It all seemed like a dream, as I closed my eyes, yet everything was the same when I opened them. Terraces of green wheat, luminous in the hazy mid-morning sunlight, and mottled with patches of mustard, that stretched down to the river, a wide expanse of rounded stones caressed by the tumbling waters, and very faint strains of a wandering flute, played on the far bank.

In a few months the waters would swell, fed by the monsoon rains, and bring firewood, taking in exchange a little more of the soft riverbank, stones and sand, and the nests of birds that lived in their burrows. But now all was so peaceful. Schoolchildren by the spring, looking shyly in my direction, goats and their kids that galloped about crazily under the large tree, and all the while, the song of strange birds, the groaning of buffalo, the dripping of spring water into a green bucket behind me, and the voices of men and women in the small village, pots tapping and brooms sweeping.

Now all the children had gone to school, and I opened my mind, forgetting my self, to the sound and being of everything around my form, in this sort of Spring in Nepal in February where life is so simple and there is no time, only the rising and setting suns. I wondered; how could people live, packed into those big, filthy cities, full of poverty and hopelessness and frantic desperation, when out here and everywhere there was so much space and calm and simple plenty for people, animals and nature alike? I could rest here and contemplate the being of everything for ever, but I knew that I would be, in the morning, on the lurching, dust-choked bus back to Kathmandu.