Summer in Thimphu

Summer in Thimphu means monsoon, and monsoon means rain, coming and going,

cooling the air. We don't use air conditioning here. We don't need to. But we need umbrellas and rain jackets. The clouds drift white and low over the mountains some days, and I feel sealed in, held, like the valley has pulled a blanket up over itself. It satisfies.

Everything turns green and stays green, lush in a way that feels aggressive by midsummer. The willow tree at the bottom of our road seems to have doubled in size. It will need trimming, otherwise it will take over. The mountains surrounding Thimphu valley are thick with pine, and in little clearings that dot the mountains there are prayer flags, clusters of 108 white flags to honor someone who died. Some are way up in impossibly steep clearings near the sky, fluttering wherever someone has climbed high enough to plant them. They send prayers to heaven when the wind blows them.

The rain comes and goes rather than settling in for the day, which makes summer here rainbow season too. A cloudburst empties itself over one side of the valley while the other side clears to blue, and there, almost on cue, a rainbow. We see them most days this time of year, arcing over rooftops, over the dzong, over nothing in particular. Sometimes there's just a multicolored blob in the crook of a mountain, like a rainbow collapsed on itself.

Sometimes the rainbow circles the sun instead of arcing across the sky. This is called a sun halo, caused by sunlight bending through ice crystals high overhead, and in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which shapes so much of how people here read the sky, it's considered a genuinely auspicious sign, associated with the birth or death of a great teacher. Whether or not you hold that belief, there's something that stops you in your tracks about looking up and finding the sun wearing a halo, as if the whole valley were being blessed in real time.