Today I ask Great Grandmother about the changes she has seen in her lifetime.
 
‘Perhaps the most obvious change is in the degree of isolation in which we then lived.’ Great Grandmother says. ‘We had so little information about the outside world. Reports from the war fronts were propaganda, letters rarely got through to our town’.
 
‘Today I see you and your generation struggling with too much information. Except up here where you are cut off from the internet, your cell phone is like another limb. Even my infant great grandchildren reach for the screens.

​If you have a question you can ask the internet. But in those days we had far too little information. Even what we had was usually false news. Of course you complain that you are also bombarded with false news. But you still have other sources you can turn to. We did not’.
 
‘Tourists come to this part of the world because they want to savour the remoteness, the feel of an earlier way of life. I am proud of the traditions we have retained such as this summer migration. But I am also glad of our new ties to a wider world and that my great grandchildren will be so much better connected than my generation was’.

​Today Great Grandmother talked to me about the lessons she learnt from the gatherings with her friends up here on this rocky outcrop.

‘The most important lesson for us was quite unexpected’ says Great Grandmother, ‘It was the value we came to attach to uncertainty.

None of us in those wartime years could be sure we would see fathers, husbands, sons or brothers again in this life. In our efforts to cope with the overhanging sense of uncertainty our talk up here in the evenings moved without conscious break from our most trivial daily anxieties to much more fundamental questions about what we could believe in.’
 
‘Don’t get me wrong’ says Great Grandmother. ‘We women were not philosophers, or even well educated, or conscious of talking about matters which people have pondered for centuries. But the war forced us to confront death in our families. Inevitably we wondered about whether that was all, the end, or whether there might be something beyond.
 
Our communist leaders put science on a pedestal. But we knew, even in our ignorance, that there was no scientific knowledge on which to draw about another world.

​If there is another life to which our brothers and fathers had gone, we came to accept that it is not accessible through any form of what we call ‘knowledge’ available to us. We came to accept that this most fundamental of beliefs has to remain uncertain’.

‘Over the years, me and my friends came more and more to value the importance of uncertainty’, says Great Grandmother.

‘We came to understand that it is those who are certain who do the greatest damage to our lives.

In the post war world my generation saw so much harm done by those communist party members who proclaimed certain knowledge about how to organize this world. Of course they spoke against religion. But now that communism has gone we see a revival of religion and those who preach certainty again about the next world. We see great harm done by them too – an intolerance and demand for social control that infects all our lives.

My generation has seen that so many of those who claim certainty, about this world or the next, misuse their claims. They manipulate others and enjoy power and position for themselves’.
 
‘What we first experienced up here, that day-to-day undercurrent of questioning of the established ordering of things, and that imperceptible movement of out talk between practical tasks and speculation about much larger matters, became the most important legacy for us from those wartime summers.

​That legacy gave to me and my generation a life-long impetus for a more fundamental questioning of claims to certainty. Instead, we came to value the necessity of uncertainty in order to keep us from the greatest harm‘.

​There has been a break in my daily routine. A big party is planned by the camp.

Traditionally the party marks the midpoint of the summer grazing. In fact, my friend explains that the most experienced herders will stay on after the departure of the families. They will stay until the first snows come. The horses are able to continue to graze in the snow, but they need to be brought down before the deep winter drifts begin to form and predators come down from the highest mountains. The pastures need time to recover.
 
I help my friend with the preparations. Expeditions have to be made back below the treeline to gather wood for the fires. Mares’ milk goes through the fermentation process. The embroidery on old blouses has to be re-sewn.

​Those with performing skills bring out their viols and mouth harps. I have not heard them since my childhood. Their sounds bring back an earlier world of make-belief and shamans.
 
I have to admit I am not much use to my friend except as a pair of eyes on her boys. It rains on the night. But it does not matter. We all have a good time.

​After the remains of the party has been cleared away, I revert to my afternoon walks with Great Grandmother. ‘In the last year of the war I also had my last year of school’ she said.
 
‘One of the things we learnt about in that final year from one of my Russian teachers was about some ancient Greek philosophers. Only one thing stuck in my head. It was about a life of reflection as the highest form of ‘the good life’. It struck me as so wrong, so self-congratulatory’.
 
‘it was so wrong because in neither the big decisions that affected our lives then, nor in our daily lives, did we have any time to reflect or even much of a choice. When the women of the town took the decision to continue the summer migration during the war they did not have time to weigh all the alternatives. Similarly when the war ended I had no choice about marriage.

