The Land West of Long Mountain Project:
Dispatches from Gansu &
the Frontiers of Western China
-Travel Stories Out of Asia-
A Literary Guide and Travelogue
Chronicling the Lands of Western China,
Central Asia and the Greater Himalaya.
A Home for Peace Essays, too,
and for Writing About War & Peace.
A Literary Arts Project
by Joseph
Travel. From the time we walked out of Africa and first began to explore the earth, human beings have been travelers. We’re curious creatures. We seek to know what lies beyond the next hill, what’s around the next bend in the trail, what’s past this wheat-blown field and outside this wind-worn valley, what lies beyond the border of the river and the rim of the plain, beyond the frontiers of the ocean and the horizons of the world.
We make pilgrimages through scorching heat and searing cold to far-flung foreign climes because in our faith these ancient power-places seem sacred, holy. We climb mountains and ascend their pinnacled peaks and snow-capped massifs because they’re simply there. We walk the long, rugged and rocky, high kora around the same Holy Mountain because we believe the mountain to be the heart of the earth and the center of the world.
Through travel, we learn about the earth and the physical world and about the many peoples, plants, rocks, trees, birds and animals that inhabit the world and about the places and landscapes that comprise the earth and compose the creation.
From the desert basins of Turpan and the Taklamakan to the heights of the Hindu Kush and the Himalaya, and from the stark and austere source of the Mekong River high up in the rarefied air and arid monochromes of Tibet through the hot and lush, radiant green running of its viridian and raw umber waters down through Yunnan and the highland jungles of Laos and Vietnam to its ultimate destination in the South China Sea.
In short: we learn about our planet in all its astonishing diversity, arresting beauty and awesome wonder. Through travel, we learn about our common home.
Travel is a physical, a sensual, a corporeal experience. When we read books, when we listen to music, to poetry, when we dream and wonder, we travel, too. But this is an imaginative experience. To read and to write is to enter into the life and the world of the imagination. To inhabit the domain of the mind. But to travel is to enter the physical world and the life of the road. To travel is to inhabit our bodies and to ravish our senses. We travel for our eyes and ears, for our noses and taste buds, for our tongues and teeth, for our hands and feet and skin.
From the inexpressible tones and tinctures of a palatial desert sunset, wild with all the colors of a painter’s palette and riotous with the hues of Noah’s rainbow, to the audible racket and riot and bursting brilliance of a Kashmiri or Kashgar, Red Dzao or Flower-Hmong bazaar, and the thrilling trill of some children laughing and playing amid the hustle and bustle, as a sleepy shopkeeper sings some desert elegy, sad love song, gay blues or lost lullaby to keep awake and pass the hottest hours of the long, slow day and a streetsweeper with her long, ragged-straw broom swishes and swooshes sheathes of glittering dust to the placid breeze, where the spellbinding particles and golden grains blaze briefly in dazzling motes in the sunlit air, amidst the fragrant scents of saffron and cardamom, cinnamon and coriander, the wafting smells, pungent odors and delicious aromas of the bazaar—we travel for the visual, for the auditory, for the sensual.
We travel to feel the innumerable textures of the world in our skin and to experience the earth in our bodies. To experience fully this ceaseless riot of sounds and colors and sensations we call Life. To fill our senses to the bursting brim. In this way, travel is a celebration of life.
Of course, we need not travel to experience the amazing pageant of life. Each of us, always, every moment we’re alive, wherever we’re standing right now, is fully immersed in the brilliant bazaar, wondrous riot and miraculous drama of life. We cannot escape it if we tried. It’s the very air we breathe and the space we move through. Our lungs, our blood, our bodies are beating with energy and filled to the brim with life. To join in the throng of creation, simply open your senses and step outside your door.
As all searches and wisdom-seekers learn in the good course of time, the heart of the earth and the holy mountain of the world is the ragtag hill in your backyard, that scruffy old knoll blooming with weeds and crabgrass and flowering with dandelions where you played as a child. The sacred center of the earth is wherever you’re standing right now. Simply center your heart, wake up, pay attention, and you’re there in the sacred center and holy heart of life. You’re there in the heart of the mystery.
Yet, for all who seek to fill their senses to the brim and immerse themselves headlong in the wild wonder of the physical world, travel is a pretty awesome way to do it. You can walk out into your backyard and sit beneath the blue branches of the cool green shade tree there and listen to the golden-throated sparrow sing and the harlequin leaves chime in the breeze on a sweet sunlit summer day or revisit that childhood hill and so enter the heart of the world.
Still, lacing up your travel shoes and making the epic overland journey across Tibet and the roof of the world and joining the pilgrims in their kora-walk around Mount Kailash is a pretty cool time and remarkable way to reach the holy heart of the earth and the sacred center of the world, too.
But travel is something more than sheer sensual ravishment. Travel is the marriage of the inner and outer lives, the wedding of creative imagination and the physical creation. Travel is where our inner life and the outer world meet. The marriage of Imagination and Reality.
