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The three wolves were aptly named Progress, Dinesh, and Anjit. I got to know Progess first. I would chat to him while I ate. Progress was long haired, spiritual, and charismatic. He had the air of an ambivalent, secular yogi and had fittingly reinvented himself as “Progress”. We would talk about life and spirituality like old friends. I met Dinesh later while chatting with Progress. Dinesh means “Light”. Dinesh slipped in to talk to Progress one evening. He was short haired, handsome, and physically slight. He lacked the confidence of Progress and had a girlfriend from Germany who held him in a bardo of uncertainty. She had returned home, and he had yet to hear from her. I met Anjit last. Anjit means “Undefeated”. He appeared fiercely one evening, the tallest of the three. He was a powerful lanky young man with long, curly hair, a beard, and a wild dangerous vibe. It was with a sad note of irony I later learned Anjit struggled with heroin addiction. Their hunger for something better was palpable. As the canadian band Tragically Hip might sing, they were looking for a place to happen.

And it may. One of my teachers at the monastery, Ashok, bullishly challenged the oft-cited dictum that Nepal was land-locked and therefore poor. Ashok had trained as a civil engineer in the United States and returned to help the Nepali government. He took us on several amazing walking tours, showing different layers of Kathmandu built up when Nepal enjoyed different periods of wealth. Ashok explained a war with India closed the Nepali border to trade in the 19th century and a later conflict with Tibet closed the border to trade with China. This reduced a trade-rich Nepal to poverty. If, however, those borders were reopened and trade restored, Ashok seemed to suggest, wealth would return.

Like the three wolves, my Tibetan host brother in Nepal, Dorje, had a similar vibe. I lived with him and his mother for a couple of months when I took summer classes at the monastery. Dorje and his mother were incredibly kind and generous. Like most Tibetans in Nepal, they were refugees who fled Tibet in the decades following the Chinese invasion. While Nepal granted the refugees asylum, they hadn’t been granted official legal status and Dorje and his mother, like many Tibetans, lived in a diplomatic limbo. Dorje had a hunger to be modern and a fierce desire to emigrate to Europe or North America. He especially longed to come to Canada and his sister had already made the move to Vancouver.