I drink a lot of tea. Sometimes, when I’m writing, I stare at the cup as if it contains some hidden inspiration. Sometimes, it works. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the cup is empty or full.

My husband, Phurba Namgay—bless him—is always offering to bring me a cup. He makes really good tea. We live in Bhutan, a country where flying tigers have transported Buddhist saints to holy sites and enlightened masters have subdued demons by shooting fire from their private parts. But most days, life here in Bhutan is far more ordinary, although spectacular insights can be found in everyday moments.

I’m not the first to come up with this idea, but I am the only one taking this particular path. I’m an American writer and have lived in Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital, for nearly 30 years. It’s a marvelous place to explore Buddhism, life, and tea. So that’s what I write about—along with coffee, walking meditation, metaphor, books, dogs, life in the Himalayas, the last Buddhist monarchy, the modern world, death, and the cosmos.

Everyone’s path to liberation is different, of course, but for me a spiritual path means making sense of daily life. I also don’t take many things too seriously. Probably, the things I do take seriously might strike you as odd or frivolous. Or maybe not. I am, however, quite serious about living purposefully—especially as I grow older. But even in that, I find humor. It’s better to laugh at yourself than to get mad at other beings and things.

Once, while visiting family in Nashville, Tennessee, my mother gently reminded me that there were a lot of things in the attic that belonged to me. She hinted that, if I wanted, I could do something about them. There was one thing I did want: a set of hand-painted china that had been my grandmother’s. But how could I ship it halfway around the world without breaking it? 

Also, I technically wasn’t allowed.  Namgay and I have rules in our marriage, and one rule is that when we visit the US from Bhutan, or come to Bhutan from the US, we can’t bring anything that originally came from the place we’re going. Namgay made the rule when I bought a bunch of decorative boxes from India in the US, and packed and brought them to Bhutan. We had to pay a lot for our overweight luggage. And there are many decorative Indian boxes to be had in Bhutan. It’s a coals-to-Newcastle kind of thing. So I had to clear the idea of the china with Namgay, who gave the okay to ship my grandmother’s dishes to Bhutan from the US, although they had originated almost 90 years before in Hong Kong.

I remembered a high school contest in which students had to engineer a way to protect a carton of eggs inside a box so that they wouldn’t break when dropped three stories off the school roof. The local news even covered it. I figured if I could channel that same engineering energy and ingenuity, I might be able to pull this off.

So I went to a UPS store in a strip mall near my parents’ house. I decided to start small: four plates out of the eight-piece settings of dinner, salad, and dessert plates, along with eight teacups, saucers, and hand-painted salt and pepper shakers. It was my favorite china in the world, white with pink, green, and gold decorative flowers and Asian motifs. I had loved them from the moment I saw them as a child in my grandparents’ home in Arlington, Virginia.

I insisted on watching the unfortunate, minimum-wage-earning young man in the UPS store pack the first box.

“You’ll need a bigger box,” I observed.

“For just four plates?”

“These four plates have to make it to the Himalayas. The roof of the world! They’ll have to travel for two days on the back of a yak!” 

That last part wasn’t technically true, but it might as well have been. Bhutan is exactly 12 hours ahead of Nashville—halfway around the world. It takes me four flights to get from my home in Thimphu to my home in Nashville. And there’s a bumpy ride at the beginning, usually in the dead of night from Thimphu to Paro, and then another car ride at the other end. There’s no telling how many trucks, planes, carts, three story schools, and conveyor belts these boxes would have to endure.

By the way, the dishes are bone china, which is surprisingly strong. You can hold a teacup up to the light and see through it, but bone china is more resilient than you might think.

So four plates went into a box about 30 inches square, wrapped in an obscene amount of bubble wrap—whole rolls of bubble wrap— and lots of paper. It cost a fortune.

A couple of week later, Namgay said the package had arrived in Thimphu. I asked if the dishes were okay.

“Yes, yes, they’re fine,” he replied.

Encouraged, I proceeded to ship all 40 pieces of china (plus the salt and pepper shakers) in eight enormous boxes.

The following month, when I returned home, I ran inside, eager to see my dishes. There, in our dining room, sat eight giant unopened boxes.

“You said they were okay. You didn’t open them?”

“The boxes are fine.”

This kind of linguistic confusion happens a lot in our marriage.

Immediately, I had a vision of all my beautiful dishes shattered inside those unopened boxes. I tore them open.

Not a single piece of my grandmother’s china had broken.

Our dining room, however, was packed to chest level with bubble wrap, paper, and cardboard. Our daughter, Kinlay, squealed with delight as she crawled through the packing materials. Every so often, her head popped up and she grinned before diving back in. “I’m a sand worm!” she shrieked. Children love chaos.

It was beyond wonderful to have the dishes in our little house in Thimphu, but I did feel moments of buyer’s remorse—thinking I’d overdone it, with all the plastic, waste, and the absurd expense. We didn’t have that kind of money. It had been pure folly. 

Or so I thought.

Namgay had been working with sculptors for a few months to create six large Buddhist statues for a temple in Wangdue Goempa, his family’s shedra in Wangduephodrang. Bhutanese statues are made from unfired clay mixed with Daphne bark and sculpted over wire. They are incredibly fragile and so difficult to transport. They are painted and gilded when they are in situ, which strengthens them. These unfired statues needed to make a four-hour journey from Thimphu to Nekachu in a rattling Eicher DCM truck over rough mountain roads. 

And that’s when we realized—the absurdly over-the-top packing method that had protected my grandmother’s china was exactly what we needed for the statues. Copious amounts of hay packed around the fragile fingers, crowns, earlobes, and torsos of the statues and secured with miles of bubble wrap allowed them to travel to the goempa and arrive intact. There was not a scratch on any statue. 

But really, this account isn’t about dishes or statues. It’s about finding meaning in the ordinary. Enlightenment isn’t reserved for grand, distant experiences—it can be discovered in the simple, calming rituals of daily life. Such as enjoying a cup of tea—in a cup that has traveled the globe at least twice—and about the extravagant packing materials that kept a Buddha statue safe for transport to his eventual home. 

It’s a lesson about strength and vulnerability. Whether bone china or sacred statues, the things we cherish most often seem fragile, yet with the right care, they endure and they have a strength that’s powerful. Buddhism teaches impermanence, but it also teaches reverence: we wrap our treasures in layers of devotion, just as we wrap our hearts in mindfulness and love. We must honor what is precious while we have it—be it porcelain, faith, fleeting moments, or a cup of tea.

Related features from BDG

Mystical Dances in the Kingdom of Bhutan, Part 1: A Black Magic Dance at the Core of Bhutan’s Founding
Painting the Transcendent: An Interview with Bhutanese Thangka Artist Kinzang Chojay
The Magical Kingdom of Bhutan
Bhutan – Teaching Buddhism in a Buddhist Country