Lobsang and the Snow Lioness

“Listen, friend, and I will tell you an old story that’s still good. One day, the Buddha went up to the snow mountain to pray. This was long ago in one of the Buddha’s past lives, before the Buddha was the Buddha. Back then, in his own boyhood days, he was still a young bodhisattva full of unfulfilled yearning and struggling to find his way.” So begins “Lobsang and the Snow Lioness,” a story of modern-day Tibet imbued with elements of myth and mystery; an imaginative work of literary fiction rooted in a real-world place and inspired by the author’s travels in Tibet.

Journey with Joseph and The Land West of Long Mountain Project to the Land of Snows, to the Roof of the World and the heart of the earth, to a small town called Manigango in the green highland heart of Kham, in the grasslands of Eastern Tibet, where a yak herder and young boy named Lobsang with a love for the earthy, for the bardic and the lyrical goes on a quest in search of annihilation in the wake of his brother’s self-immolation, but in the end experiences the transformative force of mystery and the healing power of violent grace and finds something closer to enlightenment and to peace of heart. In short: to an experience of the sublime on earth. Come, friend, and listen, and the Bard of Manigango will sing to you the story of “Lobsang and the Snow Lioness,” a story which aspires to be a modern-day myth for a myth-starved modern world.

In Pursuit of the Sublime

In this first edition of “In Pursuit of the Sublime Poetry Project,” we journey with Kahlil Gibran’s seeker up the eternal holy mountain, four times through the course of three thousand years, in pursuit of God. Along our journey, we learn about the meaning of patience and perseverance and about the true relationship between life and Life’s Creator. In this way, we unearth both wisdom of the heart and fulfillment of the spirit, and we come to discover joy, to experience the divine and to behold the beauty of creation everywhere on earth.