How to name a home - #154

The origin of Shangrilogs.

Shangrilogs is a weekly Sunday essay about slow mountain living — exploring our own natures and big nature. Upgrade to get the Wednesday edition, along with the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting the arts.

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Tucked between surrounding peaks of 13 and 14,000 feet, snow clinging to the couloirs that carved them, a valley sat in watercolors of purple, green, and yellow. Wildflowers waltzed in the breeze, ever turning toward their partner, the sun. The road was gouged and uneven, with a wall of rock to the left and a river to the right. The turn was tucked away, dipping down and away from the usual path, hiding and hidden. If you were lucky to know it, luckier still to find it, you would approach the valley with an eye toward the cuts in the trees: avalanche paths, where nature had scraped clean the paint from the canvas again and again, never getting it quite right. The narrow approach would soon widen, and you would be welcomed into the vale by a small stable and the sight of metal roofs dotted along the sloped valley. The mountains, near mythical in their beauty and stature, all leaning in to look down at their precious, verdant hollow.

Our very own Shangri-La.

That was how it felt when we moved here. A small town, shrouded by its protectors, unveiled only to those who sought to find it. A place to escape, where life was about deepening your experience of it, not grinding through it. Where aging was rather a suggestion than a mandate.

That’s why we named the house, and this series of essays, Shangrilogs. It was a log cabin in Shangri-La. A cheeky and cheerful portmanteau to balance the austerity and foreboding of the landscape and the storm systems that surrounded these long since fallen logs.

I knew the myth of Shangri-La in the same way I knew quicksand, dragons, and trolls. It was lore, a given, part of the cultural lexicon. Shangri-La, the hotel. Shangri-La, the museum in Hawaii. Shangri-La, the 1960s girls group. Shangri-La, the dispensary, now in cities near you across Ohio, Missouri, Illinois & Connecticut! Shangri-La, a Mandarin and Szechuan restaurant in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Shangri-La, the original name of Camp David. Shangri-La, a song by The Kinks.

For nearly a hundred years, it has stood in our imaginations as a utopia and a fountain of youth, a place lost to civilization amongst the highest and most dangerous peaks of the Himalayas. Only the few who could survive the journey had the chance to see it, and see only it, for once you were of Shangri-La, you could not be trusted to be of anywhere else.

James Hilton created the lamasery and valley of Shangri-La for his novel Lost Horizon in 1933, loosely based on other Tibetan readings and tales, likely including the spiritual kingdom of Shambhala in particular, found in the Kalachakra tantra. In the tantra, it is prophesied that when the world finally descends into war and greed, it will be the forces from Shambhala that usher in the new Golden Age.

Hilton’s Shangri-La is similar; it is posed as a sanctuary for texts and art and music, separating itself from the rest of the world in order to preserve what is beautiful for the next renaissance. The lamasery and the community it presides over are protected by secret, and protected from everything else. Its people practice no grand ambition, save to save their home from the greed of the modern world. With its lush valleys and abundant gold, it is ripe for exploitation, and the high lama of the lamasery is careful to avoid that.

“We believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.” - Chang, Lost Horizon

In Lost Horizon, four characters are rescued by lamas and taken to Shangri-La after their plane crashes high in the Kuen-Luns (named for the Kunlun Mountains). The lamasery is described as idyllic, a utopia of peace. The crash survivors are treated with the utmost hospitality, given access to all the treasures of the valley, but all their inquiries about leaving, about returning home, are rebuked and dismissed with little reason or explanation. Their experiences range from passive curiosity to anxiety-ridden fury at the mystery and secrecy. To some, Shangri-La is a sanctuary, a place safe from everything from the mundanity of societal pressures all the way to the gruesomeness of war. To others, it is an anomaly, threatening in its extremeness, its secrecy, in its very existence. Shangri-La is simply a place that shouldn’t.

“But even such vaguely future fears [earthquakes and landslides] could only enhance the total loveliness of the present.” - Conway, Lost Horizon

In many ways, the mythical Shangri-La parallels this town. There is one way in. There are frequent avalanches. The people seem much younger than their years, climbing mountains in the harshest of storms, well into their 70s. More than one person who doesn’t live here has asked why we would live here, what could compel a person to want this. More than one person who does live here has asked with sincere curiosity how we found this place, as if it really was Shangri-La: unmapped, an earned place that you did not discover but were brought to.

In a way, we were.

For centuries long before Hilton wrote his best-seller, explorers mapped expeditions in Tibet and the surrounding areas, preparing for arduous journeys of near certain death in search of gold and elixirs of youth. We took out a road atlas and Zillow. We weren’t looking for gold and everlasting life, but we were looking for a better life. We saw the road to this valley marked on the map as “Closed in the Winter”, and we were curious.

This tiny town perched on an alpine meadow just shy of 10,000 feet is named for an ancient city of gold, and when we first drove in, two hounds appeared in the road. Running alongside our car until the walls fell away to reveal the valley of green and a town run by dogs. The hounds stood in the road in our rearview mirror, their mission complete.

It took me several years of living in this house, Shangrilogs, before I finally read the book for which it's named. Shangri-La had been a myth so unquestioned for me, like Eden and Atlantis, that there simply wasn’t an idea of knowing it better.

But recently I have been grappling with the name of this newsletter. Did people get it? Did it make sense? Did I need something, dare I say, more marketable?

I ordered the book, and when it arrived, I read it by a nightlight, noting with pen and page marks while the baby slept beside me.

The protagonist, “Glory” Conway, is at ease with Shangri-La, with its separateness and moderation in all things. He is happy to leave the world behind, with its wars and dinner parties. The narrators of the story lament this element of Conway. He was meant to be a great man, to accomplish great things. And instead, to them, his potential appears to dissolve into the ether, into a peace foreign to them.

That is the ethos of Shangri-La: to be at ease, flexible and, in many ways, unwanting. To enjoy but not indulge. To study for leisure, not for ambition. In some ways, this town has illuminated that path for me. I don’t have any aspirations to be CMO anymore. I don’t want to work on a computer for 50 hours a week. I don’t want to increase shareholder value. I want to chop wood and write a book.

“It is significant,” he said after a pause, "that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present?” - Chang, Lost Horizon

For all its bounty, we do talk about leaving this town. We have always talked about leaving, no matter where we might be leaving behind. We are still explorers with a map and an app. We talk about having land and deeper quiet. About a place where headlights don’t shine into your bedroom in the dark of night. We talk, but we stay. We love it here. This home has brought us specific joys we would not have found somewhere else. It is the inspiration for this series of essays. It is where a wood shop nearly fell into Ben’s lap. The trajectories of our lives changed just by the mere fact of us being here.

It is, in many ways, our Shangri-La.

“There was a reek of dissolution over all the recollected world … but here at Shangri-La, all was in deep calm.” - Conway, Lost Horizon

But it is also just a small town. It is not a utopian paradise built on gold (the gold is, in fact, pretty much all gone.) And as easy as it is to brick my phone and ignore the world, it is a fallacy and a fantasy to imagine one can protect that world but not be of it.

I share the stories of living here because I do think that there are ways of living our lives that center more on connection than convenience, more on the abundance of goodwill over goods. Maybe Shangrilogs is a dumb name for that. Maybe it lacks marketability and SEO. Maybe it will be hard to find, hard to describe.

But so was Shangri-La.

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In the land of dogs

I bought a house in the middle of nowhere

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In the slog of your craft and need some company? Pen Pals is a process show. Every week Krisserin Canary and I share what’s working, what’s weird, and what’s getting in the way as we try to publish our first novels. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

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