A Pause in Kyrgyzstan

March 6

I climb up here in the heat of the morning sun. I climb up here in the cool of night. From here I look over the roofs of the town below and into the stretching valley beyond.
 
To the north, over the foothills, the valley will open to the steppes of Kazahkstan and beyond to the mountains of the Altai;
 
To the east lie the peaks of the TianShan with China behind.
 
To the south west a larger valley emerges with passes to northern India.
 
North west lie the Aral, Caspian and Black Seas with the plains of Hungary beyond.
 
I was born near here in a town by a lake in the shadow of the TianShan.
 
I have returned for a ‘pause in my life. I will tell you of my experience.

March 7

My chance for a ‘Time Out’ has arisen quite unexpectedly. The App. I have been working on with my fellow programmers was acquired, out of the blue, by a larger start-up company. The buy-out does not make us multi-millionaires, let alone billionaires. But it comes with a ‘non-compete’ clause. We have to turn our skills in a different direction while the commercial use of our brain-child is further developed by the purchaser. The buy-out has given me enough to allow me to take a break, a pause, and a chance to refresh.
 
I could have returned to the town near here where I was born and bred. But my family has left. The town itself is transformed by tourism. I looked for a place where a traditional way of life still lingers. I find it here.

March 8

I have chosen this town for my pause and Time Out because it takes me back to the setting of my childhood, a generation ago.
 
Here there is a combination of a Kyrgyz way of life and a Russian way. Here Russian style houses face out to the street and the Kyrgyz face inwards around their courtyards. The dwellings are still bordered by their agricultural smallholdings – with the apricot and peach trees of this region and the vegetables for self-supporting living.
 
There is still too a daily market; both a mosque and a Russian orthodox church; women with headscarves and women with free-flowing hair. Against this setting, I can reflect more easily on the changes in my own life and the setting in which I now live so far away.
 
My friends, back where I now call home, say that I am being sentimental, selfish, self-indulgent. Perhaps I am. I know that taking a pause and having a Time Out is a luxury. Most people never get the chance for a pause in their lives. And why should I not use my Time–Out to give space to sentiment. I have spent my student years and my professional life in an abstract world of the mind. Time for a change; don’t you agree? I came for another reason too. I will tell you about that in my next blog.

March 9

I promised to give you another reason for my choice of this town for my Time –Out. My own life has been shaped by a journey across cultures. I could not have imagined my present home, or current way of life, when I was growing up near here.
 
I want a moment to stand back from this intercultural journey – to consider what I have gained and what I have lost. I hope to measure this better here, where in the background, all around me are the traces of thousands and millions of journeys that have gone before.
 
Across this part of the world, people have moved from West to East and from East to West, South to North and North to South.
 
With the interchange of people there has come trade, new technology and new scientific knowledge. There have come different ways of experiencing the world –through the different social organization of nomads, settlers and the settled.
 
There also have come different religious beliefs. In the hills, towns and cities of this region, if you look carefully, you can see traces of Zoroastrian worship, Buddhist temples, Nestorian Christianity and caves where perhaps Sufi wanderers and Taoist hermits once lived, as well as the churches and mosques of today.
 
Perhaps there are no insights to be gained. Perhaps I am engaging in a form of ‘New–Age’ self-indulgence, or traditional magical thinking. We shall see.

April 20

I have been staying in this town now for about six weeks. I am boarding with a family in a traditional courtyard house. In the inner courtyard there is a pump, a washroom and a toilet, storage spaces and a summer kitchen. In the outer courtyard the chickens live, hay is stored, and animals are bought in to overwinter.
 
There are four generations living in this house. There are three very young boys, their mother, who has quickly become my close friend, her husband and his parents, a grandmother and a great grandmother. 
 
It is my friend’s mother-in-law who holds the strings between the generations and whose approval, or disapproval, determines the family mood. I eat with them in the evening and spend the days walking the town and the surrounding foothills of the mountains. Internet connection is reliable. But I try to limit the time I spend on it.
 
My friends back home are messaging me every day to ask when I will return. They also bombard me with their ideas for the new Apps we should be pursuing. Every day I am pulled by their desire to form again our old partnership.
 
But I need time alone. It is a rare moment in anyone’s life that one can take a pause. I want to take advantage of it. You tell me. Should I go back? 
 
Today I got a surprise.

April 21

I returned from today’s walk to find my friend waiting. ‘We have decided to go up next week to the summer pastures. I want to know if you would like to come with us’, she announces.
 
Of course I do. It is a signal of support. Equally important, in the pastures of the high mountains I will be out of Internet contact. My friends back home will have to wait for my reply to their pleas to come back for the next project. My real Time Out can start.
 
