Tomorrow is International Women's Day and I would like to choose to celebrate the life of one woman who silently made an impact on me. She taught me much about my life, just from the way she lived hers.
That woman was a nobody, generally speaking, a simple farmer in a small village in Bhutan. But she was a somebody to the few people who knew her. A mother to her children, a sister to my late Mother and her siblings, a wife, a daughter, and an Aunt to me.
There are many people who try to make a difference in the world by trying to lead, to impress, to be someone, to impact someone's life, to have a better life, to make more money. Not my Aunt. She didn't intend to be or do any of those things. I have never seen anyone with no desire for anything more than the life she had been given; even though that life was not the easiest.
My Aunt was just a farmer, and being a farmer in Bhutan is not easy. It is an extremely demanding way of life involving great physical hardship. In her I saw the lives of many other Bhutanese women of that generation who were content with what they had, with what they were given, and just being who they were. She had no ambition to be anybody, but to fulfill her daily duties of being a mother, a daughter, and a good farmer. Even though she didn't know much about Buddhism (she wasn't very religious), she lived a more Buddhist life than many who claim to be.
Aum Tsheri Om, as my siblings and I called her, was a small, thin, demure, and quiet woman. She was soft-spoken and rarely had much to say, so much so that I hardly noticed her while growing up as a child. But despite all the appearances of a quiet, docile woman, she was fiercely independent - just like my mother. Her sister, my mother, lived about 3 hours away in Thimphu, the country's capital, yet she never desired to go there and be a part of that life, and so we didn't see much of her at all unless we went to the countryside.
