I came across this moment in Thimphu: a traffic police officer standing above the street on a raised platform, looking out with quiet vigilance. Below her, leaning against the retaining wall, an older man in a wool hat, standing still beside his pink plastic bag and the shadow of a tree. No words pass between them. They don’t even seem aware of each other. And yet, they’re part of the same small frame of time.
There’s something haunting and beautiful in this juxtaposition—the elevated stance of order and authority, and the grounded stillness of someone simply passing through the day. One looking outward, the other perhaps looking inward. Both present.
Some places stay with you because of what you did there. Others, because of how they made you feel. For me, Bhutan is both—but above all, it’s green. Not just visually, though that’s the first thing that strikes you. It’s green in its air, its spirit, its choices.
Flying into Bhutan is a visual love letter to the planet—steep valleys draped in forest, rivers carving silver paths through farmland, and clouds resting gently on mountain shoulders. But what feels even more remarkable is learning that this isn’t just luck or geography. Bhutan chose this.
The country has made a deliberate commitment to protect its environment, keeping more than 70% of its land under forest cover. That’s not a vague promise—it’s enshrined in the Constitution. Bhutan isn’t just carbon neutral; it’s carbon negative. In a world racing toward climate tipping points, this small Himalayan kingdom quietly leads by example.
But what moves me most is how this green ethos is woven into daily life.
You see it in the school children planting trees during Social Forestry Day. You feel it in the sacredness of the mountains—how locals speak of them not just as landmarks but as living spirits. You hear it in conversations over tea, when people casually mention Gross National Happiness as a guiding principle, and yes, environmental health is part of that.
Even in the capital, Thimphu, with its growing number of vehicles and modern buildings, there’s a persistent gentleness—a respect for the balance between development and preservation. Farmers markets still thrive.
Of course, no place is without its environmental challenges. Waste management, urban growth, and reliance on imported goods are all real concerns. But what stands out is the intentionality—a national awareness that these challenges are worth confronting.
To be in Bhutan is to be reminded that green doesn’t have to mean passive or nostalgic. It can be vibrant. Practical. Rooted in policy and in everyday gestures. A shared responsibility.
Green Bhutan isn’t just a place on the map. It’s a way of seeing the world—and a vision for how we might live in better relationship with it.
Smiling Faces in Tradition: A Mural That Says “Kuzu Zangpo La!”
There’s something immediately heartwarming about this mural I came across recently—two smiling figures in traditional Bhutanese dress, captured in vibrant colors on a wall that now feels a little more alive. The characters, one labeled “Pema” and the other “Tenzy,” seem to greet passersby with a quiet sense of joy. It got me thinking: how many people outside Bhutan really know what they’re wearing?
Let me introduce you to Bhutan’s beautiful national dress.
The girl in the mural is wearing a kira, the traditional attire for women in Bhutan. It’s a long, ankle-length piece of woven fabric, wrapped and folded into a dress, usually held at the shoulders with silver brooches called koma and secured at the waist with a handwoven belt known as a kera. Over it, she’s wearing a short, tailored jacket called a toego. Her kira features classic geometric patterns—these designs often carry regional or familial significance, woven by hand with great care.
Next to her stands the boy, Tenzy, wearing a gho, Bhutan’s traditional attire for men. The gho is a knee-length robe tied at the waist with a belt, also a kera. The excess cloth above the belt creates a pouch called a hemchu, which, fun fact, is sometimes used like pockets to carry small items (yes, even a phone these days!). The gho’s stripes in the mural are a nod to the bright, bold patterns typical of Bhutanese textiles.
Both outfits are not just everyday wear—they are woven into the fabric of national identity. In Bhutan, students wear these clothes to school, civil servants wear them to work, and everyone is required to wear them when visiting government offices or sacred spaces like dzongs and monasteries. It’s a cultural policy that not only preserves tradition but also fosters a shared sense of belonging.
What I love about this mural—aside from its cheerfulness—is how it casually educates. Even without words, it tells a story. It shows how proud Bhutan is of its culture and how style and identity intertwine so naturally here.
So, the next time you see someone in a kira or a gho, you’ll know it’s more than just clothing—it’s a symbol of national pride, everyday elegance, and a reminder that tradition can still thrive beautifully in the modern world.
From this rooftop view, looking out across the clustered buildings and winding roads, The Dzong, glowing faintly from afar.
I’ve lived in many places—But Thimphu holds a different rhythm. A slower pulse. Watching a whole city breathe in peace.
I’ve been here long enough now to feel the weight of its silences. To appreciate the hush that settles over the city after 9 p.m., when even the dogs pause their barking battles.
The rhythm of a city is often built quietly, floor by floor. Bamboo scaffolding, orange vests, silent focus. No fanfare, just labor. Just people making something rise. A reminder: the real architecture of a place is often human.
Some images don’t just capture a place—they echo something within. This one, taken on a gray-skied day in Thimphu, Bhutan, is one of them.
There he sits: the Great Buddha Dordenma, poised on a ridge above the city, cloaked in mist and framed by dark pine. Still. Watchful. Immense. Not just in size, but in presence.
Living in Bhutan, surrounded by mountains that seem to breathe with you, I often find myself looking inward as much as outward. The pace here isn’t slow, exactly—it’s steady. Grounded. A rhythm I’ve had to learn to walk in time with.
And maybe that’s why these images resonate so deeply with where I am in life right now.
I’m no longer racing to figure it all out. I’m no longer measuring myself by how many countries I’ve touched, how much I’ve published, how fast I can adjust. The questions I carry these days aren’t about where next, but rather what matters—and how to move through this world with clarity, care, and a bit of quiet.
The Buddha, serene even in stormy skies, feels like a mirror to that moment. A reminder that not all journeys require motion. Some ask for pause. Some ask us to stay long enough in one place—on one hillside, in one life—to feel the clouds break open and the meaning come through.
