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Reviews for
Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir:
From The Midwest Book Review - November 2004
Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir is the true story of a
woman who dropped out of Berkeley in 1965 to travel to India and Nepal
with her lover. Their time there becomes a seven year stay in which she
expresses herself through painting, and learns the secrets, wonders, and
sacred essence of a profoundly spiritual culture. A smattering of
black-and-white photographs and essays illustrate the award-winning
author's dazzling journey through a rich and rewarding culture, and a
brief glossary will prove helpful to readers unfamiliar with Indian,
Nepali, and Buddhist terms. A highly recommended window into quiet daily
workings of another land as observered and experienced by Marilyn
Stablein.
From Library Journal
A writer, artist, and performer, Stablein recounts the seven
years that she spent as a young woman in India and Tibet studying her
crafts. Her detailed observations of cultural and religious rituals have
scholarly merit, while her anecdotes on such topics as tea-making,
meditation in caves, and innovative survival skills offer light and
enjoyable entertainment. Affectionately called Lhamo Saykey (Goddess of
Happy Life) by the Tibetans, the author provides personal insight and
introduction to these cultures and teachings. Through her reflections,
readers are drawn back to a time when the wanderlust of young people in
the 1960s was epitomized by spontaneity, experimentation, and freedom.
Stablein concludes with a useful glossary of place names, religious
titles, terms, and definitions. This book, a travelog, spiritual
journey, and cultural study all in one, is appropriate for public
libraries.-Jo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed
Business Information
From
Wigglefish.com, October 13, 2003, by Kilian Melloy
"In the mid-1960s, a young
woman named Marilyn met up with a young fellow named Keith. She was an
American; he was an Englishman; they shared a flat where various musicians
of the era, including Donovan Leitch, would drop by and parties would
spontaneously erupt. Who would leave such a scene, and why?
But Marilyn and Keith did leave, and the reason was the English talent for
the Visa Hassle. Marilyn drifted around Europe for a while, until she hit
upon the notion that she and Keith should be re-united in India. They
were; and for the next four years, they shared an adventure that opened
their consciousnesses both in the sixties meaning of the phrase and in a
larger, more (Eastern) traditional sense. Along the way, they met up with
Richard Alpert (Timothy Leary's cohort in psychedelic fun), Ram Dass, and
The Dalai Lama, among numerous other lamas and rinpoches. Marilyn and
Keith both became scholars, of sorts; he translated, collated, and
published a book of Tibetan prayers, while she learned to paint mandalas
and depictions of the Buddha. But other life lessons were to be had as
well — the joy of solitude, the meaning of slowness. Even cooking became a
form of meditation for Marilyn, as she learned to prepare entire meals
over a single small flame.
In Marilyn Stablein's memoir, India of the 1960s takes root in the
reader's consciousness, blossoming into vivid colors and vibrant with
ideas ancient and modern. The book is not organized according to strict
chronology, but rather follows a looser and more inventive course.
Dissertations on art mingle with comic episodes and recipes for milky chai
tea and hash brownies pop up with irrepressible cheer, like hidden
punchlines. Most entrancing are Marilyn's excerpts from her Pillow Book —
a journal of her dreams. Many of the dreams she describes are recognizable
as expressions of anxiety that proceed from modern expectations: she fears
her life is out of her control, and that it is evaporating; she dreams
that she sees her own parents in the market place and they do not
recognize her. Such worries are commonplace to travelers who remain abroad
for years on end. But by day, in the here-and-now that she cultivates,
Marilyn learns the value of study for its own sake, and recognizes beauty
everywhere she looks. Not until she prepares to bring her wanderings to a
close and return to America, with a new husband and child in tow, does she
really understand how far she's come: the saris and drapes she has long
become accustomed to wearing will hardly do, she realizes, for a long
flight home, much less for her re-emergence into the Western world.
Sleeping in Caves is a gorgeous journey through a land of turmoil and
marvels, and Marilyn Stablein has done the job of a poet — sometimes of a
rock lyricist — in recounting her travels. Need a vacation? Pick up this
book and enjoy a sojourn into another country, another time, another mode
of being."
---
From
Raven Chronicles, by Lilith Wood
"Sleeping in Caves is the
occasionally evocative, disjointed tale of an 18-year old Berkeley
drop-out who runs off to India for seven years. The story is told not by
the young woman who ran away in the sixties, but by the middle-aged woman
she is. Perhaps it is Stablein's nostalgia that makes her book read like a
loose list of smells, rituals, and colors. Stablein did a lot of painting
and talked to some monks and lamas, and she tells us about that, too. But
who was she, I wondered. Who was she when she left Berkeley eighteen, and
how had she changed by the time she returned to California as a wife and
mother? At the end of the book, I had no idea. Like Alice, she just fell
down the rabbit hole.
Each chapter begins with a pillow book entry—two or three small,
italicized paragraphs that contain dreams or rambling thoughts. These are
the best, most honest parts of the book, possibly because they were
written en media res, and not as recollection. The pillow book entries are
documentary in a relaxed, phantasmagoric way. The body of the book seems
more contrived. Stablein's descriptions of sensual detail are loaded too
heavily with spiritual jargon. Everything is “ancient,” “sacred,” and
“dreamlike.” It is hard to find any sort of narrative amid the paragraphs
of regurgitated spiritual lore. I wanted her to be gritty and personal,
and to reel her language down to a human scale for some contrast with the
technicolor world she had stumbled into.
