurba Namgay.

No part of this blog may be used without expressed permission of Linda Leaming.

The secret to a good marriage

So this is how Namgay spends his days and most nights. He sits cross-legged on the floor and paints. Sometimes he uses an easel, but this on the floor cross-legged is how traditional painters in Bhutan do it. He stays pretty focused, and it's good for me because if I know he's downstairs working in his studio, I feel like I have to keep writing. My room is at the other end of the house. We meet in the kitchen for lunch.

Here's me playing with Photobooth working on my next book. Sometimes it's hard to stay focused and work and not go downstairs to Namgay's studio and bother him. But I believe we have the perfect thing to help us stay focused and make our days of painting and writing productive. Because I know that after we put in a long day of work we can do lots and lots of this.

PING PONG!

Note: The Honorable Tshering Tobgay, Bhutan's opposition leader, correctly pointed out that cooperation, the point of the story of the Four Friends image that Namgay is painting in the photo, is more probably the key to a successful marriage. I can't argue with that. So cooperation and ping pong.

Small Packages

 

 Phurba Namgay painted this Four Friends for the Small Packages show at Cumberland Gallery in Nashville which starts December 1st and goes through the 24th. Each of the four 6 x 4" pieces in the show illustrate Bhutanese folktales. Images of the four friends are all over Bhutan and remind us to live harmoniously. The elephant, monkey, rabbit and bird help each other pick the berries from the tree and it's come to represent the spirit of cooperation that makes life easier and more harmonious. If these animals can work together anybody should be able to. Most often in depictions of the Four Friends the bird sits on the rabbit who sits on the monkey who sits on the elephants back, and the bird is reaching for a piece of fruit on the tree. Namgay said he wanted to unstack them and give a more democratic distribution of labor. So he did.

The Leonard Lopate Show: Married to Bhutan - WNYC

The Leonard Lopate Show: Married to Bhutan - WNYC

Married To Bhutan is posted again in the Leonard Lopate podcast lineup on WNYC for today!

Goodreads Choice Awards

Married to Bhutan was nominated! PLEASE VOTE!

2011 Goodreads Choice Awards: Best Best Travel & Outdoors Vote now for your favorite books!

Marriage and Beliefs

This picture, taken in 2002 on a trip to Bumthang, is Namgay and me at Membertsho, the Flaming Lake. It's where Terton Pema Lingpa found treasures five centuries ago, including a lit lamp he pulled out of a very deep and mysterious eddying pool. The pool is to our left in the picture. Treasure finder, magician, saint, scam artist, Pema Lingpa has been called all of these things. He is still highly revered in Bhutan and the place is an important pilgrimage site. I believe in Pema Lingpa and his supernatural abilities. When I moved to Bhutan a lot of what I believed changed, but I didn't entirely give up my own belief systems. I don't think that's even possible.

Marriage has been about self discovery. Namgay and I have some similar and some different beliefs, but because we're married going on 12 years, and because we plan to stay married, happily if we can manage, we've sort of meshed what we believe. Each of us knows what's important to the other. When we take big trips-- like to the US from Bhutan-- we go to Dechencholing, as do most people living in the Thimphu Valley, and get a blessing. Namgay consults a tsip, or astrologer, who tells him things like the most auspicious direction and time to begin the journey. Sometimes we have to back out of the house in the middle of the night so that we start out a long trip facing the right direction. There might be something to all this. Belief is not as important as doing it because he believes it's important.

It makes me a little sad that stories of women going to foreign places and finding love are cliche. It's been done to death. I don't really have an opinion about other books and other people's lives, but for me marrying into another culture made me better. It automatically made me a citizen of the world, and made me take the focus off myself. Sometimes I feel like I glaze over the difficult parts of our intercultural marriage;  it takes an enormous amount of work and a superhuman capacity to love and forgive. And not just your spouse. And then you have to love more. And laugh. I think about all these things and wonder if my friend Aldra, whose husband is Scottish, has her own culture clash and citizen of the world dynamic. I wonder if she eats haggis.

