If you would ask me to remember an essay about nature—or about a human being encountering nature—I always return to two pieces: “Five Minutes in the Alps” and Teaching a Stone to Talk. Both of them, once I finished reading, clung to my consciousness and never let go. The first one is from Sir Leslie, and the second is— you may have heard of her— from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard. This essay belongs to her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. In this book, we can find fourteen essays about nature, mystery, and divinity.

When my economics teacher in high school told me to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he said, “If you want to be a real economist, you should read this.” I remember he was pursuing his doctorate in economics, but God knows where he is now. Is he still teaching, or has he gone to some rather odd place to find “sympathy” and “moral judgment”? I never read that book when he suggested it, but years later I read it and understood why he told me, “If you want to be a real economist you should read this.” Then I realized he was not just an economist—he was trying to witness some inner judge that evaluates our actions.

After many years, finally reading Adam Smith’s book, I understood one thing: for Smith, human beings are not cold calculators; we are emotional, interdependent creatures whose morality emerges from our ability to imagine the feelings of others. And then I regretted that I couldn’t tell him my findings personally.

Suddenly I remembered this because the same day—rather than reading his recommendation—I read Teaching a Stone to Talk. Now I find it funny and disobedient too.

In this particular essay, she talks about an island community where eccentric people—she calls them “cranks”—live and are deeply obsessed with each unusual personal act. Reading is a personal endeavour, and understanding them is too subjective. When I finished this essay, the one thing I understood was that we must adhere to nature’s rule and remain close to it to ensure our own well-being.

A few things about the essay. First—

“A man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk,” she writes.

The practice is the same with Hindu gods, if you have seen anyone worshipping their god (mostly stone gods—this is the main topic of this writing; keep your ears and eyes open until you reach the end). While I was reading this essay, I remembered my mother, who was cooking dinner downstairs, probably after worshipping her stone god (Śālagrām). In the essay we read:

He keeps it on a shelf. Usually the stone lies protected by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth. Larry removes the cover for the stone’s lessons, or more accurately, I should say, for the ritual or rituals which they perform together several times a day.

My mother keeps her god on a shelf (we call it siṃhāsan) and instead of untanned leather, she wraps them with colourful cloths. But when I read, “Larry removes the cover for the stone’s lessons,” it gave me awe, because my mother prays for lessons from the god—but Larry was doing something else. He was giving lessons to the stone (we can see this act as performing a ritual) to speak. How wonderful, I thought.

This paragraph I find most exhilarating:

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we’re blue.

What do we want, actually? What are we looking for in our life? How far can we go on living like this? All the questions are not easy to answer. But keep on reading—I am not going to spoil any further. I found the essay very interesting, and it has held my head since then. So if someone asks what my most recalled essay is, then this one I must recall.

We were—let me begin this essay somewhere in the middle, because I prefer that. I love starting my writing not at the beginning, not at the end, but in the living center of things. I’ve used this in medias res technique in nearly every book, every story, even the simplest poems. I have an aversion to beginnings—any beginnings, including my own. So the middle is fine. The middle is always fine.

You can see the above picture, which is the banks of the Kali Gandaki River—not like Koshi River (which is the longest river in Nepal having 729 km) it is quite small in length (roughly 560 km), running through the high desert of Mustang to the fertile plains of the Terai, and eventually merging into the Ganges. The river begins near Lo Manthang in Upper Mustang (where we were heading a year ago), in the Tibetan plateau-like terrain, and the most interesting part is it flows as the Kali Gandaki Gorge, often cited as one of the deepest gorges in the world, sandwiched between the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna massifs—With peaks rising more than 8,000 meters around it. There we were sitting on the banks of the river and conversing with nature’s magnificent reveal.

Now, let me talk about the stone, which was our main purpose here. The river itself has a mythic importance too—globally known for producing ammonite fossils worshipped as incarnations of Vishnu—which Hindus worship in every household and call Shaligram—like “A man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk.” We were not trying to teach a stone to talk but we were trying to become stone—
My brother said in a whim, “Let's go find Shaligram.” But can you see that gorge in the picture? We were obliged to sit there and watch in silence, pondering nature’s symbolic extremities. That was the best road trip I had gone through in years.

If you see the picture closely, you can feel how calm the weather was, but in reality, the season was monsoon (rainy). After hours of a drenching ride on horrible muddy roads, we were sitting there, completely soaked in water and mud. Our shoes we could hardly see. It was almost like mud-brick.