Though in the beginning it may be a book, a story, an epic poem or our fantasies of far-off lands that fire our hearts and feet and inspire us to take the great leap, to vamoose, to leave our houses and homes behind and hit the road and travel the world for a time, it is often the terrestrial lands that we find that ground us to the earth and root us to the new place and the people we meet on the road who keep us traveling and coming back, again and again, trip after trip, for more.
In this way, travel is both an inner and an outer journey. An odyssey out into the world, and a pilgrimage into the heart.
First and foremost, we travel for the sheer wild joy of it. The freedom and inexpressible pleasure of life on the open road. We travel for the same reasons we listen to Bach, to the blues, to jazz, to all music, for the same reason we sing, we dance, we jive, we laugh, we write poetry, we drink wine and we make love.
Because it’s thrilling. Because it’s in our blood. Because it makes us feel we are truly alive on earth. Because it’s a way for us to pursue our bliss. Because like each of these spontaneous pursuits and ecstatic pastimes that arise from the wellspring of our deepest humanity, it’s a way for us to celebrate life and praise everything under the sun. To celebrate and sing the praise of all creation.
Travel is exhilarating. Even when travel is tough, even when the road is long and hard and lonely, even when we brush up against anguish, misery, poverty, even when we behold the suffering of others, often those less privileged than ourselves, even when we suffer hardships, too, travel is invigorating. Travel is awe-inspiring. Travel is life changing, life-renewing.
At its best, travel is bliss. Travel is pure blues. Travel is sublime.
The Land West of Long Mountain
is a travel blog and literary arts project.
A creative endeavor. A cosmic
adventure. A project for peace,
education and entertainment
with a passion for people and for place.
Our aspiration is your inspiration,
and our deep hope of the heart is to
leave you satisfied and tickled, too.
In short: we hope our work resonates with you.
When you finish reading a story and travel on, continuing on with the journey of your life, we hope you leave the Land West of Long Mountain
feeling enlightened, ennobled, and wiser.
We hope you feel more full of love for life
and empathy for all.Praise, presence and joy.
Praise for the planet and its myriad peoples,
and a celebration of its cultures.
Joy in travel and presence deeply-rooted in place.
Praise for the earth and everything under the sun
is what The Land West of Long Mountain Project
ultimately aspires to sing.
Put simply: the sublime.
Stories. And since we first walked out of Africa and began to explore the world beyond our native countries and so became travelers, we’ve been telling ourselves stories about the awesome lands and amazing plants and animals and unique peoples we meet on the way. We tell these stories in our primal yearning to understand the world and its myriad wonders and innumerable marvels and to fathom our own place in the Creation.
In the same way those first ochre and charcoal cave paintings of Altamira, in Cantabria, Spain and those primeval petroglyphs scratched on stones, carved and hewn into the rocks of Mongolia and Central Asia may’ve been the beginning of all art on earth, so this original act of storytelling may’ve been the origin of all poetry. The birth of Mythology, that primordial act of storytelling.
The Land West of Long Mountain Project hopes to be a home for narrative nonfiction and long-form travel writing in the traditions of literary journalism and lyric landscape writing. A story-telling and travel-tale-sharing site, a home for trip reports and travelogues and adventure stories, and a creative resource for backpackers, overlanders, modern nomads, mountain trekkers and adventure travelers in Asia and beyond. Fellow readers, writers and teachers will hopefully find a resource for education and entertainment here, too.
In short: the project hopes to be a home for quality writing and good stories. The marriage of travelling and storytelling is an old one for sure. Still, it’s a good one. Some would even say a timeless one. A marriage that grows more beautiful with the ages.
First and foremost, the Land West of Long Mountain Project aspires to be about stories. Stories out of the hinterlands, heartlands and highlands of Asia. Stories about people and stories of places. A literary guide and travel companion to the lands of Western China, Central Asia and the Greater Himalaya. The project aims to illuminate, educate, celebrate, share and inspire.
Above all, the project aspires to invoke respect, empathy, dignity and a natural sense of wonder in readers for the peoples and places of Asia. The beautiful, the good and the unique in these lands, and the hard, ugly and the bad, too. But always, the human and the natural. It is in the duality of our beauty and our ugliness, our violence and our compassion, our creativity and our destruction, that we are wholly human, that we are complete beings, that we are what we are.
Homo sapiens. If we possess grace as a species, surely it lies somewhere within this muddled mess of our incorrigible humanity. And if we truly aspire to be “wise men,” to live up to and earn our self-bequeathed titles of celebration and banners of praise, then surely we must also face up to and reckon with both the civilized and the savage, the beautiful and the barbaric, the humane and the inhumane, in our sapien ways.
