The Mountain Will Decide

"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.

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 khora, 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 18,600 feet she experienced an illumination of her life.