Jono Lineen wrote a beautiful experiential book of travelling on foot across the Himalayas: Into the Heart of the Himalayas.
I felt like a a co-traveler reading his book. And more. A feeling or a realisation that doesn't lend itself to words. A way to describe the indescribable is to vividly recreate the situation that made the indescribable possible, happen. And you'd know what's being said--the unsaid. I could see the unseen in his narrative.
I thought I knew Jono very well while reading the book and also his dead brother, Gerath, who was his constant companion in these journeys by way of his omnipresent absentia.
On a cold January night, a day before his 19th birthday, Gerath’s boat sank after washed over by two metre waves in Elk Lake in British Columbia. This was in the year 1991. “It took three quarters of an hour for hyperthermia to take my brother,” Jono writes, “I still think about his perfect, lean body floating inert on the furious surface of the lake and then quietly dropping, like an autumn leaf, to the lake floor.”
It wasn't easy to write this book was evident reading the book. It took him 12 long years, after doing many drafts from different perspectives, and a huge amount of research went into it. He has become an expert on varied aspects of the tallest mountains of the world, the Himalayas, whether flora or fauna or the religion and customs or for that matter land and soil. His many trips to the Himalayas, gave him a firm footing. It took him a while to find the narrative he wanted to do.
As this book is a catharsis, an outpour. The Himalayas acted as a catalyst, helped him delve deep within as he scaled heights–the lone traveller in communion with nature.
His brother’s untimely death in water made him question everything, his life as well, and the purpose, and the absurdity of it all. Jono was lost in his own self. An experience he feels was good and bad too. “Good in the Buddhist sense; bad because I was unable to define who I’m. (And bad because) I couldn’t keep a relationship or job,” he says.
Jono escaped his life as he knew to explore and find a life he sought, but knew not what it was. An adventure unto self became a journey, many journeys.
The tradition of storytelling back home in Belfast came handy. He had an early visual association with the Himalayas, thanks to his mother who'd routinely take Jono with his siblings to a local library. The coloured pictures of the Himalayas, jacketed in the travelogues, has had a profound impact on him; etched in his memory.
Perhaps because these “very colourful” pictures were in a stark contrast to greyness back home. Colours are joyous. He associated open blues sky, beautiful mountainous landscapes with the birth of his children--creation.
Jono came to Ladakh for the first time in 1992, soon after Gerath’s demise. This was first of many journeys to follow in the years to come. They were all for a selfish reason. “To glorify myself,” he says
He did the first draft locked inside a room in Tibet Hotel at Dharamshala. He was utterly disgusted as it read like a travel guide. Next, he did commendable research on the flora and fauna of the Himalayas, and wrote another draft, much more informed than the first, which was a big improvement but still not good enough. Then the focus of his research shifted to culture, and he reworked his book yet again. Still unhappy, he added another dimension to it, the place and the people.
Each subsequent draft was an improvement. It was getting somewhere close to what he intended to but was not there, yet. A friend of his gave the draft a careful read, and prepared a three-page list of suggestions. The crux of it was simple: there's something missing. All the painstaking research and writings till that point, was merely “scrutinising the superficial” as he puts it.
The inflection point came in Gangotri, at the source mother Ganges. He had a vision, a light flashed, “I saw Gerath’s body lying on the stretcher. I knew at that moment that these journeys were about coming to terms with the death of my brother. It was all about my brother.” Then there was clarity.
In the next two months, he wrote for 8 hours a day and finished the final draft. There was no need to redo it. It was an heartfelt, graphic, descriptive, cathartic, emphatic and empathetic account of his travels. He had this feeling that some unseen force held his hand and made him write lines after lines.
For Jono writing and meditation go hand in hand. He writes after meditating, and sometimes he ends up writing new, or rewrites what’s already written, and never does more than 500 words at a go.
Healing is not avoiding grief, or running away, or being in a denial, but giving it a perspective by living it. In that sense Jono’s travels, in the presence of the absence of Gerath, changed him as a person, opened a whole new world for him.
EXCERPTS from his book: Into the Heart of the Himalayas published by Speaking Tiger (speakingtigerbooks.com)
I arrived as the mountains glowed in coral red. The infant Ganges emerged from her frigid womb, surrounded by a fortress of ice. The glacier was translucent blue. There again, as on the Phokar River in Zanskar, were the protective colours, turquoise and coral.
Again I felt completely at peace in the landscape. I sat down on a freezing beach at 4,000 metres, the stream an arm’s length away. My shirt and fleece vest were soaked with sweat but I was satisfied with where I was. I crossed my legs and stilled my breath until it was soundless. I sat and sat. I felt a warmth rise up my spine. There was a tingle on my eyelids, as tears welled up and stumbled down my cheeks, falling to the sand. The water of me was absorbed by the earth and taken back by Mother Ganga.
My brother had been taken by water and now I was sitting at the source.
The source. Gareth’s death was a source of fear for me, fear of not deriving the most out of life and at the same time a source of fearlessness in my drive to transcend that. But his death was also an inspiration for trust, because to get the most out of my many experiences I had to trust the people and the land I came in contact with.
The Ganges flowed on, part of a cycle of transformation. Cloud and sun to ice and water, all leading to the flow of a continent and a religion. Gareth’s death was the basis of my own transformation, from a world defined by more black and white rules to one ruled by the infinite greys of India. Death was my catalyst for understanding that great paradoxes—why, for example, such a good person as Gareth should die so young— are there not to torment us, but to provoke us into asking more questions, and eventually to accept them for what they are—constant. The world is a matrix of paradoxes and how we navigate the labyrinth is the best definition of our lives.
Most importantly, his passing brought me to look in on myself, to qualify who I am and understand what it is to be good, to live with goodness, in the dozens of cultures I travelled through. Goodness, I understand now, is universal. My tears dried. Darkness was all around. Where to go? I stood, remembering the night I had learned of my brother’s death and had walked alone in the dark rain to Elk Lake, a first small, confused pilgrimage—a walk of dreams, of hope, hoping that maybe it was all unreal, that when I reached the lake Gareth would stride out of the water, intact, dripping like an ocean swimmer. But at the edge of Elk Lake all there was was darkness and wind and the clicking rustle of conifers swaying and rolling, wailing like a line of invisible mourners. At the edge of a stony beach was the water—black, depthless, forbidding. It had my brother and was not about to give him back.
I went to the edge of the infant Ganga. I sat back on my haunches and leaned over. River stones glinted in the moonlight. I scooped a handful of water, so cold my fingers burned, and drank it. The water was in me.
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