Update from Gomar
Hi-
The update from Gomar is that everyone is doing well and thoroughly enjoying (if not being occasionally challenged, in a good way, by) life in the village. Our various artistic projects are well underway, with thangka students gaining the skills to properly and proportionally draw the Shakyamuni Buddha at an impressive pace and the stone and wood carvers and metal smiths well on their way to producing truly stunning images. The local artisans and teachers with whom we've been working in the village have time and again expressed their astonished joy at how quickly our Pratt students have gained such refined skills, no doubt attributable to their experience and background from home.
Yesterday many of us spent the afternoon at the dizzying Kalachakra Chorten of our neighborhood Gomar Gompa, as well as touring the chapels and assembly halls of the monastery. Today we walked across the Rebgong Valley floor to the Mango Sengeshong monastery, and again took in enough stautes of bodhisattvas and murals of Buddha-lands to exhaust even the most seasoned iconographer.
We will be taking a break from the village routine this coming Tuesday and Wednesday, when we'll make a short drive to the nearby Khamra National Park for a day of hiking and a night at the local and important Namdzong nunnery. Following this change of scenery we'll then return to Gomar on Wednesday evening for 4-5 more days of art studies and homestays. After this we'll again head out on the road for a tour through the nomadic regions of northern Golok, visits to significant monasteries of this region, and finally, commence our trek from Labrang back to here in Rebgong. But that's not until July 26, so there'll much to share before then.
Stay tuned-
Galen