re•strung | {a return}

11 Aug, 2026

It came back changed,
     yet it was the same...
          a new thing—
               but of the olden ways:
                    a last homecoming.

Sonam smiled gently as she looked up from behind the glass counter, recognizing me; turned around to retrieve the small sack that felt like filligreed air, the one in which she'd originally placed my unhinged mala for safekeeping when I'd brought it to her shop 76 days ago and she'd said her mom Pachen would re-string it for me, for free, after a brief iPhone consultation as the latter wasn't there that afternoon.

She took the crimson garland out, handed it to me; immediately, I sensed it was... different. But at the very same moment I was so glad to see it back in its accustomed form, its constitutional shape, its essence as a coherent string. Of red beads; of singular worlds; of individual... tokens? ::chuckle::

All of us, without exception, have in our lifetimes been unstrung one way or another. Broken, even. But most of us have emerged afterwards in a state of continued coherence — although whether stronger, or weaker is always a matter of chance, or one's own fortitude and resilience, or one's acquired tarnishment. The kintsugi that life performs on us might be quite evident in the burnished scarification, or invisibly subtle instead if one is of a gnomic cast of mind and octopodal cast of body-surface (by which I mean one can change the hue and visual texture of one's skin to render an optical illusion for others around one to be baffled or dazzled or vexed by).

So, it was to no surprise to me to feel, first, that the mala was changed, upon its return to me. Sonam told me that Pachen, that very afternoon, was at Pistahan, the annual Filipino summer festival at the Yerba Buena Gardens, with a booth for the store. It delighted me to know there was at least one Tibetan aspect to the fiesta.

Second, but some hours later at home, I counted out the beads — not as a test to see whether Pachen had strung the mala back correctly, but as an inquiry to the cosmos as to exactly how the mala was changed; at the store, Sonam had shown me a few of the beads (3 of them) were different from the ordinal others — smaller, a duskier shade of red, slightly clearer and see-through, like a tiny insect-sarcophagus of amber.

There were 106 in the string (not counting the large guru bead and its dangling double-pair of tiny acolytes or amanuenses)... thus, 2 short of the canonical 108.

Over the past few days since the mala's return, I have been feeling a growing sense of wonderment for the rightness of the underlying, unspoken, story here. There had never been a sense of despair for me after the loss, that day and moment when Sonam Tsering's original thread had finally broken after years of the mala being set on stone or ground or book or cactus or birdbath ... any of 535 or so loci in the city where it found breath and bone as an element of the Samādhi of the Lay Sacraments. ::chuckle:: There was just a deep and abiding curiosity as to how my story was being unfolded in the travels of that braid, in its unraveling, the loss of some of its familiars, its repair over time, its return.

The human organism is nothing if not a manifestation of entropy itself; one's own body is the thing everyone knows the best of anything at all. It's the one that fragments and dissipates with time, sometimes gently, sometimes violently, but always inevitably. Hair, skin, teeth, nails, bone, sight, smell, sound, taste, touch... all go by the wayside, fail in ways large and small, and that is the way of all things. One trusts that one has a vessel of certain Weeks in which this process takes place, perhaps enough to satisfy or mollify — if not to be grateful for in the first damn place. ;-) One is fortunate if, at the appointed and anointed end of things there are a dispositive majority of squares to be seen in the final, actuarial shape of one's container.

As it evidently now is, for me.

As for my gifted mala, s•he is now back with me, after some time absent, in which I missed them quite a lot, but knowing they were in good Tibetan hands I was not at all afraid they were lost but instead were being lovingly reshaped by a gracious woman I did not know but who when I met her one afternoon when she was in the shop nevertheless felt like one of the most familiar persons in my humble bhikkşu life at its present flow midstream. Thank you, Pachen, wherever you are; and thank you daughter Sonam, for your face and smile, your quiet generosity, your subtly floral spirit, the one which buoyed me so that day when I went looking for a nameless bead-monger and found instead old friends.

[ The first return of the mala to some familiar loci a couple days ago, as I walked up Polk to have lunch at Hummus Mediterranean; this is a slide show of 5 separate images, with a handful of seconds' pause between each dissolve, and cycling indefinitely on the page... ]