“Each person will enter into their own Heaven when they come to understand that what they give they receive.” Earnest Holmes, from This Thing Called You. For this whole 900 mile End Polio Now Bike Tour I had but one appointment that I did not want to miss. Be in Pacific Grove, near Monterey on July 4 to July 7 for a once every five years family reunion. Cousins three generations out would be waiting for my happy arrival. Our mom would be there, of course, as the Matron; the oldest living member who would be attending for this extended family. And then there would be my family, and in my family an adopted brother: Penpa and Dolkar, his wife, who had come down from the Bay Area to be the care providers for our mom, who is referred to by them, with great justification, as “mom.” So much so that Dolkar and Penpa were happy to become my mothers Care Providers, offering her 24 hour a day care for the entire three day Reunion. As I was sharing a picnic dinner with the big family who was scattered all over the beach near our bed and breakfast, I noticed Penpa and Dolkar sitting on the ocean stone wall enjoying their dinner, the sun, the water and each other. For this moment, I want to tell their story and in this story show you the large bridge that has been built from my mountain to theirs. In 1991 President George Bush signed into law a congressional resolution declaring Tibet an occupied country by a foreign hostile invading country: China. As a result he allowed 1,000 Tibetan refugees to enter into the U.S. and apply for U.S. citizenship. One of those refugees was Penpa Tsering, a master wood craftsman by trade who had been living in temporary quarters in Dharamshala, in the state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India, where the Central Tibetan Administration has, since 1959, been established as the Tibetan government in exile. In 1989 at the age of 30 Penpa was living in his home in Llassa Tibet. His mom died when he was 5. His father remarried and at the age of 13 Penpa went with his father to work as a carpenter at the Potalla Palace, also in Llassa. Two years later his skill as a wood carver became recognized as genius, and his father found him an apprenticeship under one of the finest Tibetan wood carvers in the world, Grand Master Dechen. Penpa’s apprenticeship included repairing and recreating carvings within the 400 year old Palace which was continuously falling into disrepair. He continued his apprenticeship until he was 30 years old, and recognizing himself as a master carver, Penpa, always a man of action, sprouted the wings of imagination and desired to fly from this high perch in the Tibetan mountains and into the land of India, where he had heard stories since he was a child about the Dalia Lama, who in 1959 had also once sprouted wings and flew away from the repressive invaders and into the welcoming diplomatic arms of the then Indian Prime Minister Nehru. The Dalai Lama is adored by every Tibetan as a brilliant and benevolent leader. A scholarly and kind man. And it was time for Penpa to see the world. So in 1989 Penpa decided that he wanted to meet the Dalai Lama. Penpa, being a man of action, decided to wrap himself in the warmest clothes he could find which was a “pair of cloth football (athletic) sneakers that fitted over his thin silk Chinese made socks, 4 pair of thin cloth pants, a shirt, three thin jackets “that you could breath through,” and, a “yellow Chinese made hat” that resemble an American baseball cap. With this “mountain snow gear,” he trekked through the Himalayans. When he came to the Indian boarder with no official state papers announcing his arrival, the boarder guards had little choice but to detained him in a jail cell for longer than Penpa felt was necessary. Finally fed up with the delay, Penpa and his friend escaped only to be captured again. The guards, thinking that he was some kind of dangerous martial arts expert with skill enough to have broken free they lassoed him with several ropes and now surrounded by many guards walked him from a safe distance to his new detainment cell where he and his friend would wait a year for the Indian Government to process the paper work and grant him asylum. At the end of a year Penpa moved to Dharamshala, the seat of Tibet in Exile government, and for two years worked as a master woodworker helping to build the Tibetan Cultural School, Norbulinga, or as is more directly translated, the Summer Palace (School). In 1992, my sister, Margo, invited me to come to a meeting at the Friends of Tibet, a humanitarian organization in San Francisco to learn more about how our family could help sponsor a Tibetan refugee. When he arrived to her Noe Valley flat, our whole San Francisco Brumme family cleared a small but well lit beautiful room in the back of the flat. There, in his bedroom he immediately set up a work shop as a wood worker right next to his rolled up sleeping futon. One morning after breakfast I asked Penpa if I could watch him work. Sure, he said. His tools consisted of a hand power drill, several small very sharp knives and chisels, a three foot wooden bow that he would string a small steel cable to, into which he had carved hundreds of sharp grooves that functioned as teeth to a saw, and sand paper. All these tools, he said, have been around for a thousand years. He began the process by drawing the designs of birds, flowers and dragons on the flat surface of a one by two inch length of pine. Once drawn he drilled a hole through his pine. Next he tied one end of the wire cable to the pliable wooden bow, and strung the other end of the wire through the hole. Once through he tied the loose end of the wire to the opposite end of the bow, causing the bow to bend, placing tension on the wire. He then sawed away the negative spaces of his drawing. He unstrung his wire from the bow, pulling it out of the opening in the wood, and proceeded to drill another hole in another negative part of the drawing, then he strung his bow again, and proceeded to cut away another negative section and repeated this process for the next hour. After he finished removing the spaces of wood, he lifted his small sharp wood carving blade and began the slow methodical meditative process of removing shavings of wood from the panel, reducing the straight flat stick to create beautiful amorphic forms that wrapped through and around the length of his now highly ornamental length of pine. By afternoon, the carvings of one length of his panel would be defined clearly enough so that he could begin to polish the coarseness from their surface. By the end of the first week he had finished sculptures in the form of small tables, frames, with images of birds with long tails, flowers, with a multitude of pedals, and dragons breathing fire. By the end of the first couple of weeks several finished frames and table were stacked up in the corner of his one room shop and home. His friends were the first to recognize his outrageous flow of beautiful art and so purchased most of them. Soon after he was getting responses to his sales calls from Tibetan Lamas both from the West and the East coast to come and beautify their Temples. Then celebrities like Steven Seagal commissioned him to create Tibetan sculptures for their homes. In 6 months Penpa had found an apartment, then acquired a job at a sculpture foundry in Berkley, had learned the English language and then after that he became a United States Citizen. His wife, though I will make her story more brief, has no less of a remarkable history than he. She was living in Southern India trained as a Paratrooper, night opts, for the Indian Government. She retired from her position in the military, and studied to become a Nurse’s Assistant, or Care Provider. She lived in the same home town in India as one of Penpha’s friends who had come to the U.S. years earlier. She came to visit Penpa’s friend here in the Bay Area and over a dinner conversation she discovered Penpha. And he discovered her. They dated and then married. So now, my mom is their mom. Family, I have discovered, is whoever we say it is. More importantly, they are whoever our hearts and minds say it is. To put it more simply: When we love others as we would love ourselves we have just adopted a new family member. The good stories that we tell ourselves about another is the bridge that creates a family. I am on a 900 mile End Polio Now Bike Tour. To learn more go to endpolionow.org. If you would like to learn more about one of my sponsors, the Sonoma Valley Rotary Club, go to their Facebook page, and “Like” them. If you would like to learn more about Penpa and his art, and perhaps commission him a masterpiece to place in your home, then send him an email: ptsering@yahoo My arm is getting stronger every day. I am looking forward to continuing the trip.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 22:50:41 +0000
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