The Museum.

Nicholas Roerich.

Agni Yoga.

The First Man.

The Second Man.

The Third Man.

Shambhala.

Making Shambhala.

Making Shambhala

The Museum.

I remember, vividly, the first time I saw it. I had not been expecting much. The museum was small – barely a museum at all – tucked in between an innocuous apartment building and a massive mansion under seemingly-perpetual renovation. The Nicholas Roerich Museum. I thought it was cute, very charming, very New York. A hole-in-the-wall museum, paintings exhibited in the former home of their long-dead painter, surrounded by the curios he collected in his decades of travel. Having freshly moved to Manhattan at the tender age of eighteen, it seemed like exactly the kind of place I should be going to.

            The lobby was nothing special: about the size of my dorm room, with little shelves full of books and little postcards for sale and an elderly woman patiently manning the register. And then, up the stairs and to the right, I saw it.

            The Himalayas.

            No wonder that Roerich, Russian son of middle class lawyers, spent so long travelling through Asia at a time when Asia was nigh impossible to travel through. No wonder he painted those mountains dozens of times, in multiple series, multiple colorscapes. If the true Himalayas were anything like the lurid, preternatural shapes I saw that day, it cannot possibly come as a surprise that he saw them once and could not exorcise them from his mind, could not shake the deep desire to go to them.

            I certainly cannot, and I have only seen his paintings of them.

Nicholas Roerich.

            Nicholas Roerich was a man of many interests, and a stronger man than I. When I came to university, I wanted to be a writer; my mother would have none of it. I muddled through school, second- and third-guessing myself; even as my mother and I grew ever more distant, her hold on me remained, poisoning my ambition, alienating me from my desires. Roerich wanted to be a painter; his parents would have none of it. They insisted that he become a lawyer, and he did. He—a stronger man than I—received degrees simultaneously from St. Petersburg University and from the Academy of Art.

            There is a self-portrait of Nicholas Roerich in his museum, made late in life, wearing a perfect white beard and perfect black robes. He renders himself tucked between mountains, gazing out of the frame calmly and evenly, his face a collection of well-assembled acute angles. He is handsome, sort of – but, more than handsome, he is self-assured. He looks like he knows things. When I meet his gaze, his eyes seem to soften, as if he has understood something about me, as if he is about to speak.

The First Man.

            I wish, in retrospect, that it were not true, but the first time I went to the Nicholas Roerich Museum was with my first boyfriend, the first time I met his parents. He came from money, and I did not. In order to prove to the money he came from that I was worthy of dating their son, I arranged a multi-stop walking tour of the Upper West Side, trying to find things that were cultural, exciting, novel—and free. They had lived in New York for several years, and came back to visit often; it had been something like ten weeks since I’d arrived for freshman orientation. What could I find that they would not have already seen? I was gasping with anxiety the morning they arrived. He did not do much to comfort me.

            I had found the museum by complete accident, looking at Google Maps and looking for an activity to pass the time between The Coffee Shop With Literary Significance and The Pet Store Selling Exotic Fauna. I zoomed in just-so on just the right neighborhood, and there it was: The Nicholas Roerich Museum. I clicked through to the website, skimmed it, and decided it would do. There was no fee for admission, and it was small enough that they probably hadn’t heard of it.

            They liked it, I think. His father in particular seemed taken with a painted likeness of St. Sebastian; months later, when I visited their home in California, I would see that he had a wooden likeness of St. Sebastian on the front porch. But in the two years that I dated my first boyfriend, his parents never brought the museum up again, and neither did he.

