I have always been in love with the snow. There is something about its perfect crystal whiteness that transports me to happiness. On frozen blizzard nights, when sensible men and women stay safely indoors by their cozy fireplaces, I walk alone in the wind-whipped snow, down lonely pine-trimmed lanes.

My fascination with snow began when I was a child.

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I would have probably grown up to be a doctor, as my mother had wished, or gone on to law school and become an attorney, as my father had advised, if on my seventh birthday, my grandparents hadn’t given me my first sled. It was a Flexible Flyer with fire engine red steel runners. The words “Flexible Flyer” were proudly stenciled in big black letters across the top of its blond oak body.

I spent the better part of that winter, and many winters that followed, on top of my Flexible Flyer, rapidly rushing down every steep snow-covered slope I could find.

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It was logical, I suppose, that as I grew older, I would graduate from sledding to snowboarding.

Skiing was too social a sport for me. It lacked the pure intensity and grace of standing on top of a four-and-a-half-foot-long fiberglass board while plummeting straight down mountains of snow.

Having successfully snowboarded most of the higher mountains in the United States and Canada, I packed my bags and two snowboards, said good bye to my friends and relations, and traveled by plane to Nepal, to snow surf the Himalayas, on the roof of the world.

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I arrived late on a cold January afternoon, and, after clearing Nepalese customs, I went straight to the Kathmandu Youth Hostel.

Inside there were lots and lots of European college students.

Most of them had come to Nepal looking for “enlightenment”, which they hoped to find while seated at the feet of a local Buddhist monk.

After a meal, I crawled into my sleeping bag, fell asleep, and had a most unusual dream.

In my dream, I was snowboarding down a gigantic mountain. The slope below me went straight down as far as I could see.

I was riding on my snowboard, happily cutting in and out of the deep granular powder, when suddenly, from out of nowhere, a small bald-headed Buddhist monk, dressed in a saffron-colored robe, appeared right in front of me.

I reflexively cut my snowboard left to avoid hitting him, but he remained in front of me.

Then I tried cutting right to avoid him, but he was still there.

It didn’t seem to make any difference which way or how I maneuvered my snowboard.

He always managed to stay several feet ahead of me.

A soft, beautiful, golden phosphorescent light emanated from and surrounded his entire body.

As I examined him more closely, I found my gaze irresistibly drawn to his face, which was creased and wrinkled with many fine lines of age.

As I stared at him, the bald-headed monk looked back impassively at me.

Then, quite unexpectedly, he winked. He then disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.

Looking ahead, I saw that I was rapidly snowboarding toward the edge of a cliff.

Before I could stop myself, I shot over the cliff’s edge and, in a nightmarish turn of events, I found myself plummeting straight down into an endless chasm of snow.

I was about to start yelling, when I heard a voice coming from my right side. In a firm, male tone it said, “Don’t give up, fly! Use your mind. You can do it!”

Glancing quickly to my right, I saw that the short, bald-headed monk had suddenly reappeared.

He was standing in the air right next to me, and was falling at precisely the same rate of speed that I was.

“Fly! What other choice do you have? Use your will power. Do it now, or you will die and never get to meet and help all the people that you are supposed to meet and help.”

Listening to him speak, I suddenly knew just what to do. By “pushing down” with my feelings, I began to gradually slow my descent.

By “pushing down” harder with my feelings, I was able to stop myself in mid-air.

By pushing down as hard as I could, I began to slowly ascend. Using my feelings to propel and direct myself, I flew upwards through the air on my snowboard, until I reached the safety of the cliff above.

Then I stopped.

The same voice then asked me, “Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” I looked around for the monk, but he was nowhere in sight.

“Don’t worry about where I am, you will see me soon enough.” And with his words still echoing in my mind, I was awakened by the sun shining through the youth hostel windows onto my face, to my first morning in Nepal.

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The Nepalese receptionist at the Kathmandu Youth Hostel arranged for me to get a ride up to the mountain with a local farmer, in the back of his yak-drawn cart.

Sitting in his cart, on a pile of straw next to my snowboard, I listened to the driver’s non-stop comments without understanding a word he said.

After we had ridden in his cart together for several hours, the road turned sharply upward and I began to get a closer look at the Himalayas.

Staring at them from the back of the cart, I had a sudden experience of déjà vu. I clearly sensed that in some way, and at some other time, I had been in these majestic mountains before, even though this was the first time in my life I had ever visited the Himalayas.

We gradually made our way up a high mountain pass. When we reached the crest of the pass, I motioned to the driver to stop and let me off. A small path wound its way skyward from that point to a higher section of the mountain.

To get to the top, I would have to proceed the rest of the way on foot.