The Daily Glance
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's Rules of the House is a book of searching, a book of cultural longing. She's a Tibetan poet living in San Francisco, and the poems trace her experience of living in exile,though without saying where, and her struggle to retain traditions. Some of the subject matter was new to me since I know little about Tibetan customs, but the desire to retain one's culture without living within it or only living within it in a small group is a common story. She portrays the problem well by using daily experiences to show her distance from the larger culture and her longing for something else.
That was how we learned, prayers before sleep and morningReading this book makes me want to read more about Tibetan culture so that I can place the book within a context. Or perhaps I should say that her desire to retain her tradition has pushed me to look into her culture more.
prayers. And at night the moon racing past clouds -- a clear path
as though we were watching a movie. The daily rituals and the
yearly ones. One year we could not find fish, we were far from
water.
I wasn't sure what that meant for us.
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