I, on the other hand, thought about the place obsessively. I thought about how bright those colors were, how I had never seen anything like them in my life, how many of Roerich’s paintings were monochromatic and yet seemed splendiferous, expressive, vibrant, alive. I thought about how comforting and tranquil those Asian mountains looked, how the American mountains I had grown up in looked, how the Ethiopian mountains my mother and father came from looked, and the look of all the mountain ranges I had yet to see or imagine. I thought about how funny it was, this gorgeous little museum, unremarkable from the outside but overflowing with beauty within, beauty that seemed made for me, that called to me. I thought about what a happy accident it had been to have found it at all, and all the other happy accidents that had brought me first to America, then to New York, then to 107^th and Riverside. By all accounts, I should have been born in Africa, like my cousins were—but I was not, because an illness in my mother’s family brought American doctors, and those doctors brought her family to America. I should have dropped out of high school, like other daughters of single black mothers do—but I didn’t, because my mother refused to be homeless for long and some trick of nature-nurture instilled her work ethic in me. For months after I first saw The Himalayas, the painting up the stairs and to the left, I would lie in bed, fantasizing about those mountain ranges and plush clouds all rendered in various shades of blue. I would think about how much of my life happened by accident—or, rather, by some combination of accident and human will. I think they liked the museum, my boyfriend and his parents, but I loved it.

            I wish, in retrospect, that it were not true, but the first time I went to the Nicholas Roerich Museum was with my first boyfriend, who called me a whore so many times I could not estimate a count, who told me he loved me but that he was ashamed to be with me, who destroyed objects and threw things during fights, who would hold me tight and force me to kiss him when I tried to walk away, who repeatedly raped me and convinced me that I owed it to him to allow him to do so, who told me he was late for class when I confessed that I was thinking of killing myself, who snuck into my room while I was sleeping to leave me a letter telling me I was a fool for breaking up with him, who I met at a party my first month of college and decided to kiss for no better reason than he was the tallest man in the room and I liked tall men—a happy accident.

            Among Nicholas Roerich’s many interests was the achievement of world peace. I am interested in this, too, but Roerich was a stronger man than I—and a better multitasker.  To Roerich’s mind, the first step to achieving world peace was achieving world civility. When the First World War began, Roerich appealed to Russian royalty, asking them to promise to protect cultural artifacts and national monuments during their military endeavors. After the First World War, Roerich decided that the wartime conservation of cultural artifacts was too important to wait for princes and politicians to secure it on their own. He got in touch with the Americans—the 20^th century’s most idealistic people—and suggested his vision for world peace, not in fourteen points, but in one: Art. It took six years and two presidents, but in 1935, the Roerich Pact was signed. It was one of the first-ever international treaties, signed by 21 North and South American nations, and remains in effect today. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for it.

            Roerich believed that the production of art was the most sacred act a man could undertake. He believed that art was the embodiment of man’s spirit and the noblest fruit of man’s aspirations. He believed that, while paintings may burn and men may die, the eternal shared consciousness of humanity would forever be traced through the objects we created, not because we needed them, but because they were beautiful. Roerich believed that the first step to world peace was inner peace, a psychology of peace; that art was a crystallization of the inner self; that, if our inner selves were all a bit more crystallized, more clear, there would be no conflict within ourselves, and so no conflict between ourselves, and so no conflict between our nations.

            Abusive people are often abusive because they are themselves damaged and broken. I heard this a lot in the months after I finally escaped. “It wasn’t your fault; it was something wrong in him.” I must believe that’s true. The war between our nations was not something I could have resolved through treaty or compromise, though, for years, I tried. The first step to peace between us was inner peace, which he did not have. He is still at war with me: his lawyers are still in touch, his friends still harass me in the streets. Even though I have long since abandoned the battlefield, he is still at war within himself, and so there is no peace.

The Second Man.

            I met my second boyfriend five weeks and three sexual partners after I broke up with the first—which is to say, too soon. He came from money, too, but voluntarily gave it up to live the 80-hour weeks and sleepless nights of an haute cuisine chef. He was very young, and lived in the sort of Harlem apartment that very young people chasing their dreams in New York City tend to live in. It was dirty, boyish, and a wonderful escape from campus, where every building reminded me of my ex, where every walkway was a path where we might meet.

            I had been to the Roerich Museum several times on my own since that first excursion, but I decided to take him there, too. He liked it more than my ex had, and so I liked him more than I had my ex. I was young and did not realize that this was not enough.

