Patrick French seems to have put into words that spiritual and emotional essence which I identify with Middle Earth and Arda... with the Shadow Realm, with the lands of the Dea al Mon, and countless others.....
'I began to read about Tibet, its life, religion and traditions, its rulers and ruled. Looking back through sheared, overlapping memories, trying to get a glimpse of the past, it is hard to see what made me feel such an instinctive devotion to Tibet.
I can see another version of myself responding, with similar instincts but different knowledge. In essence, there were two things that drew me: the place and the spirit.
Tibet was as far as you could go. It was a harsh, remote, untouched land, outside time and geography, where ideas could be projected and dreams could be lived, a high plateau the size of western Europe, the most mountainous country on earth and nearly the most sparsely populated, a place of physical angularity and limitless expansion where perceptions of space and distance altered, a land of blue sheep, blood pheasants and barking deer, ringed by snow peaks and impassable high-altitude deserts dropping to fields of jasmine, sky-blue poppies, apricot orchards, incandescent turquoise lakes and hillsides of juniper; a place of serenity, where the enlightened chose to return after death and reincarnate themselves in human form for the good of all sentient beings; of names that rolled from your mouth: Pandatsang, Chomolungma, Dekyilingka, Dorje; of ancient monasteries with smoking butter lamps, wrathful deities, prostrating nuns, flailing oracles, revelatory trances and shaven-headed incarnations in maroon robes, cloistered in meditation, the low cry of human thigh-bone trumpets and the rhythm of soft, gutteral chanting flowing down the valleys with the snow-melt; nomads and herders, amulets close to the skin, children wrapped in sheep-skins, pushing flocks of yak and dzo, the yak-cow crossbreed, through the mountain passes, heading for the fragrant grasslands as their ancestors had always done. This was Tibet, before I went there: a place of dreams, a place to feel at home.'
