Josiah Ramsay Johnston

When existing outside of the frame of reference which has earned – for an idiosyncratic array of rational and meaningless elucidations which usually defy the power of the tacit – the title ‘home,’ and considering what one has lost, it is imperative to remember that the principal psychological fixation all of us lose once we make the great leap outward is the reality of our definition of home: our nascent persona’s training ground, that abode of the self which seems inimitable and eternal.
While the mental construct remains unchanged throughout the duration of one’s time away, upon returning he or she will find that the truth of life at the origin of the exodus has percolated slowly into a cup of purified change, adapting and mutating as the habitual structure of those one leaves behind evolves to support life without the vagabond who has managed to escape the imbedded and imbedding social dance, as the particulars take on their forbidding magnificence – for so long taken for granted.
As Thomas Wolfe wrote, ‘You can never go home again,’ meaning that whether or not one chooses to retreat back to the dwelling of the subconscious child inside, to the place one calls home, that dwelling will have been demolished, paved over, and rented out to people you barely know anymore, people who seem to barely know you.
            I have lost the sense of a tangible home, a place I can follow the dusty roads of attachment towards, a place I can return to – yet that paves the way for what T.S. Eliot articulated, ‘..to return to a place and know it for the first time.’
            So what have I lost? It would be easy to say…home. But perhaps, for all of what seems to be my loss, I have gained a perspective on the place I love so much, removed from the cultural homogenization which circumscribed my former view of it, and that now, after all the travels of my wayward existence, I have baptized my home in the fire of sabbatical and found the secret name of the place I for so long misidentified: my home is myself.
 

The amazing thing about the trip to tibet other then the many friends i obtained and the coetaneous experiences the other students and i shared and the landscape that seems to breath out in one constant long exhalation of understanding and the bijou which pours freely from the mouth of the bottle that seems to be clutching a cigarette in clenched teeth and the festivals with masked dancers waving from behind demonic masks to the sounds of cymbals and long horns and smiles and long stares and eyes and children and the rhythm of life in the village which is so slow one almost wants to give it something but you know it wouldnt take it if you asked three times…Drinking with tibetans is like dancing with tibetans or discussing politics with tibetans, they either know how to do it way better than you, or they do it with a kind of natural rawness which makes the visceral seem quaint and either one leaves you speechless on the back of a bike going up a mountain towards a vilage where a child lama wait with a khatta which he will momentariuly be placing around your neck as the light dapples between the branches of the trees in patterns of shadow and light and the wind picks up with dust that makes your throat sandpaper and the monk next to you says something you cant understand and in the end you just have to laugh as he laughs not at you but with you and all things…welcomed into homes it is good manners to drink the paterfamilias under the table while letting the sloivers of yakmeat stuck in your teeth stay put since they would never show you their teeth perhaps its a custom harking back to our neolithic past and speaking of ground stone tools let me tell you there are plenty of those on the roads and in the ripped-open valleys of Tongren county…more later