Journeys of Seeking
Cusco, Peru
Over the years my journeys and travels have always been a metaphor for my own spiritual quest or journey of seeking.
I first tasted world travel when I was 18 years old and ventured for a summer to Southeast Asia in the Philippines doing mission work. My motivation was sincere and genuine as it was to help people who were less fortunate in the scarcest of circumstances in the world. Eating the family dog for dinner one evening and ending up in a Third World hospital next to a dead person gave me my first tastes of adventure in larger world.
Although the journey was a bit misguided by organized religion it opened up a doorway for me that has never closed, a desire to explore and a hunger for deeper meaning and understanding of the world beyond the daily routine of modern life.
After that first journey I made a vow to myself that I would never go back from all that I had seen and experienced and return to living a “normal” and comfortable life in the modern world.
Unfortunately, I returned to modern civilization and did just that for more than two decades. It would be more than twenty years before I would ever travel again. More than two decades later I began to travel once again with an even deeper spiritual hunger and desire to see and understand the greater world and people through different cultures.
My first adventures were to China and Asia, fueled by a hunger to explore and understand Eastern culture, meditation and martial arts and paradoxically opposite ways of seeing the world.
My China and Hong Kong adventure led me to in an unplanned and unexpected way to Japan, where I felt an immediate and unexplainable familiarity amidst a place and a people I did not understand. I explored the traditional arts of this ancient culture through painting, Zen meditation, tea ceremony and tai chi. I would continue to be drawn to Japan on three separate adventures.
My continued quest for a truly simple and meditative life would lead me to Costa Rica for two years, quietly surrounded by and immersed in the beauty of nature, truly the only spiritual teacher anyone ever needs. Ultimately, all of the answers are to be found in the silence. It was there, living alone on a mountain, that I went as deeply as I ever have, amidst the silence and beauty of nature.
I now find myself on a new adventure in Peru and a new chapter of my journey. I hardly know in the mind’s way of knowing, what brought me here and what has already kept me here for a season.
However, it seems like just the beginning chapter of a story I have begun to write and I have only just begun to explore the spiritual depths of this place and these beautiful people.
Painting by Rockwell Kent
Field Notes
“One great advantage of possessing the world through travel is that one may enjoy all of the satisfaction of possessions without the responsibilities of ownership.
Now, in the days when our most valuable assets become or threaten to become our most crushing liabilities, it is good to contemplate property which cannot depreciate but must increase in value, property which cannot be taxed by federal government, or state or city authorities, property which calls for no repairs or alterations.
Everything from real estate to diamond tiaras has had its vaunted worth reduced to pitiful and sometimes complete inconsequence. Stocks, bonds and all manner of gift-edged, beautifully engraved certificates of value, to secure which we have slaved and saved and denied ourselves the joys of travel, may sink in worth to such a point that it will seem absurd to pay the rental charges of a safe deposit box.
The only things which are still worth what they have cost me are my travel memories, the mind pictures of places which I have been hoarding like a miser for more than half a century.”
Burton Holmes, Travelogues 1892-1952
Scenes from Cusco, Peru
Travelogues
Enjoy four years of past articles from the Zen and Ink Journals journey in the archives.
Published Travel Articles
Enjoy published articles from my last four years of travel.
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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 or Ciudad Colón.
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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