What’s the worst travel experience you’ve ever had?
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My “worst travel experience” is like my “worst sexual experience;” it still beats the hell out of sitting at home alone on the couch. (Also, worst travel experiences make the best travel stories — given enough distance in the rearview to see the humor.)
What’s one piece of travel advice you always follow?
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入乡随俗 — i.e. “enter the village, follow the customs.”
Facets of Taoism – Essays in Chinese Religion by Holmes and Anna Seidel (Eds.) WelchHow do you manage stress?
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Through the realization that one packs one’s own load.
Everything is passing weather, how one dials up (or down) the significance of the present situation is up to one (even if the situation, itself, is completely out of one’s hands.) As the Stoics said, either you can or can’t do something about a given event — either way, it’s not worth one’s worry. If you can’t do anything about it, worry is futile. If you can, do the virtuous thing and you can feel content even if it doesn’t seem to work out for you.
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund burke
In the garden of gentle sanity,
Chögyam Trungpa; Timely Rain
may you be bombarded by
coconuts of wakefulness
…the most fruitful developments
Werner heisenberg
frequently take place at those points
where two different lines of thought meet.
My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.
Bankei (Upon being challenged to produce a miracle during his lecture at Ryumon-ji Temple)
We cannot catch the fleeting minute
Arthur Milne
and put it alongside a later minute.
What does it mean to be a good person?
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I don’t know that it has a meaning. I tend to consider dualities in Taoist terms. Every Yang has a seed of Yin; the Yang flows into Yin and back again.
What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?
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First, I don’t have a mantra. While I believe Transcendental Meditation to be a fine approach, other meditative techniques have resonated with me more on a personal level. Unless by “mantra” one is looking for a soundbite that encapsulates the entirety of one’s philosophical thinking — which I also do not have. (At least not a stable one.) Philosophically, I am a Traveler (or, identically – I would argue, a Student.) Epistemologically, this requires a humility about what can and can’t know (though, admittedly, not necessarily humility — generally speaking,) a willingness to empty one’s cup to allow for consideration of new information, and an openness to adopting foreign and unfamiliar ideas where they prove useful.
Luck, diligence, spontaneity, and inspiration
Mary oliver; A Poetry Handbook
are all needed to write a poem.
…above all let us never accept as cause for what we do not comprehend something we comprehend even less.
Marquis de sade; Juliette
…wise people don’t tell us what to do;
david brooks; How to know a person
they start by witnessing our story.
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
Hunter s. thompson; The Rum Diary
but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.
We do not see things as they are,
Anaïs Nin
we see them as we are.
Do you believe in karma?
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As a general principle about how acting selflessly and as a force for good tends to help one find one’s way, YES. As a clockwork cause-and-effect accounting of one’s life activities, NO. In fact, in the latter sense, I believe the idea has quite a dark side that is frequently overlooked.
Health, Healing, And Beyond: Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya by R.H. Cravens
