Archives
Kathmandu, Nepal – March, 2014 Happy Losar! It’s Tibetan New Year in Nepal, and I’m here to see friends, attend some parties and go on the Shiva’s Slave’s Motorcycle Club Shivaratri Run. Here are a few photos from the Yantra House Losar Party on March 4th. I’ll tell about the other party and the Slave’s Run in separate posts. READ MORE…
I have never seen another silk Tibetan saddle carpet, though I have read of two others. Since they don’t grow silk worms in Tibet the carpet was probably made in a Chinese workshop as a special order for a Tibetan nobleman. My best guess to its age would be mid-20th Century – 1930-1959. I bought it in the winter of 1987 from the seasonal Tibetan nomads who used to winter at Boudhanath… Read More
Thomas “Tom Bol” Guta and his Japanese wife, Nariko, were some of our best friends when we lived in Kathmandu Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s he revived the natural -dyed Tibetan carpet industry and in the 1980s and early 1990s he turned his artistic talents to reviving Chinese silk tapestry-woven Thangkas. While doing all this, and practicing the Dharma, and brewing chang, and working on his Ph.D at Tribhuvan… Read More
General Introduction When did humans first start wearing beads and why did they start? According to Lois Sherr Dubin, in the The History of Beads (2009, p. 19): “… the earliest known beads are associated with Middle Paleolithic people. They were discovered at Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel and have been dated to approximately 108,000 B.C., at about the time Homo sapiens populations were replacing the Neanderthals and developing new and more complex cultures.” Both those beads… Read More
(1977)
THE ARDENT ENTHUSIAST 