And talking about the stones we need to collect—that's how our minds work. After hours of being there trying to get dry (but it was impossible) and needing to travel, I think, 78 km more to our that day’s destination. We were lucky to recall the past of that place, which the same route served as one of the major arteries of the Salt Trade Route between Tibet and India. Still we can see the long trade of caravans—goats and yaks carried salt southward and returned with grain and textiles. Sitting there we covered from myth to human consciousness.
Legend says that the river’s roar echoes the primordial sound OM, carried down between the mountains. I told my brother, “I need to write everything about this place.” It was coincidence that my manuscript was already being edited and planned to launch on market late that year (Nov 2025), where I blend mythology of OM and the primal being of human history. I told him further, “I need to write another book, you know, something like ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk.’” Then we talked about our economic teacher and his recommendation.

“It is believed that Shaligrams found in the river are remnants of Vishnu’s cosmic battles.” My brother added, and I knew it’s a legend in Hindu mythology. Actually, the water in the river is so dark in color that it might carry the name Kali (black) river.

After conversing hours on the union of geology and divinity, we left the river bank. After traveling a few hours we reached a cafe and had to drink something to refresh our mind. When you are travelling, everything you find solacing, caressing, and wonderful in nature; the tea brewed by local villagers was too good.

In five days we had travelled miles and miles. Met a lot of different people. Smoked their joints and chatted in a language actually we needed to speak—the stone language, the philosophical language of nature. These kinds of outings let you feel that uncanny awareness that nature is alive in ways we rarely perceive (see the picture below). In the whole journey that day, the situation kept reminding me of Dillard’s Larry—act is ritualistic, symbolic, and deeply personal, even sometimes you can’t jot all down. How we became the students of nature was surreal. We ate, somewhere we danced whole night around fires, drank night after night, felt the real consciousness with nature. I told my brother, “We need to speak with the ‘Cup’ or let them teach us how to speak…” He wondered at my whimsical proposal, and I explained to him about the ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’. Whenever we go we tried to speak with nature, tried to keep our witness, and through our deep dialogue we were participating with nature itself—and that is only possible when we journey this way. What we actually did in those thirteen days (traveling on bike) was to transform ordinary acts into nature of presence. Everything became interlocutor. Everything became us. And us became everything. We were witnessing the being in all beings. Cup became dryads, river became naiads, smoking and drinking and dancing became gods—all was, we discovered, blending joy with the sacred.

When we were sitting and drinking, the old man passed with his hallo (ploughing) and his cattle. There it reminded me of Adam Smith again—with fundamentally empathetic and moral beings. I saw man not as a calculator but as the real being. I suddenly filled with Dionysian spirit, whether from the cold beer or from the real closeness that I was feeling with the terrifying life-force that awakens awe and humility. I felt a sudden tacit coexistence with the land, with his actions too. I was not looking at the man but the ‘steady rhythm of nature’, not abstract, not analytical but lived… nearer and nearer with my own skin. Whole nature I saw with many folds, hands within hands, eyes within eyes, and legs within legs—thousand.

Lo Manthang Palace was built around 1440 AD by King Amad Pal, the first king of Mustang.

We kept moving to our destination; still we had to travel 103 km (we cannot measure this km with western measure, it’s more than 1000 km in that road situation) to reach the Chinese border (Koro La), which was situated at 4,660 metres above sea level. That is almost half of Mt Everest and we were traveling on our bike. It was freezing cold. After driving with so many obstacles and geographical difficulties we reached the border. Koro La sits on the drainage divide between the Yarlung Tsangpo (a major Tibetan river) and the Ganges river basins. One interesting fact is despite being very high in absolute terms, it is one of the lowest passes that can be driven between the Tibetan Plateau and the Indian subcontinent. In winter temperature can drop to about –15 °C, but when we reached at that time it was around -5 °C. We drank Tibetan tea sitting inside a temporary tent. The guy, owner of the tent, took our photos, the most amazing and humble people they were (unfortunately I could not find that tent photo). The guy told us that they live there until winter hits, and as soon as winter comes they go to the lower land to avoid that harsh cold. Their simple life could teach us the real beauty of life or being alive. Before reaching Koro La that day, I had heavy fever the day before because of high altitude, but reaching there even that fever abated.

Koro La border--behind

After spending an hour or so we left Koro La and headed to our next long destination, Ilam(800 km+). I will write next time what happened there, what we learned, and how that geography changed our perception of being alive and all.

And you might be wondering… about everything but…

Hell, man, it’s simple.

We went out there, got soaked, got cold, drank the beer, danced around the fire. That was all.

Before I sign out of my contemplation on this writing, I leave you with the last paragraph of the essay:

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to “World.” Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.

 

Kora La border me and my brother (Photographer and Trekking Guide).. and that's our bike.