            While I was looking at the mountains and fantasizing about jagged peaks obscured by hazy clouds and smothered in mystic silence, he was pointing out the various artifacts in Roerich’s collection: little Buddhas, medium Buddhas, and one big Buddha on the second floor. He told me that, in high school, he had spent a lot of time at a Buddhist monastery near his house, eating and meditating and talking to the monks. They had given him a lot of peace, he said, peace he still carried with him. All chefs are drug addicts, as I learned in the months we spent together; he waxed philosophical on inner peace and harmony, stoned off his tits, talking a little too loudly for such a quiet, pretty place.

            A few weeks after we broke up, we had coffee in the Bronx’s Little Italy. I still longed for him. While we nibbled cannoli and sipped espresso, he told me that he was Facebook friends with his ex again, the one that ruined him; that he was fighting a lot with his roommate; that work was even more overwhelming than usual; that his mother was divorcing her second husband; that his father’s health problems had come back. Smiling, as though it was funny, he confessed that he’d been coping with the stress by doing a lot of drugs and having a lot of promiscuous, semi-anonymous sex.

            I returned his smile tightly and looked at my coffee. I thought about how tenderly I had cared for him, how much pain his stress had caused me when we were together, the depth of the compassion and care I had offered him, how willing I had been to believe in him. In the wake of the disaster that had been my first love, his basic human decency, his failure to scream at me for expressing my feelings, seemed life-saving, seemed important—but it wasn’t, really. He was not a bad person, but that is not the same as being a good person. He never really hurt me, but that is not sufficient. We tried to stay friends until I realized that I did not owe it to him to be his friend, that you can care for someone but choose not to be their caretaker.

When I think of him these days, it is with a faint feeling approximating pity. I cannot give you compassion, I whisper to my memory of him, because I do not have the emotional strength to be responsible for you or your suffering. But I hope you are well. That is what I wish for him: that he be far away from me, but that he be well.

Agni Yoga.

            Nicholas Roerich’s wife was a woman named Helena who, if his portraits of her are to be believed, has had a streak of grey in her thick brown hair since the day she was born. I have yet to see an image of Helena in which she looks any younger or older than 42: in both photographs and paintings, she is always beautiful and lively, aging and wise. There is a painting of her at her desk at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, hung over the fireplace, a few yards to the right of the self-portrait of her husband. She, too, has a knowing gaze, though hers is a bit friendlier, softened by a smile.

            Helena went with her husband on his travels through Asia, in a time when travelling through Asia was nigh impossible. Well, that is an unfair characterization; Helena did not go with her husband like an obliging maid, following in his footsteps and keeping his luggage tidy. When he traveled through Russia documenting national history, she traveled through Russia documenting national history; when he froze and starved in remote Tibetan villages, she froze and starved in remote Tibetan villages.

She was an active participant in his work, a muse for his creative endeavors, an equal partner in his intellectual pursuits. She was as much a master as he, and was, in turns, a musician, an art restorer, an ethnographer, a translator, a philosopher, a photographer, a documentarian, an archaeologist, a polyglot, a mother. The last of these roles she filled as passionately as all the others: all her sons were immense successes, and the men of her household unilaterally considered her the spiritual bedrock of the family. She was generous, and kind, and genteel, and intelligent; she read to her children, and made them good citizens, good thinkers, good men. She did all of these things smiling and beautiful, with a wash of grey through her thick brown hair and—if her husband’s portraits of her are to be believed—delicate and perfectly rounded fingernails.

Nicholas was a stronger man than I, but Helena was thrice the woman. The two met accidentally, but forged their coupling with purpose, until one could not be considered without the other, and their love became a form of gestalt. On solitary trips to the museum, I imagine their pillow talk, those two well-made faces and their enigmatic smiles. I imagine how they must have made each other laugh, how Nicholas likely loved Helena’s little smile and Helena likely loved to kiss Nicholas right on the tip of his nose. I imagine how they must have encouraged each other, watering each others’ roots until they grew, like trees with trunks leaning into one another, each new bud entangling their branches further, until they were as one great tree.