My friend happily accepts my offer of help in preparing for the trip. The tarps have to be taken off the old truck standing in a corner of the outer courtyard.
 
The poles and felt panels of two family yurts have to be taken out of storage and inspected. The inspection is carried out by my friend’s mother in law who is the family member with felt-making and felt-repairing skills. I watch her at work on the combing, soaking, compression and framing of the wool patches. 
 
A supply of kerosene also has to be loaded, as well as two old iron stoves for heating the yurts in the night-time chill of the mountains. Bedding has to be aired and everything selected that will be needed for a two month stay.
 
‘This year Great-Grandmother is coming with us’, said my friend. ‘Go have a talk with her’.

April 22

Next day I find Great Grandmother sitting on a bench under the apricot trees beside the house. She waives me over. ‘I am so glad you are coming with us’ she says. ‘My many summers up in the mountains have given me a lot throughout my life. Perhaps even a short experience can also give you something’.
 
During this week of preparation for the transfer to the mountain pastures we find time to sit together for a few hours each day. ‘I love this summer migration’ she says. ‘It has always been part of my life. But there was one period when it was very special, when the experience shaped the way I viewed my life and the world around me.’
 
‘It started, long before you were born, in the summer of 1941 with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. All the families were on the point of starting our migration when the news came through of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union of which we were then part. 
 
Immediately all the men were conscripted for the army or other duties. The town was left only with young boys and old men. There was an immediate decision to be made. It had to be made by the women. Should we go up to the mountains or not’.

April 23

‘It would have been easier if the decision had been taken in that summer of 1941 to abandon the trek to the mountains’ continues Great Grandmother later on.
 
‘But there was a big downside. If the pasture around the town was consumed by the herds over the summer there would be no winter feed. The herds would have to be slaughtered at the end of the summer. We would all be blamed for the destruction of our wealth when the men returned. 
 
I was just starting on my teenage years. I was not consulted. But I listened to the arguments in the market place. No one wanted to take that decision to slaughter the herds’.
 
‘Going up to the mountains was not easy either. In those days we had no trucks. We had mules, horses and some camels with a few old men as camel drivers. But we did it – not only in that year, but in the following summers until the men began to return in the years following the war when they took charge again’.
 
‘It took me a long time to admit it without feeling in some way guilty. But those summers were marvellous for me. Of course I worried, along with my mother, about what was happening to my father and elder brothers drafted into the army. But there was a freedom to my teenage life’.

April 26

‘Those mountain summers were wonderful for me’ continues Great Grandmother later in the week. ‘
 
Equally important, I could stay on at school when we came down from the mountains at summer’s end. You take school for granted. But mine was the first generation of girls in this part of the world to receive more than rudimentary education. In the normal way of life around here I was reaching the age when my father would have been looking for a husband for me. School would have ended. All that changed. There were no men around to take those family decisions. School continued for me and my friends. All talk of marriage was postponed’.
 
‘There was something else that made it a very special time. We had suddenly entered into a women’s world. We were visited by communist party officials from Bishkek and Osh. But they had been caught on the wrong foot by the outbreak of war. They came only to give assurances, false in the early years, that all was going well in the war. Some town elders remained. They still tried to exert a traditional masculine dominance. But they were too confused by what was happening to be able to exert authority.
 
In practice, all the key decisions were being made by women. From being behind the times, we women had suddenly jumped ahead of our time’.

April 30

The day has come for our journey up to the summer pastures. In the cabin of the truck, my friend’s husband is the driver, Great Grandmother wedges between him and me and, on my other side, against the door, my friend squeezes in with her youngest on her lap. Safety regulations? Forget it.
 
In the back of the truck there is all that we have selected for the stay in the mountains, and a calf and a foal securely tied down so that they will not jump out in their fright. The other two boys are jammed in the middle. Two shepherd dogs make up the truckload.
 
We start out at dawn. There are other trucks on the same journey. We form a convoy linked by the blue haze of diesel fumes from badly running engines.
 
We have stopped on our long upward grind through forest in the late afternoon. Engines are overheating, drivers tired. We do not make a proper camp. We stop in a field by a flowing river. Women and children divide off in one direction; men in another. We unload some bedding and a few awnings but otherwise we prepare for a night under the stars.
 
In the midst of the bustle, Great Grandmother takes me aside. ‘We are in the way here’ she says, ‘come with me’.

Great Grandmother leads up a small animal track beside the river. In the distance we can see a waterfall. But she stops before we reach it at a point where the river suddenly widens into a small beach of fine gravel and quartz chips. Here she steps down and washes her face and hands.
 
