Field Notes from 2022
As the page turns on another year and perhaps you have some extra reading time over the weekend, please enjoy a recap of the most enjoyed articles of 2022. Each one offers a lesson gleaned through the lens of a different perspective and a different culture. Here’s wishing you simplicity in 2023 and always the heart of an explorer.
Seeking Home. Once we come home within ourselves, we will then be home anywhere we find ourselves in the world.
On the Path. Life seems to be a continual reminder that everything falls away and nothing remains the same. Each day is an opportunity and an invitation to begin again.
Simple Life on Less than $1,000 a Month. “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
A Slower Rhythm. Live simply. Live quietly. Love others. Leave a small footprint.
The Grasshopper on the Bus. Always seize the opportunity to help a stranger.
Listening to Trees. To worry about life months down the road is to dishonor the gift and beauty of today and rob us of this beautiful moment we are fortunate enough to be living in.
A Season in Boquete. I now travel the world lightly and simply, living out of one bag with my laptop and a pour over coffee filter. Experience and travel throughout many countries have taught me that there is no ideal location, only the one you create wherever you are.
Weekend in Puerto Viejo. Old wooden fishing boats in bright colors of blue, green and yellow danced along the shore while children swam and laughed to the Calypso rhythms coming from the nearby restaurant and bar overlooking the cove.
The Journey of Love and Loss. "We are each just fragments of the one big heart weaving itself back together again." -Mark Nepo
The Path of the Soul “The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.” -Rabindranath Tagore
View from the Road
Costa Rica’s English speaking newspaper, The Tico Times, recently began running a column on my travel journals from my first three months in Costa Rica during the rainy season. The column will be an ongoing series through the eyes of my experiences during my first season here along the Guanacaste coast. I hope you enjoy following along.
Field Notes
Some say that the first half of life is spent acquiring things, and the last half is letting them go. That’s generally true I suppose, but it’s different for travelers, who from the start of their journey begin to let things go.
One of the unsung benefits of travel is learning how to do this, how not to invest too much of your presence in static physical things.
If you’ve been traveling long enough, you know the deepest meaning of goodbye. As to physical things, you never accumulate more than you wish to carry; since your first day of wandering you’ve been working to pare even that down, give yourself maximum mileage; you’ve learned to reduce all that matters to practicals, minimals, symbols, essences, thoughts, memories, things you can take with you when you go-as you always do, or at least always think of doing.
In your latter travels you physically settle down somewhere, in spirit you still treat time like a traveler, still live like a traveler, eye your surroundings like a traveler, always thinking maybe next month, maybe next year, viewing your possessions with a jaundiced eye, plotting what to do with them at departure: give them to friends who might need or enjoy them, then pass them on; for you know what anchors such things are to passage on the endless river-known only to travelers-that runs through the world and has carried you here, the marvelous river that you’ve never really left, that runs now inside you, calling the boat of your soul.
The traveler journeys through life letting go and going onward, and at death it is the same....
by Robert Brady for Kyoto Journal
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Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama.
On these pages, I share my observations of kindness and beauty from my adventures in the world and invite you to listen quietly for the call within you to explore the places that beckon your soul.
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