My latest conversation on climate was with Tsunma Tsondru, a Tibetan Buddhist nun living in Cape Town and Spain. As Christine Jardine, she completed undergraduate studies in microbiology in the late seventies at Rhodes University, and then transferred to the University of Cape Town halfway through her Masters in molecular genetics, followed by research towards a PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Along the way, she also scooped up a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree through Unisa, and farmed beef cattle in the Underberg district of KwaZulu-Natal – something she describes as “unimaginable” now, to be “making a livelihood off the lives of other animals”. And then, to top it all off, in 1998, she completed the same Master of Philosophy degree in Environmental Science at the University of Cape Town as I did.
Ani Tsondru grew up close to nature, exploring the rock pools on the beaches of East London. Her scientist mother, who she lost when she was six and a half years old, worked as an extension officer for pineapple farmers in the Eastern Cape, and filled her daughter’s early life with formative lessons about the natural world.
After earning an impressive array of degrees, her life seemed set on a scientific trajectory. But curiosity drove her to attend a weekend retreat at the Buddhist Retreat Centre in Ixopo, where she felt a sense of homecoming that activated a blossoming of her spiritual life.
She describes a subsequent visit to the Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Kenilworth. Walking into a house filled with bright red and yellow colours, and statues of deities representing aspects of the human mind, some with many arms and legs and heads, the scientist in her rebelled. But at the same time, she felt that somewhere deep inside herself she had finally found home. And, as she says, “that was the beginning of the final breaking down of my rational straitjacket, happily”.
Tibetan Buddhist temple in Sikkim, India © Penny Urquhart
Awakening the spiritual side led to profound changes in her life. She had taken a step away from the world of the research scientist when she finally abandoned her almost-complete PhD studies while farming in Underberg. She subsequently met Lama Tsondru, a Spanish Lama in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and felt an immediate and deep connection, “as though we knew each other from a past life, it must be”. This catapulted her, several months later, into more than seven and a half years of closed retreat at a monastery near Barcelona, in Spain, leaving behind her environmental consulting work, a newly-built house in Noordhoek, and her husband of 16 years, as well as a precious dog.
Now describing herself as a ‘free-range nun’, she serves on the board of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environmental Institute (Safcei), which has a growing Faith Leader Environmental Advocacy Training programme. She also leads meditative trails into the Umfolozi wilderness area, and returns to spend half of every year in Spain.
Penny: What concerns you the most about the climate crisis?
Ani Tsondru: The climate crisis itself (laughs). But I think what concerns me the most is that we don’t know if we’ve reached the tipping point already. Probably, possibly, things are running away from us, and we haven’t caught it in time. It’s going to take a long time for this to completely unravel, if we have lost control. The impacts are unimaginable on people, and the poorest of the poor are the ones on the frontline. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
And we’re still fiddling. It should not even be under discussion that you could carry on with coal. I don’t care whether you’re a developing country or whatever, because you are not going to develop if your world is falling apart. We are all interconnected, and people don’t really understand that, they don’t experience that. We don’t know any better, everybody just wants life easy, and they don’t understand that happiness has nothing to do with an easy life. ‘They’ – we. I’m not separating myself from this.
As we continue the discussion, we talk about how you respond if you fear that it is indeed too late to actually turn the climate crisis around. Ani Tsondru likens it to sitting at the bedside of someone who’s been given a terrible diagnosis, and not running out on them. As she says, “You sit there because we do not know whether our presence, and our holding of a hand in a certain way, is going to be the thing that tips the balance, because everything is interconnected”.
But, as she adds, we need to be coming from a stable spiritual base, or it would be impossible to go beyond the despair.
This has a lot in common with my own approach, which is to keep acting somehow, even if things seem hopeless. And to keep returning to opening your heart, despite the unfolding grave situation. This helps you to be present to what is, and not run from the challenges. It’s essential, I find, to keep joy alive, as an antidote to existential despair. This can be challenging. But it helps to hold on to mutual respect, for each other, and for our home here.
Penny: You’ve described always having a strong connection to nature. But are there any personal realisations or transformations that have been decisive on your path?
Ani Tsondru: Yes, I think the specific personal transformation was my spiritual practice, it was throwing everything out the window and going into traditional Tibetan long-term closed retreat for three years and seven months, for the first retreat. And then six months later I went back in for four more years of closed retreat.
So I had seven-and-a-half years of intense spiritual practice, which is not what most normal people might contemplate doing. They’re not lining up to do these retreats.
The intensive immersion in Tibetan Buddhist practices was life changing. Ani Tsondru had given no thought to the schedule, but it turned out the days involved waking at 4 am and spending 12 hours in meditation practice. About eight months were spent in utter silence, not even speaking to the Lama. As she says “It’s wonderful. You don’t recognise your own voice afterwards.”
In Part 2 of the blog, Ani Tsondru talks about the challenges of emerging from this long cloistered period, and how she is creating an unusual life for herself as a “free-range nun”.