Tashi Delek, as the Tibetans say! I just came across this journal entry from a tough day on the shoot, and I thought it might be a good warm-up for the premiere of Blindsight. This was just the training climb, the real climb was even gnarlier, but you?re going to have to wait for the movie for that?

June 1^st
Woke to rabid-sounding dogs barking all around the tent ? at least something is managing to stay alive out there, not just rock and weather. And at least not lightning 10 feet away, like last night. That must have been the closest call of all, a perfect capper to the most dangerous day of my life. Just lying here, loving that there's canvas between me and the outside. Don't care that I'm perched painfully on large rocks on an extreme incline at extreme altitude. Just that I'm inside. I'd say dry but I?m not. The tent leaked again and everything completely soaked but I'm warm enough.

Woke just now thinking I must have been stung by a large bee, right on the mouth - because my mouth is so sore and swollen and raw, and lips and chin too... they feel completely unrecognizable. Took a long moment to realize it's just sunburn, and can't fathom why I didn't suspect that yesterday. I saw everybody else's faces burn to a crispy pork scratching texture but I had factor 30 on and thought I'd be fine. I guess too many other things to worry about. Like:

- crossing a river in a thunderstorm on a high plain with no bush or scrub around for miles - we were the only thing for lightning to strike. Insanely dangerous.

- the spot where Sabriye was throwing up felt exactly like we just got tipped out of an airplane onto the solid-seeming white clouds you see out of the plane window, so heavenly-bright and white and snowy (and at 17,700' feet, that wasn't far off, was it ? we?re getting to grown-up altitudes, not in the death zone yet, but maybe that?s why everything?s getting so pear-shaped)

- up on the pass, nothing growing up here. Past the point of vegetation, just rock and snow. No insects, no plants, nothing, and not even much oxygen. Reminds me, what are we doing here?

- the pain of the hail coming so fast and perfectly sideways, since we were in the cloud, especially during the third storm, which was the worst

- not being able to make the stupid velcro work on my gortex trousers, scarcely able to take them off to pee, having abandoned all extraneous if customary urinary procedures (privacy, squatting, replacing clothes properly, keeping boots clear, at least stepping away from the group).

- feeling of not knowing how much longer it could possibly go on, having run out of water and even snowmelt as we started to descend off the glacier, such a throbbing headache of dehydration taking over from the headache of altitude

- Paul telling me that we were all lost, the Tibetan guide had gone wrong, and was just talking to a passing nomad about what to do

 - the terrain couldn't be worse for blind people - tussocks, yak holes, mud, snow, loose rocks, all of it crumbling and uneven, one step up and one step down, like a mad masochistic version of those machines at the gym, except completely unpredictable and bonus points for holes being disguised with snow and wet mud, requiring total concentration even for a sighted person. And so much of it all uphill (4 1/2 hours our of 9 hours hiking)

- how many times I turned my ankle on loose rocks. Looking at the blind people's ankles in amazement - how have they not turned them over? What do they know that I don't about how to tread on this stuff without breaking any bones?

- Tashi's kidney infection, Sally's vomiting and blue mouth and toes, Sabriye's vomiting and passing out, the kids' sunburnt, scared, suffering faces

- Sybil giving Tenzin the last of her water, and giving me a Strepsil that felt like it was a life-saver when we were all really losing it in the last storm

-Jeff holding Sabriye to keep her from falling off the horse and telling her stories to keep her conscious. Me walking beside hoping the horse wouldn't fall.

- descending feeling the air literally getting thicker. So that's what mountaineers mean when they say thick air. I'd thought it was just a figure of speech.

- the kids too tired to eat at dinner, finally admitting they're tired. They look beat, and burned to a crisp. That's the ones that made it to dinner. Tashi shivering and moaning in his tent on a drip as well. Sabriye on her drip with a towel over her head. Everyone sick in tents like a war zone.

[To clarify, Tashi and Tenzin are blind Tibetan teenage boys, Jeff was the expedition doctor, and Sabriye is the young blind German woman who founded the only blind school in Tibet. There were five other blind climbers with us, four other students from Sabriye?s school, and Erik Weihenmeyer, the American climber who is the only blind person to have summitted Everest - two others blind climbers have attempted it, but tragically one fell and was injured, and the other died.]

? and that was just the beginning ? the supposedly easy training climb! It had been quite a day. Finishing the last ten miles of the New York marathon with a knee injury, as I had done in 2001, had felt like a romantic moonlit stroll in comparison to that day. That was also the day I was given the Tibetan name "Drolma", which is the Tibetan name for a female bodhisattva also known as Green Tara. It?s a common name, and the Tibetans love to give foreigners names, so it?s not a particular honor, but I was happy to be called Drolma, because she has a good story. For one thing, she was told that she?d need to start incarnating as a man if she wanted to achieve bodhisattva status, but she refused, saying she?d like to try, because there had been plenty of male bodhisattvas already.

I feel a bit the same way about being a female film director, to be very irreverent for a moment. And secondly she is the bodhisattva you need to know about when you are lost on a mountain in a storm, because you can call on her in your hour of need, and she has the power to intervene and avert catastrophe ? her mantra is "Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha", which is considered to be the best thing to say in a crisis. I found myself murmuring that on several occasions during the shoot. I might well be saying it to myself at the premiere?