After the war my father returned. He had already promised me to his closest friend from the war. The other girls of my age group were in the same situation.

​The world we faced was not a world of reflection. It is a world where most of us have to live with the hand we are dealt. In any definition of a good life we have to embrace the vast majority who face a daily struggle in a world determined for them by others’.

​Today Great Grandmother has chosen to walk to the Scythian tombs we had seen in the distance. ‘I came up among these Scythian tombs in the years after the war because I found that the sights and sounds up here could somehow settle my mood. I was so angry and frustrated as I struggled to accept my stipulated role as wife, mother and as a housebound daughter in law’.
 
‘In those wartime years the women around me had also experienced times of feeling helpless and of their lives being shaped by outside forces so much larger than anything they could influence. When things were particularly bad, because the rumours from the war were all about disasters, or because we had had some bad accident among the herds, we all used to walk over here’.
 
‘It was the marmots on these hillsides that made our hearts sing again. They are nervous, shy animals. But somehow they got used to our visits to the tombs. We got endless amusement from their antics. They reminded us that life carries on. So this place with its strange combination of wide open views, ancient history and scurrying animals came to stand for us for survival. And that gave us the strength to go on. It was the same for me after the war’.

​‘The atmosphere of this place’ continues Great Grandmother, ‘is also about the gods and goddesses of earlier times.

​Here, when times were bad, we prayed for help from gods and goddesses that had been prayed to long before ours. Up here during the war, I saw the women renew a sense of fittedness about their decision to continue the summer migrations. Up here after the war, I too came to accept a sense of fit with my motherhood and my other given roles. So did most of my friends.
 
No doubt we would have loved some dramatic intervention to prove that our prayers for help had been heard by the ancient gods and goddesses. In our lives we learn to look for causes and effects. But If there is another world that has influence in ours it has to be in a way that is compatible with our own responsibility in facing what is given’.
 
‘Perhaps when we look for help from our gods and goddess we should not look for cause and effect but for that sense of fit between our inner nature and the events, circumstances and help along the way that determine our lives’.

​Since our midsummer party there is a change in our daily rhythms. What is entering into our routine is the beginning of the preparation for the return journey from the high pastures.

The big change is that a start is made on the culling of the herds – the decisions that have to be made about how much of the herd is to be overwintered and which animals are judged too weak or old to be worth maintaining.
 
My friend tells me that most of the culling is done after the herds are brought down from the pastures. But a start is made on the weakest and oldest animals. The reason is that up here the meat and sausages can be preserved for the winter by air drying.

I join in gathering reeds from the lake and gullies on which the meat will be laid out for drying.
 
When it comes to the air-drying of the meat and the making of sausages I am hopeless. Even though I grew up near here, I have become totally used to seeing meat in supermarket packages completely detached from any relationship with a living animal. Up here I suddenly see the slaughtering of animals up close.

​I wash their intestines in the lake for the sausage casings. My own attempts at stuffing them for sausages only produces laughter. I am told that it is time for me to take Great Grandmother for her daily walk.

​The destination of my daily walks with great grandmother has reverted to the rocky outcrop. Here we can sit among the petroglyphs and warm our backs.

​‘There was a third hard lesson I eventually absorbed from those wartime summers and the aftermath of the war’ says Great Grandmother. ‘It was about the incomplete’.
 
‘Only one of my two brothers came back from the war with my father. To the end of her days my mother would go each morning to the gate of our house in the town and look down the road. She never gave up hope that one day my missing brother would return. I did not share her hope. But I could not destroy hers’.
 
‘I struggled to understand the death of my brother. It seemed so unjust. Others of his generation had returned to the town yet he had had no chance to live a life. Others of my friends who experienced similar losses also felt the injustice’.

​‘After the war had ended my friends and I continued to see the daily unfairness of life around us. Those women who led us through those years never saw rewards from what they did. The survival of the herds and the maintaining of the town was taken for granted in the aftermath of the war. Those men who found success in the post war period were the unscrupulous, the vicious and those who made their accommodations with communist party members and officials’.
 
‘Nor did the collapse of communism change the nature of success. The rewards went to a different set of the corrupt and the dishonest, and even the beneficiaries of the previous regime often became beneficiaries under its successor.

