Telluride celebrates Dalai Lama's 75th birthday at Library

04 Jul Telluride celebrates Dalai Lama's 75th birthday at Library

[Scott, Nancy and Elisabeth discuss the Dalai Lama’s birthday party; click “Play”]

“For as long as space endures / And for as long as living beings remain / Until then may I too abide / To dispel the misery of the world,” the Dalai Lama’s daily prayer.

Telluride’s five-star Wilkinson Public Library is throwing an all-day birthday party. The guest of honor is a man born Lhamo Dhondrub on July 6, 1935 to a humble farming family in the village of Takster in northeastern Tibet. At age two, this man was proclaimed the tulku or rebirth of the 13th Dalai Lama. He is now His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, living in India as the spiritual head of a government-in-exile along with the 80,000 exiles who followed him.

Telluride and Tibet are tied as two mountain cultures. But we share more than peak experiences. His Holiness’s legacy of empathy and compassion shown through the faces of the Drepung Monks on an unforgettable Sunday morning at the 37th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival, but that was not the first time Tibetan monks have moved Festivarians. And Telluride is sister city to Yushu in Tibet, where local Elisabeth Gick discovered a girls’ school filled with orphans. Yushu and the school are once again in need of our help since the earthquake on April 14 destroyed 80 percent of all homes in the region, plus the school.