            An interest in Eastern mysticism was very fashionable among Russian elites at the time, and Helena (who came from better stock and more money than her middle-class husband) was a very fashionable woman. Nicholas Roerich’s mark on world history was the Roerich Pact; hers was Agni Yoga, a school of spiritual thought derived from theosophy and occasionally referred to as “The Teaching of Living Ethics.”

            I started doing yoga regularly because my therapist suggested it. He was educated in a time when psychotherapists were transitioning from cognitive behavioral therapy to mindfulness therapy, incorporating elements of popular Buddhism into cognitive-behavioral understandings of anxiety, depression, and stress. By the time I started practicing yoga, I had already tried a number of remedies for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: klonopin, MDMA, copious amounts of weed. I did Bikram, Vinyasa, and Hatha yoga, hoping that, if I locked my limbs in the correct sequence of positions, I could correct the flow of energy in my body, and be happy.

            This is, of course, not how yoga works. The more I worked with my therapist, the more I understood that it was not the yoga itself he thought would help me—the asanas, the bandhas—but the mindfulness, the practice of looking inward, of being present, of letting go. We talked about my first boyfriend, and, through talking about all the ways that he abandoned, mistreated, manipulated, and neglected me for the two years we spent together, we also talked about my mother. My mother, who had abused me, too, in insidious little ways that didn’t look like abuse until my therapist said “you accept the love that you deserve” and I realized what she had taught me to expect. And, as we talked about this, he reminded me, constantly, gently, to let things go.

As it turned out, I had a lot to let go: Fears that I would lose what little money I’d scraped together, paycheck-to-paycheck, and die starved and alone, in a homeless shelter like the one I was born in. Fears that my daily panic attacks and unpredictable triggers would keep me from getting good grades, getting a good job, and being happy—in that order—while my classmates became congressmen and CFOs. Fears that I was too broken to love or be loved again. Fears that I would fall in love again, and allow myself to be abused. I would tell these fears to shut up, that I didn’t have time to feel them, but they just grew stronger. These fears would grow so strong that they would drown out the sound of my heartbeat, would echo around my head until the chatter was so strong that I could not think, that all I could do was cry, and gasp, and scream, and pull at my hair and flesh until the pain drowned out the fear.

Hour after hour, he talked me through my feelings, my fears, my preoccupations, until I learned to talk to myself with the same compassion and care. If I tearfully choked out “I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but…” he would remind me that there is no wrong feeling, that feelings cannot be helped, but must be turned over in the mind like an unfamiliar object. The feeling must be felt; the feeling must be let go. “It doesn’t matter if you should feel that way. Why do you feel that way?” And then, when the feeling was understood, and when the emotional surge was no longer overwhelming: “So, what do you want to do?”

            Agni Yoga is: cultivation, transmutation, cosmic energy, understanding, compassion, development, purification, inner-facing, outward-loving, unity, consciousness, courage, patience, creativity, love, peace. It is the practice of transforming reckless energy into power. I do not believe, as Helena Roerich did, that humanity’s lack of spiritual openness will one day lead to an oversurge of cosmic energy from space that will rock Earth’s surface with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. But I do believe, as she did, that refusing to grapple with one’s own psychic energy, to understand and have a loving relationship with it, is the source of human suffering. I believe, as she did, that fire is a purifying force, that trauma is an edifying experience, that loving-kindness cannot be a part-time exercise.

            Mindfulness therapy is not Buddhism, but it is the first thing I tried that actually alleviated my panic attacks, my depression, my six-days-without-showering, crying-so-hard-and-often-that-my-eyelids-scab-over, my deeply-believing-that-I-am-nothing-and-there-is-nothing-worth-this-and-I-should-end-it-now. It helped me to clearly know myself, clearly know my desires, clearly know the path ahead.

            I bought a few books. Thicht Naht Hanh, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Helena Roerich.  I can’t pretend to be anything close to enlightened, but I am here, open, receptive, ready to accept this cosmic energy from space, this infinite-and-yet-so-finite life before me, to channel its fire through me, to do something remarkable with it.