The Land West of Long Mountain is a project born of and inspired by my ten years now of living and traveling in the far west of China. The project is based out of Gansu. Though Gansu and the lands neighboring Western China will always remain the project’s heart and primary focus, in time perhaps the project will reach beyond the countries of Asia.
Like most backpackers, I hope to one day travel the whole world. Like reading and writing, though, traveling is an art and a life-long pursuit. It takes time and work. It demands patience, practice and perseverance. The apprenticeship period is a long one. If the apprenticeship of a traveler and an aspiring writer indeed ever ends at all. Over the course of my life, and perhaps my lives, I hope to go everywhere and experience everything. The entirety of the earth and everything under the sun. I hope to get there. In time, we’ll all get there, for sure.
For now, though, my feet are planted. My boots are rooted. I’m staying right here. I’m going nowhere. I’m keeping to the lands west of Long Mountain. These lyric western lands that I love.
Welcome again to the Land West of Long Mountain. Thank you for visiting the project’s site. We hope you enjoy the work and the travel resources here. Please join us in this project to explore, write about and celebrate the peoples, places, cultures, faiths and landscapes of Western Asia. Please join us in telling and sharing the stories of these lands.
The aim is to craft narratives and create pictures that arrest our readers and that demand attention and consideration for the peoples and places they portray. Like photographs, stories can also leave indelible marks on the heart and conscience and work to oppose the othering of countries, the othering of places and peoples. Working together, at their best, words and photographs possess the power to invoke not only empathy and respect and to portray dignity but to reveal character, charisma, and charm. To speak nothing of beauty and grace.
If the primary job of the poet is praise, and her foremost tool fierce attention to the natural world, then perhaps our work as writers and travelers is to share our stories from the roads of the world. Along with attention and empathy for the Other, perhaps our primary tool lies in our ability to bear witness and speak truth to power. To change the narrative and transform the story we too often receive without question from the keepers of power, the traffickers of fear, the merchants of malice, the hawkers of hate and the mongers of war.
With hope and humility in our hearts, and action in our hands, maybe in this way we can each do our small part in working to make the world a more open, friendly and less fearful place, the earth and we earthlings braver and more beautiful and welcoming to all. Empathy is the moral way, courage and compassion our aspirations, our conviction is our strength, and storytelling the timeless tool of our trade. As the poets and prophets of old and modern teach us, we have nothing in this world to fear but fear itself, and nothing on earth is worthy of our hate but hatred itself.
Still, even with hate and fear, that deadly duo, we sapiens would be wiser to retain a gentler touch. We’d be wiser to work to understand fear/hate and to comprehend their roots than we’d be to struggle blindly and violently to tear them up and rip them out, to shoot them to shreds and bomb them to oblivion. Violence begets only violence, carnage spawns carnage, hate and fear breed fear and hate, and war sows seeds, plants death trees and yields harvests of the most hateful and sickly stalk. Harvests that we and our children will not want to reap, fruit that we dare not eat, for the fruit of war and violence is rotten to its core.
It is not through war and violence but through radical empathy, fierce and uncompromising compassion, colossal courage of heart, complete and unconditional love and understanding that we’ll overcome our enemies and slay the monsters of our world and our times. The monsters that lurk not beyond the borders of our nations, but who live in the native countries and homelands of our own hearts.
Peace on earth and goodwill among nations will only be achieved through our collective work. Maybe our stories can be a humble but powerful vehicle to help build that better world and achieve that long-sought global peace we all yearn for deep in the muscles of our hearts.
And even if we don’t achieve our aspirations in the end. Even if our work proves idealistic and impossible, well, hey, at least we’ll have had a good time, shared some laughs, made a few new friends and many fine memories, and we’ll have written some kiss-ass tales and bad-ass stories and experienced some truly amazing adventures along the lyric way of life. At least, in the end, we’ll have followed our bliss.
As Black Elk says: “No good thing can be done by any one man alone. It’s the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell.”
Work on the project will begin in 2020. Feel free to come back then for Dispatches from Gansu and Travel Stories out of Asia. Peace Essays, Photographs, Trip Reports, Travel Guides, and Resources for Backpackers, Adventure Travelers, Educators and Proponents of Peace will all be shared in time, too.
For now, if you’d like to learn more, you may read our first dispatch, “Welcome to the Land West of Long Mountain Project,” posted under Dispatches and Stories above. Please also feel free to check out our Gallery for collections of photographs from Western China, Central Asia and the Greater Himalaya and our Resources page for All Things Long West.
It’s my humble hope that this project will be of value to readers, writers, teachers and travelers of all walks and hemispheres, climes and kinds. Anybody with a love of literature, travelling and storytelling is welcome. Those with an interest in war and peace studies will find a home here, too.
Thank you for reading and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project. Good travels, and much wholeness to all. See you on the road.
-The Land West of Long Mountain Project, Summer 2019.
– Dispatch No. 1: Welcome to the Land West of Long Mountain Project –
