There's a part where the author ups sticks and ends up in Lao and visits the local home of a guy there.
He talks about the zu gah, a spirit which protects the family. Each family has one and each year it is burned and a new one made. Only the father of the household is allowed to touch it.
All of this comes after a long spiel about animistic reality (set off by the poem Aslan has already posted) in relation to death.
Anyway, this isn't a spiritual-specific book, it's just a very human story of a guy who lost his sister, which I think is what I like most about it. Haven't reached his final conclusion yet
But one experience he talks about, he finds himself in Lao and goes to the home of a local man who talks about his zu gah - the spirit which protects his family. The end of this anecdote smacks of Chögyam Trungpa and the dangers of Western spiritual materialism. A lot of what this guy writes is fascinating in that, without being pagan, he describes quite organically a lot of the feelings, thoughts and doubts that brought many people to paganism. It's refreshing to read something so unpretentious.
I wonder how many of us have been through a similar experience with other 'paths' and, at times, our own?
"Every Hmong family had a zu gah...a special spirit who would watch over and protect them wherever they went..."we make a new zu gah every year and have a big party. We sacrifice [chickens], to thank the old zu gah for helping us, then we burn it and make a new one.""
[some paragraphs later]
"As we prepared to go, Dou Xong showed me the zu gah which hung on the wall in one corner of his home, the religious object which connected his family to the spirit that watched over and protected them. But looking at it, I couldn't help but feel disappointed. Whatever the truth about this object and the animistic cosmology it represented to him, all I could see now was a small piece of paper hanging on the wall with a grubby feather attached.
"I knew that I should have known better. What could I have seen here that wouldn't be a disappointment? And what did I think I was going to learn in a day? I was appalled by the thought that I might be just another naive Westerner, in love with the idea that traditional cultures had some pre-packaged 'ancient wisdom to go', that I could just pick up and take home with me. Dou Xong wasn't an anthropologist or a shaman - he was no more an expert on Hmong cosmology than I was on Christian monotheism. While he could tell me a lot of interesting anecdotes, it was absurd for me to have hoped that he'd have any kind of profound, life-changing answers."
. Sorry, couldn't resist 
