The Mountain Will Decide

<p>Where will you go when I die? Swenson's elderly aunt asked triggering her first journey to Tibet. But what began as a trip in memoriam expanded to a fascination with a country with a deeply Buddhist culture dominated and exploited by its wealthy neighbor China. The fascination in turn enlarged to an obsession whose essence became a mountain.</p><p></p><p>Over a couple of decades Swenson traveled every year or two back to Tibet to places that enchanted her that fascinated her that she needed to see again-Lhasa Gyantze Shigatze Tholing Tsaparang. She became friends with a Tibetan woman of her own age. She traveled sometimes with friends sometimes only with a guide. But the sacred mountain Mount Kailash and the thirty-three mile walk the <em>khora</em> around the mountain became a path she yearned to return to. Here in the rain-shadow of the Himalayas in a landscape dry and ascetic sere in its stone-boned beauty at 18600 feet she experienced an illumination of her life.</p>