The Third Man.

            In a way, it does not feel like falling in love with him—rather, it feels like love is something we are making, together. I have fallen for men, and the experience is unpleasant at best, that horrifying stomach-lifting feeling not unlike plummeting down a roller coaster it is too late to dismount.

            I want to tell him this, but, of course, it is far too soon to use language like that. So instead I grip his hand tight and tell him that I like him, that I want to take him to one of my favorite places.

            On our walk along 107^th, down towards Riverside, he points to the massive mansion under seemingly-perpetual renovation. “I’ve never been to this museum, but that’s my sister’s old place,” he says. “I used to throw my New Year’s parties there.” He comes from money, too.

            Happy accidents. We meet because I drunkenly swipe right when I meant to swipe left, because his first message to me is about my favorite pizza joint, because at 2am I happen to be wearing a cute dress and he happens to be hanging out alone at his parents’ Upper West Side apartment, just a few blocks from said pizza joint, and the weather is nice enough during New York City summers to hang out outside at 2am with a stranger and a slice of pizza. I ask him to meet me at one of my favorite places, a special little sanctuary on Columbia’s campus, and a few months later I ask him to come with me to one of my favorite places, a special little museum next door to his sister’s old mansion.

He asks me one night if I think it’s a coincidence that all of my boyfriends have been rich men. I point out that I hadn’t known these men were rich when I met them. He asks me again.

I roll the question around in my head. “I think it’s more that nothing bad has ever happened to them,” I say, realizing it as I say it. “I always worry that everything is on the verge of going wrong. Rich men don’t.” He himself has never really had anything bad happen to him, and he knows it. “I know I am lucky,” he says, on a different night but in the same bed, “and I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But sometimes, I wish I had suffered more. I think suffering teaches you something.” I agree. I often think to myself that I am lucky to have suffered as much as I have at such a young age, to have been forced to develop the tools for managing suffering, both in myself and in those around me. But I love men who have never had to suffer, who never had to develop those tools, because they can do things that I cannot, like wrap me in their arms, and say “It’s going to be okay,” and mean it.

A few weeks later, lying in that same bed, we both confess that—even though we have been in relationships before, even though this is nothing close to the first time for either of us—that when we break up (as we inevitably will because we are young and life is long), this will be the model for how it should feel. This is what it should be like. Not like falling in love, but like making it.

            He teases me for my interest in astrology. I tell him, “I don’t believe in it, because it isn’t real. But it is true.” He’s a Solar Gemini and Lunar Scorpio with his Venus in Cancer. I’m a Leo, Lunar Libra, with Venus in Cancer, too. We’re meant to be. I ground him; he supports me. The cosmos have ordained our coupling. “See?” I show him the charts, the star maps, the arcana, the objective proof that he is not a mistake, that he is safe to love. “The stars know.” I don’t believe in it, but it is true.

Shambhala.

            It is difficult for us Westerners to understand Shambhala, not because it is untranslatable (it means something like tranquil-comfort), but because it is difficult for us Westerners to understand things not easily categorized, codified, numbered, and defined.

            Is it a real place? What do you mean by real?

            Can I go there? What do you mean by go?

            Superficially, the myth of Shambhala is not unlike the myth of El Dorado: a mystic utopia, both unfindable and begging to be found, where all people are happy. In the Spanish myth, they are happy because they have gold; in the Buddhist myth, they are happy because they are enlightened.

            Since first hearing the term, I’ve thought a lot about Shambhala. I’ve fantasized about a perfect little monastic community, tucked away in lush and vibrant blue mountains, where there is nothing worth being concerned about, nothing but beauty and quiet and peace. I’ve imagined its capital, Kalapa, as a city eternally ringing with the fading sound of a gong. An eerie peace, a cool peace, a quiet peace.

