Power Lines – Carol Gano

THE most tangled mess of power lines I’ve ever seen was in Kathmandu.

Now if any place has the ‘right’ to have mixed wires, it’d be Kathmandu.

Think of it…

Massive earthquake in April 2015

8,964 people died

21,952 people injured

It was a 7.8 mw or 8.1Ms

The epicentre was 85KM northwest of Kathmandu.

I’d been there 40 years previously. It was a very different place. Pigs roamed the streets near the river. Many people still made mud pie cow dung briquettes to cook and warm their homes. There was a sense of kindness, harmony, welcoming of guests.

But 40 years and a major geographical disharmony changes a place. Lord knows, I’d changed in 40 years! So, tangled power lines should have been expected.

What I didn’t expect though, was the shift in people’s core behaviours, so close to the surface, so close that foreigners could palpate it, so close as to push away visitors and the almighty dollars to save them from their misery.

The threads of power lines are used to send messages to other living humans. ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ according to Lord Acton.

But, in Nepal, could it be the tangled power lines display the changes in power of a people? Now, enmeshed in misery, now struggling to transmit life power to the next generation, now in an exhausted heap of live vs. dead individuals, a sideways shift towards survival along the prana continuum for their entire culture.