The day with Zenkar Rinpoche began innocently enough packing up his books and other items for his flight back to London. For our tea break, I filled the kettle, turned on the stove and left the water to boil, expecting it to whistle. I didn’t know that Rinpoche’s hosts customarily used the oven shelving as storage space for things that should not be stored in an oven. The kettle whistle didn’t work, but the smell of smoke did as it…

How does a nice Jewish girl, raised in the sheltered suburbs of New York, convey to a Tibetan Buddhist master her culturally conditioned phobic reaction to the very sound of the word nun and its implied austerity? I can’t say why monk doesn’t sound as forbidding, lackluster, or as humorless as nun, but I do know my discomfort with the word was an expression of fear that had no real basis.

I had purchased a one-way ticket to Nepal. Despite a conscientious effort to leave America with all i’s dotted and t’s crossed, it felt more like I just grabbed a toothbrush and left town the way someone might walk out of a faltering marriage—exhausted, harboring no ill feelings, wanting no material settlement, only a fresh start. Living tongue-tied among Tibetans during my initial months in Boudha was maddening, but it was utterly delightful to be free of my New York worldly routine.