Modern.
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Produced by the Ilab at WBUR Boston from the New York Times and WBUR Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss, and redemption.
I'm your host, Magna Chakrabarti.
When Charlotte Bacon went to a temple in Bhutan, the place unlocked feelings in her that she hadn't truly realized were there.
She writes about the experience in her essay a forgotten prayer answered.
It's read by Mira Sorvino, who won an Academy Award for her performance in Mighty Aphrodite.
You can see her now in startup on Sony Crackle.
On a cold march night nearly two years ago, not long after we learned that the baby I was carrying had all his chromosomes in a sequence that spelled health and wholeness, I was lying in bed next to my husband, marveling at this unlikely turn of fortune, when I remembered Qimilacang.
Qimi Lacang is a dusty temple in Bhutan, a country where, two summers before I had taught composition at a college.
Bhutan is tiny, caught like a bead between the masses of China and India.
Through the protective arc of the Himalayas and a strategic choice of alliances, Bhutan has preserved its borders and its culture.
It remains stable, stunningly, itself indifferent to western notions of success.
The country restricts tourists to a standard itinerary of sites and small towns.
It's one of the ways the Bhutanese keep their country pristine.
To go anywhere, you need guides and permits, and most visitors must pay steep daily fees to peer into the quiet recesses of old fortresses and stare at jagged mountains.
On one of our last days there, in late August, my husband and I decided to spare our two children a long car trip and visit a few of these places on our own.
Chimi was one of them.
When I told some colleagues that we were going, one woman, a resident of Bhutan originally from Japan, said, hey, give the monks a picture of our baby.