Think of your ancestors, your loved ones, as you toss the sage into the fire”.
These were the instructions the Shaman gave to me as she stuffed a handful of loose sweet-smelling sage into my hands. I walked over to the fire, briefly closed my eyes and silently muttered “I love you, Dad” as I tossed the powdered herb into the deep orange flames. The fire hissed, and I jumped back, as if he had heard my words and was eager to respond.
“I want to meet a shaman, but only if it happens organically, by chance,” were Amy’s words when we first talked about her decision to travel to Mongolia. She had watched a documentary about a family who had undertaken an epic journey to the Taiga region of Mongolia to seek help from a shaman in their attempt to deal with grief. Their story resonated deeply with Amy, and she knew she just had to go. Amy, our group of Wild Women and I were now here, in the heart of the Khogno Khan mountains, mere days into our Mongolia travel adventure and the inaugural Mongolia Explorer.
Our 4-Runner bounced about, winding its way through a series of faintly marked, dusty ochre roads. Skirting herds of Pashmina goats resting in the shade of tumbleweeds and sagebrush, we drove to where the road ended and a rocky footpath began, leading up Khogno Khan Mountain.
After an hour or two of hiking, we arrived at the site of a 14th-century Buddhist monastery. Elaborate but now crumbling stone walls were all that physically remained of the site. There was something about the air, though – an ‘unseen’ element to the deeply peaceful surroundings that caught most of us off guard. It was hard to pinpoint, but we all felt it. An energy, a sense of ‘presence’ among a stone facade that was slowly being consumed by foliage and time. Remnants of Buddhist lives and history, crumbling among fields of wildflowers. It was a heavy, but beautiful location.
It was just the eight of us at the back end of this remote valley in central Mongolia. Or, at least, we thought it was. Returning from our hike, as we neared the base of the mountain, we could hear the faint beating of a drum echoing off smooth granite boulders far to our left. We instinctively chose to investigate. The drumming intensified, and as we drew nearer, we could see a woman with jet black hair dressed in a full-length deep red robe, adorned with an elaborate collection of tassels, bells and intricately stitched embroidery. On her head, she wore a wide, thick black band with strands of yak hair, eagle feathers and a triangular symbol. Her focus was consumed solely by the beat of her drum.
We stopped, watched and listened from a distance, not wanting to interfere. We were startled at first to see anyone else in this remote location. Upon finally noticing us, the woman signalled with hand gestures that it was ok for us to come closer. We soon realized that this woman was performing some kind of shamanic ceremony and that we had essentially stumbled, within days of beginning our journey, upon the exact scenario that Amy had quietly hoped for. The serendipity of the moment seemed surreal. How were we, deep in the wilds at the back end of a remote mountain valley, experiencing this rare chance encounter that she had dreamed about when planning her Mongolia travel adventure, but could never have truly expected to occur?
Mongolian shamanism is one of, if not THE oldest, shamanic traditions in the world. The belief centres around the connection between the human and spiritual realms, particularly in communicating with our ancestors’ energies or ‘Tngri’. We stood, silent, observing as the Shaman drummed, chanted and made offerings of dried juniper, sage and cloth from her ancestors onto a well-stoked fire. She at times seemed in a trance, at others smiling and inviting us closer. Our guide interpreted for her, telling us that the Shaman says she is from this valley and that she was here to ‘speak’ to her ancestors, to wish them well, to send offerings of burnt herbs and prayer into the surrounding trees, rocks, river and mountain in which their spirits now reside. Her drumming intensified, her head swaying wildly from left to right, a black mask pulled over her eyes.
Nearing the end of her ceremony, she handed us the sage so we too could ‘communicate’ with our loved ones in our own way. I thought of my dad. Amy, of her beautiful daughter Sara, and how it was both the grief and depth of pain that comes from profound love and loss that propelled her to visit this land of one of Sara’s earliest and greatest loves – horses.
As one can only hope for when embarking on a journey, our time in Mongolia was shaped by meaningful encounters of all depths and widths. Pre-planned ones, immersive ones, educational ones. Some encounters were brief, like our visit with the women at the Asral Mongolia NGO to learn about their project, ‘Made-in-Mongolia’, and how it supports disadvantaged women, many of them single mothers. ‘Asral’, Mongolian for ‘care’, provides these women with shelter, meaningful employment and reliable income. It felt right to meet and support these women. Others, like our visit to the home of Tumurkhuu Batmunkh, one of Mongolia’s top archers and craftsmen, were exciting and a little nerve-racking, as we put our muscles and aim to the test, firing his handmade arrows at undersized, distant targets.