Stablein does have moments of clarity, when she seems to understand that
speaking lucidly of small things can paint a better impressionistic
picture than grand, sweeping generalizations. I enjoyed her clean, simple
description of the habits of dung beetles. I also liked reading about her
fear that leeches would attach themselves to her nether regions when she
squatted to pee. I liked it when she recounted hearing a Janis Joplin song
after several years in India and Tibet, and she feeling as if she had
awoken from a meditative stupor. I liked it when she tries to meditate at
the lip of a cave, early on in the seven years, and is disrupted by the
sight of locals protesting in the street below her. I needed her to
acknowledge, as she did in that passage, that there was an element of the
dilettante in her spiritual pilgrimage.
Stablein meets and marries another American, and they have one baby and
then quickly get pregnant again. Once she has kids, Stablein decides it's
time to end the ascetic, Eastern phase of her life and go back to
California where she will feel clean and safe, where there will be
supermarkets and sophisticated medical technology on hand should anything
go awry. She does not seem to have come of age in India so much as entered
a long reverie. Her real coming of age is when she becomes a mother, and
at that point it's time to go home to a Western, middle-class existence
and leave the subcontinent to the locals."
---
From
Dragonfly Review, May 2004, by Trevor Carolan
"A mid-1960s dropout from
Berkeley University, Marilyn Stablein hit India’s dusty backpack trail
just as the Himalayas were opening up to western dharma-seekers. Her seven
years in Darjeeling, Kathmandu and assorted
bazaars-at-the-end-of-the-world make a worthy tale that proves eminently
enlightening.
Stablein roughs it spiritually, ecologically, transportationally and often
psychologically in a litany of cross-cultural encounters that will be
familiar to anyone who’s stirred the red dust of the Sanskrit world. But
whether you’ve traveled doesn’t matter: Stablein ornaments her book with a
rich harvest of landscape portraits, on-the-road meetings with Tibetan
lamas, Shivaite ascetics, a considerably younger Dalai Lama, Harvard LSD
researcher Richard Alpert in the process of morphing into Baba Ram Dass,
and others. Ultimately, Stablein becomes Lhamo Saykey, a lay disciple, and
commits herself to studying Tibetan and the practice of Buddhist thanka
paintings. Her mini-essays on Himalayan medicine, ritual, art and
aesthetics, guru-chela relationships, religious rites, and even loneliness
ring with lovely sincerity.
Veteran Irish author Dervla Murphy and the incredibly courageous Alexandra
David-Neel set the benchmark for women adventurers in Asia. Make room now
for Stablein’s uncommonly moving addition to our canon of western
practitioners on Asia’s wisdom paths."
---
From
Shambhala Sun Online, May 2004
"Reading Sleeping in Caves is a bit
like stepping into a time machine. We pick up the story in 1965 when
eighteen-year-old Marilyn Stablein is at a fork in the road. It's the
close of a summer in Europe, and Marilyn considers whether she should
return to California to continue her art studies, or scrape together a few
dollars and head to India. Thus begins a seven-year sojourn in India and
Nepal. During her stay, Stablein will experiment with drugs, hike the
Himalayas, begin the Tibetan Buddhist preliminary practices and become
acquainted with luminaries and Sixties adventurers like Richard Alpert
(a.k.a. Ram Dass). Although the reader is removed from these events by
some forty years, Stablein evokes the spirit of the time without sullying
it with nostalgia or self-importance."
---
From
Small Press Bookwatch, November 2004
"Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties
Himalayan Memoir is the true story of a woman who dropped out of Berkeley
in 1965 to travel to India and Nepal with her lover. Their time there
becomes a seven year stay in which she expresses herself through painting,
and learns the secrets, wonders, and sacred essence of a profoundly
spiritual culture. A smattering of black-and-white photographs and essays
illustrate the award-winning author's dazzling journey through a rich and
rewarding culture, and a brief glossary will prove helpful to readers
unfamiliar with Indian, Nepali, and Buddhist terms. A highly recommended
window into quiet daily workings of another land as observered and
experienced. by Marilyn Stablein."
---
From
Publishers Weekly, June
30, 2003, by Publisher Weekly Staff
"In 1965, Stablein (The Census
Taker), then an 18-year-old Berkeley art student, set out on a summer
jaunt to Paris. Her European tour became a seven-year wander through India
and Nepal. Stablein roamed the subcontinent as a sort of spiritual
tourist: moving with the seasons, cooking local dishes, imbibing local
hallucinogens and making pilgrimages to holy caves, rivers and, with
Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), to see the Dalai Lama. Her travelogue is
strikingly self-absorbed: her musings on chai (Asian spiced tea), dung
beetles, leeches and an ice lingam are detailed and sometimes intriguing
and humorous, but there's a paucity of information about the people she
encounters. Even Stablein's boyfriend, with whom she lived throughout,
remains a blank, except for a short reminiscence as Stablein prepares to
leave him. The effect is claustrophobic and meandering, although the book
briefly coalesces in the chapter "Turning the Wheel," where the author
writes, "My path circles, fans out like ripples from a stone tossed into a
pond." The book ends rather abruptly when Stablein is deported from India,
moves to Nepal, marries an American, gives birth to two children, decides
Katmandu is too dirty for infants and flies back to San Francisco. In her
preface, Stablein writes, "There are times when I ask myself, What am I
doing here?" Her immediate answer is that she's there for art, culture and
spirituality. But she provides a more convincing (though indirect) reason
after giving birth to her son: "Mother is home... I don't need to travel
any more. I'm already home."
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