When all said and done, somehow every journey begins and ends in the same place: home. I have been back in the States going on 3 weeks now, and the transition has not been easy. Perhaps more than a part of me was unwilling to return so quickly; I seem to have left my immune system on another continent. My health can be summed up by a stomach bug followed by a virus followed by a cold followed by a spasming back. How much of health is psycho-somatic? I’d like to leave that as open question.

Certainly there are great things about being back home, being together with family and friends, all the amenities of a comfortable 1st world life, the Wii, organic foods. My job for the next year or more will to succeed my mother in the family land development business, a task to which I have taken willfully as a shouldering of filial responsibility rather than passionate interest. But I have no regrets, it was my choice and the future is always malleable.

With this last entry, I retire the “Prisoner of Shangri-la,” which from the onset was meant to be a metaphor for the seeker who is trapped by his own concepts of the world around him, the thinker who takes his thoughts much too seriously. Although I am still him, I must turn to live in that world of concepts, to engage and dialogue with it, to take it very seriously…though I hope still with a touch of humor and spaciousness. Will the prisoner ever be free?