In the Age of

Tsering Yangzom Lama

I lived once in a forest and so I have lived always in that forest where sunlight traveled through the leaves and danced on my fingers and across my palms with their stories of a future I have already forgotten all that I could have been because I heard that we are living in degenerate times like the 11th Century in our ancestral land, like the days after Gesar Ling’s death, as Milarepa aged, alone and impoverished, called a drunk madman even as he composed and composed, and so I say, Poet Warriors, where are you today? Where is your vastness to hold all our tumult, our egos, our pain that we cannot bear for a second to face naked as nakedly naked as the day we were born and held and bathed by our creators who chose against their sorrow and because of their sorrow to make life and to keep that life going and to let it grow until it filled their entire beings, but what do I know about all this given that I am a person living alone in a forest, but there, I see that there is still so much left to revere, even in a degenerate day, there is more to love and to forgive in myself, and then I remember that I don’t believe in the self and death is just a transition from one form to another, and don’t I doubt for a second that my faults and my virtues, my good deeds and my bad ones will keep reincarnating after this body dissolves into smoke and ash that clings to the broom belonging to the young temple worker who breathes a part of me in and I live within him and become inseparable from him as I have always been and so one day when he is an old man, we hear a story from a Tibetan girl at the streetside teashop telling her friend that someday Gesar Ling will return to Miyul and bring peace and happiness, an end to wars, so that the dharma can flourish again in our homeland, didn’t you ever hear that story, she asks, almost whispering as her friend shakes her head, knowing that from that day forward they will be bound by secrecy and loyalty because the old stories are banned and yet they persist, and finally the friend has heard the foretold and she can be part of the chainlink that keeps the old stories alive until the day that the Poet Warrior returns to all of us, inside all of us, to wield a sword of discernment and hold love for the war within ourselves, and then the age of degeneration will be understood as the age of preparation, of practice, of a life’s daily labor of learning to bear it all.

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, won the GLCA New Writers Award as well as the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction & Poetry. Tsering holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA in Creative Writing and International Relations from the University of British Columbia. She was selected as a 2018 Tin House Novel Scholar. Tsering’s writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Vela, LaLit, and Himal SouthAsian, as well as the anthologies Old Demons New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet; House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal; and Brave New Play Rites. She is also a co-founder of LhakarDiaries, a leading English-language blog among Tibetan youth in exile.