A Law School in the Forest

Sitting on a hill, I peered through the still trees. Above the snaking thoroughfare, I looked at the hidden campus of law resting at peace with its permanent shriveled laziness traversing times and ages, welcoming ‘would-be lawyers’. And bidding farewells to the aged learners to run their errands, but I'm still waiting for the grand gesture of goodwill the place will bring. People would ask me where I study and I tell them I study in one of the forest campuses nested in the hidden hills by thick growing pines that partially shed its leave to the freezing cold of winter and yellows to beautify the aura of autumn. They would smile and the smiles subside. Are they smiling at my blunt invoke of niceness or the blunt gesture of vanity I must have shown? I wonder but why would I lie to them? When I truly stay in the hidden forest, far away from the daily gymnastics of the crowd. The hidden forest where the touch of cool breeze is an ambrosia of healing and the silence, the unnoticed aura of happiness. It's true I stay in that forest where intervening thoughts saunter its presence in the whole world. How amazing is that? The whole deck of thoughts springs when your inquisitive mind tries to unravel the meaning of a psychopath philosopher and you assure yourself that the philosopher has put on the hat of all knowings by going beyond his daily normalcy into a shred of madness to discover the truth that many would ever think of. How amazing is that by sitting in the middle of four wooden walls at which I inadvertently pierced a hole, with the best teacher to provide you with the knowledge of the Westphalian system and the vindications of the resurrection of the great silk road delving into the unknown for peace and for encroachment? In the human rights class, once, how is it I built on out my tortured mind, a passion for constructing the value of a deprived and the most intertwining thoughts and ideas crawling like a ghoul rising from my imaginative brain? Unrelenting and swiftly moving from one idea to the aha, and then finding connections between the first human right mechanism and the solutions. How amazing is it that you open up the secret doors of human longing for knowledge? And beyond that the arsenal passion for lifelong learning? The story neither begins at the campus nor ends here. But the ritual for what you are learning perseveres through the esoteric, undecipherable scripts of Choekae, the intervening strategy you find for the trafficking, and above all, the depressing somersaults that shape you to think like a lawyer. Often these somersaults are of the incremental steps, of hardships, and the weepings. But let me tell you, the forest, the best teachers, and the lifelong arsenal of passion for learning are worth having, above all.

This poem was dedicated to Her Royal Highness Princess Sonam Dechan Wangchuck and my law school.