            British novelist James Hilton stole Shambhala (in the way that British people steal things) for Lost Horizon, a book which embarrassingly suggests that paradise – a place he calls Shangri-La – is a place where no one grows old, no one gets sick, and no one has a job. “It is significant[…] that the English regard slackness as a vice,” he writes, perhaps thinking of parents who characterized his creative impulse as a lack of industriousness, or peers who teased him for being poor in maths. “We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?”

            But Shambhala is not a place for slackers and do-nothings to lie indolently in their cots, biting sweet figs and gazing intermittently at both their navels and the stars. A British man may see paradise as a place free from work, and meditation as an extreme form of relaxation, but it is not so.

            For all that the West has done to categorize, codify, number, and define it, I think we know very little about tranquil-comfort. We imagine serenity as idleness because we imagine our unhappiness as exhaustion. “If only I could work a little less,” we think, “I would be a little happier. And if I didn’t work at all, I could be the happiest man alive.” If only I could find Shambhala.

            Shambhala is not a place to be found.

            In his memoirs, Roerich relates an anecdote he heard from a learned lama at the Sikkim monasteries about a man who was searching for the Maitreya, the King of Shambhala. The man searched for over a decade, and, finding no sign of Maitreya or his kingdom, abandoned both his search and his faith and began his return home in anger. On the way, the traveler saw a poor man trying to saw an iron rod with a single horse hair, repeating: “Even if the whole of life is not enough, I will yet saw this through.” Over and over again he said this, sawing at his iron rod.

            The searching man saw the sawing man and thought: “’What do my twelve years signify[…] in the face of such persistence? I will continue my search.’” It was at that precise moment that the Maitreya Buddha appeared to him and alighted upon his shoulder. The King told him that, indeed, he had been with him all along, but the man had not seen him, because man can “[behold] only what each [is] worthy of seeing.” And, indeed, all around the searching man, the peasants recoiled in disgust, for they could not perceive the King on the searching man’s shoulder; they saw only a sick dog, covered in boils, reeking of shit.

            The lesson of this anecdote: “Know clearly what you desire. Otherwise, instead of God, you shall behold a dog.”

            The lesson of this anecdote: Shambhala is not a place to be found.

            Shambhala is a place where one can go, yes. I have taken brief and fleeting trips there—or, at least, to countries like it. In the words of the Dalai Lama, “those with special affiliation may be able to go [to Shambhala] through their karmic connection[;] nevertheless it is not a physical place that we can actually find. […] Unless one has the merit and the actual karmic association, one cannot actually arrive there.” Unless one labors to know oneself, to consciously free oneself from suffering, to feel compassion and alleviate the suffering of others, to accept negativity but refuse to propagate it, to see clearly and sharply the true state of things, one cannot actually arrive there. Most days, I am nowhere near Shambhala. But I endeavor to get there.

            Perhaps “get there” is the wrong language. What I mean to say is this: The life that I live, the life that exists around me, the life that is life (which is to say, suffering, and unpredictability, and disruption, and changes of plans, and happy accidents) can look like dog shit or like the King of Shambhala. I have been depressed, I have been abused, I have been terrified. I have come home early from work with every intention of swallowing every little blue pill in the top drawer of my desk, stopped only because, when the elevator doors opened to take me to my room, some cosmic energy urged me not to move. I have also been happy—blissfully happy—and gripped by the absolute fear, the absolute knowledge that that happiness would not last forever, and that someday sadness would come to take it.

            And yet, in spite of the fact that I have, in 21 short years, been impoverished, homeless, abused, suicidal, raped, betrayed, neglected, harassed, and promised very little of anything, the most common phrase in my meticulously kept journal is “I cannot believe I am so lucky.”  And it’s true: I cannot, ever since I began to learn what James Hilton did not, what Nicholas Roerich has begun to teach me:

            That Shambhala is not a place to be found, but to be made, brick by brick, with great effort and labor, with great care and attention, a place to go, not with our feet, but with our hearts, our minds, our inexplicable human capacity, our incomprehensible emotional elasticity, our indefinable cosmic energy, That Thing Which Makes Us Human, That Thing Which Takes Us To Shambhala.