I shared this song in my Instagram story earlier this year, in 2026, without knowing it was born back in 2021.
I didn’t know its story either. Only that it spoke to my heart.
Then I finally took the time to read about it. And that made it so much more beautiful.
Lau suna suna suna. Listen, listen, listen.
So, let me tell you the story and set the scene.
Mustang, the Hidden Kingdom
The song comes from a short film called The Young Ones: The Silent Echo. The film takes place in Mustang, a remote mountain region in Nepal, also known as the hidden kingdom
“One of the most interesting facts about Mustang Nepal is that Mustang is known as the lost kingdom of Tibet. In the old times, it used to be a part of the Tibetan empire. Therefore, the kingdom of Mustang is closely connected to Tibet in traditions, cultures, religious beliefs, languages, and geography. Now, Mustang is a part of Nepal. People of Mustang still practice Tibetan Buddhism in its pure form,” writes the Mustang Trek Nepal site.
I first heard about this “forbidden kingdom” in June 2025, while travelling to Tibet to undertake the Yatra around the sacred Mount Kailash myself. Just hearing about those remote mountains and seeing them far in the distance stirred a deep curiosity in me.
Travelling through the harsh landscape of Tibet, and before that, hiking through the high Himalayan mountains of Nepal, I couldn’t stop thinking about how geography, the sheer scale of the landscape, brings the sacredness of life into the everyday lives of the people who live there.
Why do they live so closely connected to all the elements: earth, air, water and fire?
In those rough terrains, people take nothing for granted. The elements are the dwellers’ allies.
Even just passing through, I could feel the holiness of life. So when I saw that same scenery in the short film and learned that the filmmakers had filmed it in Mustang, I understood why it spoke to me. I had seen those severe landscapes with my own eyes, and I could feel their listening with my whole body.
Lau suna suna.
Four Teenagers, One Bus
In that award-winning short film, four teenagers live there, far from any city, far from any stage.
They spend their days in an old abandoned bus on the ridge. That bus becomes their world. Their rehearsal room. Their escape. They sing there. Just for themselves, at first. Then they hear about a band competition in a neighbouring town. They have almost nothing. Not much money. No real instruments. No guarantee anyone will even listen when they get there. But they go anyway.
They travel down from the mountains, into the city, carrying this one song between them. Lau suna suna. Listen, listen.
It is a child’s plea, really. Please hear me. Please see what lives inside me, even out here, even with so little.
The film is quiet. There is barely any talking. Just their voices, the mountains, and the sound of them trying. The children in the film are not professional actors. They grew up in Lo Manthang, Mustang, and their presence gives the film a rawness that feels impossible to fake. They seem to speak through their silence.
And once I knew that, the song stopped being just a melody. It became a story about real listening.
And listening to that song, after everything that had recently happened in Nepal, took on a completely new meaning for me.
I had stood on that very bridge, on the border between Tibet and Nepal, the same bridge I later saw in CCTV footage on the BBC as the flood swept it away. I had also passed through those very areas of Nepal that the flood later devastated. Rasuwa.
Many Kinds of Listening
So I came to think about the many kinds of listening.
Listening to the chit chat of the mind, and believing it.
Listening to the gossip around us, that quietly steals our energy and our attention.
Listening to the news that paints the whole world black.
Listening to the state of the world, and letting it affect our being.
Listening to another person, without waiting for our turn to speak.
Listening to the wind dancing with the leaves.
Or listening to the silence underneath all of it, where something truer is waiting.
And listening to that touching song took me, once more, in a new direction: to the incident on Broad Peak at the end of July.
Two Women Who Listened
Broad Peak is the twelfth-highest mountain in the world, in Pakistan’s Karakoram range. Broad Peak has a reputation for avalanches, sudden weather, and thin air that gives no room for mistakes.
On the 30th of July, an avalanche swept down between two camps and took ten climbers with it. There were no survivors. Among them were two women who had both, in their own way, listened.
Mallory Geis ran a Pilates studio in San Antonio, Texas. Earlier this year, she closed its doors. On Instagram she wrote that she was taking a giant leap of faith into the unknown, to see where life would go. She had a sneaking suspicion, she said, that there would be a lot of helmets, harnesses, and crampons involved.
Broad Peak was her first attempt at an 8,000 metre peak. A close friend later described her as someone who had a real sense of adventure.
And then there was Nadhira Al Harthy. She was a geography teacher and government worker in Oman. In 2017, she met Khalid Al Siyabi, the first Omani man to summit Everest, and something in her woke up. She had never climbed before. She gave herself two years to learn.
Her mentor died while she was at Everest Base Camp, just weeks before she reached the summit. She kept climbing. In May 2019, at 42, she became the first Omani woman to summit Everest. She carried a small piece of paper with his name on it and left it at the top of the world.
She later went on to summit K2.
For me, her story became a quiet permission slip for a new generation of women across the Gulf, a permission to step into adventure, into risk, and into places they may once have thought were beyond their reach.
Both women had listened to something inside them. Both followed it all the way to the mountain.
That voice does not shout, the way the mind does. The way the news does. It waits. It hums. Sometimes, it sounds like four children singing in an old bus, asking the world, and themselves, to listen.
Where It Leads
And when we finally listen, really listen, it rarely leads us somewhere safe. It leads us into the unknown. And if we choose the path of growth, in my experience, that is exactly where it begins — in deep listening.
Maybe that is the whole point of listening deep within. Not to hand us the answer, but to give us the courage to walk into the unknown without one.
I wrote a whole book born from a similar kind of listening. Some patterns can’t be thought through. They can only be walked through.
The Silver Route – Via de la Plata is now out on Amazon, born from a 1,000-kilometre walk in which I learned that lesson one step at a time. 🌾
What might you hear if you listened a little more deeply?
If something here resonated, welcome. You’ve found a good corner of the internet. Subscribe if you haven’t already.
I am Parisa, and this is not my only home online. I write at People, Life, Politics and Bullshit, and I’m the founder of Health and Movement, where holistic movement helps people stop performing and start hearing their own voice again.
Find me on Instagram most days, or let my Spotify playlist move what words can’t.