​We came to realize all too fast as we reached adulthood that the deserving do not get their rewards in their lifetime and the selfish, the ignorant and the malign do not receive their retribution either’.

‘We tried not to become cynical and bitter’ says Great Grandmother when our walk resumed the next day.

‘Again it was the summer migrations to the mountains that helped us to come to a reconciliation with this sense of incompleteness. In our treks up here to the summer pastures we observe the cemeteries of travellers who have gone before us. Placed by the roadside and facing out to the passer by, the tombs present life as a journey, with journeys before and journeys yet to come.
 
‘These outward-facing markers suggest that this one short life we have is neither the beginning nor the end of the story. From them, my friends and I took comfort. We came to believe that that the injustice we experience here is not the end of the story, but only a stage on a longer journey.

​If there is a rectification of the injustices we see around us it occurs in the frame of that longer journey. The markers suggest that the way we live our lives affects the lives of others and our own continued path on that longer journey’.

​I am invited by two older women to join them in their searches for mountain herbs.

I can recognize the gentians and edelweiss but many of the plants are unknown to me. For those with the knowledge there is a lucrative side-line in gathering and drying mountain herbs. They will bring them back and sell them to middlemen for export to the herbal remedies industry in Europe and the United States. My new friends tell me what to gather and which parts to keep – the roots, leaves or flowers.
 
I still have time for my daily walks with Great Grandmother. I tell her that the lessons she and her friends had learnt are very hard ones to live with.

People do not like to live with uncertainty about what is most important;

we look for simple explanations of cause and effect in understanding the pathways of our lives;

​we find it difficult to accept a sense of incompleteness in the working out of what we think is fair and just.
 
’Of course they are hard’ says Great Grandmother. ‘That is why we create the idea of gods to help us on our path.

​On our yearly journeys up here we accepted and sought help from all the gods and goddesses we found on the way. It does not mean we reject the idea of the universal god we have been brought up with. But we opened our hearts to other pathways to belief. We learnt not to turn away from any source of help’.

​‘I see this same sense of openness in your generation’ says Great Grandmother. ‘Now that we take in tourists to our house I see from them how once dominant pathways to belief have lost their appeal.

It is not that the original message is wrong. But the priesthoods who have carried the messages have distorted them. So often they have constructed a false authority for political and social purposes and for a masculine dominated world. In doing so, they have distanced both themselves and their message from people today.

Me in my generation, and you in yours, reject their interpretations. You can reject it overtly. For my generation the questioning born in the wartime summers had to be hidden’.
 
‘I see this openness on how to respond to the challenges of our journeys taking on new forms.

​Many of those who come this way look for a sense of completeness in the evolving story of the natural environment they find up here in the mountains. Others look to come to terms with what is a given in their self-identity by a search for ancestry. In this land of so many journeys I like to think that today’s travellers also begin to recognize the damage done by those who claim certainty. These summer migrations taught me to live with hope and an open heart’.

​The time has come all too fast for us to pack up for the return to the town. Many of the men will stay on with the herds until the first snows arrive. But families must return.

I help my friend to reload the truck. The yurts are taken down. The latrines are topped with earth and stones. The last night we sit around the open fireplace and go to sleep in our blankets.
 
We wake before dawn and get in the truck. I look in the cabin for Great Grandmother to take her place between me and my friend’s husband, our driver. She is nowhere to be seen. My friend sees me looking. She points to the hillside.

​There in the dawn I see a small figure beginning to make her way towards the rocky outcrop where we had passed our afternoons. I want to run after her. My friend sees my distress. ‘She said you would understand. She wants to wait for the first snows to come. The herders will keep an eye on her’.

​The journey back to the town is over in a long day’s drive. I am exhausted when we get back and resist the temptation to open my email and to read the messages.

Today I can no longer put it off. There are messages from my colleagues I cannot ignore. The Start-Up company that bought our App wants us to come back as a team. The App is finding an even bigger market than they had expected. They need our help in taking it forward. The offer is for the team as a whole.

​My fellow team members are waiting for my reply. There is only one reply I can give.
 
And so I have stuffed my backpack for a final time. A bus will take me to Bishkek to take the plane to Frankfurt and to connect beyond. I am being pulled back to my daily world.. My pause in time is over.

​But in my mind’s eye I see a small figure on a mountainside. She sits with her back to the rocks waiting for the curtain of snows to arrive. There she sits. She is ready. She waits for me. She waits for you.