‘In our wartime migrations our journeys took at least a week and sometimes more. This river was our half way point. We always came to this beach to wash. It was as though we were shedding ourselves of our town life and preparing for entry to a new world of the summer pasturelands.
 
Here we used to make our wishes too. Some of us still do.’ She points to the tiny strips of cloth tied to the lower branches that overhang the river. ‘They carry to the goddesses of this place our hopes for good health, for fresh energy, for help over obstacles’.
 
I follow the example of Great Grandmother. I too feel the need for fresh energy, to wash away what is past, to make way for something new.

May 1

The next day we are packed and off before dawn. Soon we pass above the tree-line, above the cypresses and into the mountain pastures. We stop to pick up firewood.
 
Remains of snow still linger in the high pastures. As we come within sight of a lake in a shallow bowl of hills the convoy begins to disperse. Half hidden In the grass are the stones of the fireplaces that mark a campsite. My friend explained that the exact location of summer camp sites follows tradition. Different families or groups have their own sites handed down year after year.
 
Soon we have finished our journey too. Along with a small number of other families there is a wild scramble to unload the trucks and to get the site organized. 
 
I have no skills or experience to offer in erecting the yurts or in setting up their interior screens and pallets. I help in digging the trench for a latrine to squat over. I test it out. Too wide and you overbalance. Too narrow and the sides get messed up. I help put up a screen made of reeds between it and the yurts. We set up a similar screened area for washing with buckets we fill from the lake. A large skin is stretched to catch any rainwater.

May 7

A daily routine is being established incredibly quickly. It is the herders who set the rhythm for the day. At dawn, the night-time herders come down from their watch and the whole camp stirs. At dusk, the daytime herders return hungry for food. We all eat. The day herders are also exhausted. The camp turns in to sleep.
 
Today Great Grandmother takes my arm. She leads me up to a low ridge. She stops at one rocky outcrop. At our feet the slopes run back down to our encampment and to the lake beyond. Away in the distance we can see the outline of the grazing herds of horses. Sitting up here we can see too, in the distance, the tumuli raised by Scythian warriors who have passed this way.
 
At our backs the rocks are blackened, their surfaces engraved with ancient petroglyphs.
 
‘We all used to come up here during the war when we women were in charge’ says Great Grandmother. ‘There would be a time of day after the early evening meal when the small children would settle down, the night time herders would have set off and when we could relax after the efforts of the day. We talked. It was the older women mainly. But we teenagers could also chip in. We all shared a pride in our ability to manage the summer migration.’

May 14

Walking up to this outcrop with Great Grandmother has become a daily habit. I help my friend in the morning. We shake the bedding, wash the children in the lake and prepare some food for the day. But the afternoons are for her. My friend is happy to see us together. She does not want her wandering off alone.
 
I ask Great Grandmother what memories have stayed with her from those summertime gatherings up here among the rocks.
 
‘Of course, in those wartime summers we mainly talked about our daily concerns – sicknesses or injuries, the condition of the herds, our saddle sores.
 
But as I looked back in later years on those summers, I realized that something quite different and more important had begun to root. Simply because we were managing by ourselves up in the summer pastures, over the course of those summers we women came implicitly, without putting it clearly into words, to challenge our traditional place and role’.
 
‘I don’t think that the elder women realized how much my generation of young teenage girls absorbed this sense of questioning of what had traditionally been a masculine dominated world. 
 
For the older women the direction of their lives had been already set. But, for us younger girls a question had been seeded in our minds that would never leave us’.

May 15

‘When the wartime years came to a close, a traditional way of life was re-established for all of us’ continues Great Grandmother the next day. ‘Those men who did return took up their old roles without a thought. I myself became an obedient wife and daughter in law.
 
To some extent though that resumption of the old ways was superficial. There were after-effects from those summers of a women’s world that stayed with me and my friends and contemporaries. We kept them hidden. But we each knew they were there’.
 
‘When we came back up here in future years as wives and mothers we always tried to meet alone up by these rocks. We could not get away often, but each year there would always be a few gatherings. I like to tell myself that my friends and I did not lose our questioning around our given roles in life.
 
Now when I hear about the wide horizons of your life, and even see expanded horizons for those women who remain to live here, I feel a sense of continuity with my own generation of hidden subversives’.
 
‘Now I am the sole survivor of that generation. My exact contemporaries have died. But the feelings we had to keep hidden then I can pass on to you today’.

May 20

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’.

June 10

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’.

June 11

‘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‘.

July 1

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.

July 7

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’.

July 25

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’.

July 26

‘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’.

August 4

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.

August 10

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’.

August 11

‘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’.

August 12

‘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’.

August 14

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’.

August 15

‘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’.

August 30

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’.

September 1

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.