We spent time with a Buddhist calligraphy master, exploring the art of letting go of expectations and judgment. We sat in tiny round homes, sipping mare’s milk vodka with nomadic families, felting, sharing food and laughter, gaining insight into their traditional ways. There was time to converse with locals at village markets and idle hours to play traditional Mongolian games with the nomad children of our host families.
Our most ‘immersive’ of the planned days were spent being welcomed into the lives of nomadic families far out on the Central Asian steppe. The journeys to reach our hosts’ homes meant navigating undulating mountain passes and skirting around large numbers of free-roaming livestock. These visits opened our eyes to the inner world of nomadic life on the steppe. They taught us, in essence, what it takes to survive and thrive in a life that depends deeply on the symbiotic connections forged between an awful lot of hard work, ancient knowledge and the fickle nature of, well, ‘nature’. The land, the animals and Mongolian nomadic lives, we learned, are all intricately woven in a pretty darn complex web of interdependency. A concept that can be difficult to understand through a Western lens.
The Galbadrakh family taught us how they use every last drop of cow, yak and mare’s milk that they, like clockwork, harvest on a daily basis. They walked us through a ‘day-in-the-life’ out on the steppe, letting us each try our hand at their major list of regular to-dos – collecting, stirring, straining, cutting, drying, and finally tasting the many milk products they concoct from scratch. The Batchuluun family taught us how to make felt jewelry and allowed us to observe their morning and evening milking rituals, while the Davaasuren family demonstrated how they managed to herd camels, goats and cattle, all the while running a growing Ger camp in a remote landscape bound by sand dunes and mountain ranges. Idle time does not seem to be something there is much of in a nomadic existence.
In a world where traditional knowledge, respect, and even an understanding of the rhythms of nature are fading, it is refreshing to see entire families working in unison, young and old. Knowledge IS being passed down and shared throughout the generations. We watched a 4-year-old take command of her family’s yak herd, rounding them up with a click of her tongue and gentle but firm slaps on their butts. We witnessed a teenage boy orchestrating his young siblings to take turns churning freshly gathered mare’s milk and a great-grandma work alongside her great-grandson, leading calves to their mothers for their twice-daily feed. Everyone in the family seems to have a key role to play in nomadic daily life in Mongolia, and it was an honour for us all to spend time alongside them, gaining insight into their traditional ways.
We could have easily passed through these lands, from village to village, taking in momentary glimpses of nomadic life from afar, but instead, we were graciously welcomed into their world, slowing down our pace and travelling, in essence, in a much deeper and wider way, metaphorically. We slept in felted gers, lying awake listening to the stark silence or, on occasion, to the rare and beautiful howl of wolf packs in the far distance. We watched the Mongolian sky, as if it were a living, breathing organism, shape shift between a deep, high altitude blue, to cloud formations, light rays and hues that made it difficult to discern where the earth ended and the sky began. The term ‘vastness’ embodies a whole new level of meaning in Mongolia.
Emerald landscapes stretch from one end of the already massive horizon to the other, dotted with small white encampments and herds of horses running free, unencumbered by fenced-in boundaries or private property lines. Rivers flow, winding their way through valleys carved during the ice age, sustaining life through generations well before the times of Genghis Khan.
Even the rainbows in Mongolia seem to carry within them a sense of freedom, wildness and life force. Regular occurrences of these massive arced prisms connecting earth and sky have an intensity that makes it easy to understand why Mongolians have a deeply rooted belief in the spirituality of the natural world and why shamanism would thrive here, assigning a divine essence to mountains, rivers and landscapes. This is a culture with a profound reverence for nature. One that ‘blesses’ its own sky, believing it to be a nurturing entity that ‘sustains all life’.
When the Shaman had ended her ceremony, satisfied that her ancestors had indeed felt the beat of her drum and the blessings of good health and remembrance that she chanted into the wind, our guide formally introduced her to Amy and translated how she had come to Mongolia carrying the pain of grief, love, memory and even a small tube of Sara’s ashes, hoping for a chance, however slim, for a serendipitous encounter just like this one. The Shaman embraced Amy, and holding her by the hands, told her that it was her wide-open heart and her love that led her to this moment and manifested this encounter. That her loved ones are with her, guiding her in her journey through grief, through healing and through Mongolia.
We can hold onto any or all of the moments that we choose from our encounters throughout this lifetime, but one thing that feels certain after our Mongolia travel adventure and our time in this incredible land is that there is beauty and power – healing, transformation even – in experiencing our journeys with our hearts as WIDE open as the Mongolian sky.
