Letting Go of the Obsession with Travel

Those places of extreme cold, extreme heat, great heights and great depths. Those exotic lands, those distinctive ethnic cultures. Those once-brilliant civilizations, those developed countries.

Those places I dreamed of countless times in adolescence and early adulthood.

Those beautiful dreams that have been fashioned for us—what are they suggesting? What do they cost? What price do they exact? So often, it is an act of consumption. What am I consuming? My own blood, sweat, and life.

In the past, I valued travel more as a way of fighting poison with poison: using poetry and faraway places to step outside my existing life and reconsider life itself, to emerge from the more poisonous pursuit of things outside myself, to move from a linear system of values to a plural one. Thanks to my fixation on travel, I have now passed through that stage.

Travel is a search for carefree freedom, yet the journey often keeps me from feeling carefree and free. Travel is supposed to be leisure, but true leisure means being without desires or demands, without worries or cares. Cultivating leisure is cultivating immortality. Carefree freedom has its roots in looking within. Do not prize goods that are hard to obtain.

What am I going to see? What am I seeking?

All I want is the ease and natural beauty of a park, the simple goodness, sincerity, and beauty of people, and simple, fragrant, delicious ingredients. Our county town has all of these. When I have some spare time and money, being able to take a few more walks in the little park downstairs and enjoy a few more meals of beef hot pot is plenty.

A sunset over sacred snowcapped mountains is just as beautiful as the sunsets I see in our county town. Nature’s beauty is the same everywhere. Being at one with nature depends mainly on how still my own mind is. When I grow quiet, I can hear the music of nature.

If the scenery here cannot satisfy me, where could I be satisfied?

If the here and now is not the other shore, how long must I keep searching before I reach it?

If I do not awaken here and now, when will I awaken?

“How Can Ordinary People Connect with Innate Wholeness?”

“Nature’s Healing Does Not Require Large Doses”

“Zhuangzi and Nature Heal the Existential Crisis”

“Letting Go of the Fixation on ‘Once I Have Money’”