What Namgay thinks about Halloween

Lately I've been going to book groups and talking about MARRIED TO BHUTAN. Last week someone wanted to know what Namgay thinks about Halloween. So I asked him and he said: "When we first got here I though it was kind of strange to decorate the houses with spiders and cobwebs and cut off hands. Now I'm used to it and I don't care." It wouldn't occur to  him to dress up, but he thinks the costumes are funny. Many of our American holiday customs are kind of hard to explain to someone who doesn't live here. Once he asked me about Easter. "Well," I said, "Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. He was killed, and three days after that he came to life again and went to be with God, his father."

"Okay, well than who is the Easter Bunny? And where does he get the eggs?"

Namgay likes Thanksgiving because we have people over and we cook a lot of food and it's the holiday that's most like a puja or Losar, the Bhutanese new year. When we were first married I told him that for Christmas it was traditional for husbands to give their wives jewelry. He's on to me now, but he still keeps the tradition. Nice.

The Kindle version of Married to Bhutan is on sale for $2.51. The Nook version is $2.99. Great deals if you like ebooks.

The Royal Wedding Dispatch



This is the best. A description of the Royal Wedding from my dear friend Louise Dorji.

It was poignant when all the guests were assembled, a daunting array of royalty gathered in the courtyard and this slender young woman walked in alone, approached the dais where the king waited and prostrated before him and offered him a scarf. She was then conducted to a slightly lower dais beside him for the marchang ceremony. Again later, after the multi coloured scarf had been placed around her neck by the fourth king in the Shabdrung chapel, Ashi Jetsun Pema had to walk alone into the Kunray and to approach the king seated on his throne, prostrate again before him, and offer a precious golden container of symbolic elixir of life. The king came down from the throne and crowned his new bride with a traditional queen's crown of embroidered silk. This was the most charming moment: he adjusted the crown carefully, his fingers cupped her face tenderly as he raised her head to check the crown was well placed and then he broke into a lovely smile. Then seated on her own, lower throne, there was a lengthy process of the offerings of precious objects and prayers before the guests started giving their scarves and congratulations. Punakha was the perfect setting for a fairytale wedding. There is an expanse of green between the palace and a small lake next to the dzong. Their majesties strolled hand in hand among the guests, chatting and smiling with great and small. The press group were bowled over it seems. I was amused to see a reporter from the UK saying how charmed he was by everything and that he felt Bhutan had the best royal family in the world really. That coming from an Englishman where tradition and ceremony have been done rather well for hundreds of years was a compliment indeed.

When the Spirit Moves You

At the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville this Friday I'm signing copies of MARRIED TO BHUTAN, and I'm on a panel talking about spirituality. The title of the discussion is "Where the Spirit Moves You -- True Stories of Faith in Change." I don't usually talk about my own spirituality or comment on the spirituality of others. It's a private thing. Our spirituality manifests itself-- whatever our beliefs-- in our actions. Why talk so much about it when you can live it, so to speak?

The spiritual realm, whatever and wherever that is, is the only place where true change happens, in our lives and in the world.

I moved to Bhutan so many years ago because I was drawn to the spirituality of the people and place. It oozes out of the rocks. It's not so much religion as it is a way of life. I also like the way that the pace of life unfolds in a purposeful way. Living in Bhutan has taught me the most important lesson of my life and this is it:  Before we talk about "spiritual," and even before we pronounce ourselves spiritual beings, we have to get things right in our lives. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror and be honest with what we see. Not possible for some. Possible for others. But we know when we don't have things right in our lives, in our jobs, with our families, and especially in our motivations. 

                   The saddest are those not right in their lives/who are acting to make thing right  for others:/ they act only from the self - /and that self will never be right:/ no luck, no help, no wisdom. -- William Stafford

Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word

I'm so excited I'll be at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14th!


Come see me at 1:00 - 2:30 pm, Room 29 of the Legislative Plaza.  So many great authors will be here! The 23rd Annual Southern Festival of Books is presented by the Tennessee Humanities Council.

Book Review: Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming

Book Review: Married to Bhutan by Linda Leaming