A TALE OF THE YAK IN SPRING
Norlha's co-founder Dechen Yeshi tells the story of the yak and their herders that touches her most each spring.
My encounters with spring on the Plateau are not of flowers blooming or warmth returning, but of witnessing care in its most essential form.
March and April are harsh months here. The animals have survived the winter, but only just, and everyone waits anxiously for the call of the cuckoo bird — the sound that signals the worst has passed.
What moved me most during this season was the tenderness I witnessed among the nomads. Strong men, hardened by the climate and landscape, would cradle newborn lambs inside their robes for warmth. A dri, the female yak, who had just given birth, would be given extra fodder, or gently coaxed to walk a little further each day to rebuild her strength after winter. There was an attentiveness to every small sign of weakness or recovery.
Spring revealed a side of nomadic life that is not about taking from animals, but about giving back to them. It is a season of patience, restraint, and compassion. The first milk is always left for the young. The weakest are watched over most carefully. Survival depends not on dominance over nature, but on kindness toward it.
And when at last the cuckoo bird calls across the grasslands, there is a collective release, a quiet understanding that all who have survived, human and animal alike, have done so through care and compassion for one another.
Words from Dechen Yeshi, co-founder of Norlha ~
Words
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