There’s something about a football match—especially on a campus field framed by willow trees and quiet hills—that stops me in my tracks. Maybe it’s the symmetry of motion: the sudden sprint, the balanced pause, the blur of bodies moving with purpose. Or maybe it’s that deep, unspoken energy that echoes in the space between collision and control. A moment like this—two players locked mid-tackle, another one watching the story unfold—isn’t just sport. It’s a perfect metaphor for what life has felt like lately.
I’ve been on the move for 22 years. Traveling has always come easy. Bags packed without hesitation, routines swapped for new ones, maps memorized by heart and discarded by intuition. But something has shifted recently. There’s a kind of inner friction now, like my old fluid rhythm of departure and arrival is starting to hit resistance. Like that player in the photo—mid-strike, challenged, off-balance—I’m still going forward, but not without thought. Not without feeling the weight of it.
And yet, I love that moment. The moment just before the outcome. That’s where I seem to live most fully—where action meets uncertainty, where instinct and discipline collide.
RTC’s football pitch reminded me of that today. That time slows in Bhutan not because it drags, but because it settles. People here play with presence. They shout, laugh, fall, rise. The field is a stage, sure—but also a meditation. Just like the rest of this life.
We all live in motion. But motion doesn’t have to mean speed. Sometimes it’s about stance. Sometimes it’s about letting your feet find the ground before you take another step.
And sometimes, you just stop to watch the ball mid-air—and breathe.
There’s a kind of limbo I’ve been carrying. Not dramatic, not heavy—just persistent. It’s the space between familiarity and detachment, between belonging and moving on. It settles in quietly, like fog, and I often don’t notice it until I pause long enough to feel it.
As a nomad, you get used to packing light, not just with things but with attachments. You learn to let places go before they ask you to. You say goodbye so often that arrival and departure start to feel like the same act—just viewed from different ends of time.
And yet, in the quiet moments, there’s a subtle disorientation. I know how to navigate cities I no longer live in better than the ones I’m in. My memories feel more like postcards than personal history. Even the word home feels too fixed for what I’ve lived.
This limbo isn’t about being lost—it’s about being suspended. Not stuck, just untethered. And maybe there’s freedom in that. Or maybe there’s something else I haven’t named yet.
Thimphu’s got this crazy rhythm that isn’t like anywhere else on God’s green earth. The Wang Chhu River’s down there doing its wild snake dance through the valley, while these massive mountains just LOOM. LOOM like some ancient deities keeping watch over everything that moves and breathes and dreams below.And that Tashi Delek gate. Standing there all decked out in reds and golds like some cosmic doorway between what we’re running from and what we’re running to. The whole scene’s like jazz, but not your downtown Manhattan jazz – this is mountain jazz, high-altitude improvisation where every prayer flag’s a blue note fluttering in winds that’ve been blowing since Buddha was a beatnik.
The isolation up here – it’s not that crushing Saigon alone-in-a-crowd scene. It’s pure. Clean. Like taking a deep breath after being underwater too long. While the rest of the world’s having some kind of speed-freak freakout, Thimphu’s just sitting here in the palm of the Himalayas, grooving to its own cosmic drummer.
And here I am, watching clouds play tag with mountain peaks, feeling the ancient pulse of prayer wheels spinning out their eternal rhythm. In this high holy place where the air’s too thin for lies and the truth comes down pure as mountain snow, I’m finally hearing that sweet sound of silence that’s been drowned out everywhere else by humanity’s mad chorus.
This is THE IT that we’re all chasing. Right here in this Himalayan groove where the old and new do their eternal dance and even time has to slow down and catch its breath. Everything’s connected but nothing’s tied down, everything’s moving but nothing’s lost.
Here I am, 22 years on the road and now I’m staring at this crazy beautiful doorway in Thimphu like it’s some kind of answer to a question I never knew how to ask. That blue curtain, that BLUE! Like someone grabbed a piece of sky and hung it right there between these ancient wooden beams that’ve seen more prayers than I’ve seen sunsets.
The whole house is like a perfect accident – these weathered walls telling stories in peeling paint, little splashes of life in those rainbow flower pots. Number 22 up there, same as my years wandering, ain’t that a wild cosmic wink from the universe?
Been teaching here a year but really, who’s teaching who? These Bhutanese walls with their fading mandalas and worn wooden frames, they’re schooling me in the art of staying put while everything moves. The laundry dancing on the line like prayer flags, that yellow cloth next to that mystical blue curtain – it’s all poetry.
Twenty-two years I’ve been chasing something across continents, through cities and deserts and mountain ranges, and here’s this simple doorway in the Himalayas showing me maybe what we’re all looking for is right here in the way light hits worn wood, in the quiet dignity of someone’s potted plants reaching for Asian sky.
The thing about being a nomad is you start seeing home everywhere and nowhere – in Bangkok alleys, Beirut streets, Amsterdam canals – but this place, this ancient-modern, sacred-ordinary slice of Thimphu life, it’s doing something different to my wandering soul. Maybe searching isn’t about finding. Maybe it’s about learning to see what’s always been there, like these wooden beams holding up centuries of stories, these humble flowers blooming in borrowed pots.
Still don’t know what I’m looking for, but for now, this blue curtain moving in the mountain breeze feels like enough. Maybe that’s the whole point – not the knowing, but the being here, really HERE, where the ancient and everyday dance together on weathered wooden stages, and every doorway holds the promise of both shelter and escape.
Sometimes you gotta circle the whole world just to find yourself staring at a blue curtain in Bhutan, feeling like maybe, just maybe, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be – even if you’re still moving, still searching, still riding that crazy cosmic wave to wherever it breaks.
