Welcome to the Land West of Long Mountain Project

– DISPATCH No. 1 –

PART I: TRAVEL

“Sing to me of the man, Muse,
the man of twists and turns,
who many ways wandered after he’d plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.”

THE ODYSSEY, HOMER

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.

Travel as Education

Through travel, we learn about our common home
in all its beauty and wonder.

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. We learn about what Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver simply call, “The Creation.”

Travel as Experience & Exploration

Travel is the ravishment of our senses.
For the visual, for the auditory, for the sensual,
we travel to experience life and the earth to the brim.

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 street-sweeper 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 ravish our senses.

Travel as Celebration

The sacred center of the earth
and the holy heart of the world
is wherever you‘re standing right now.

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.

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 searchers 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.

Travel as Entering the Space of the Sacred

Still, lacing up your travel shoes
and making the epic overland journey across Tibet
and the roof of the world to Mount Kailash is a pretty cool time, too.

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.

Travel as Odyssey, 
Travel as Pilgrimage

Travel is an inner and an outer journey.
A Homeric odyssey out into the world,
and a personal pilgrimage into the heart.

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.

Travel as Pure Joy and the Ecstatic Pursuit of
the Sublime

Ultimately, we travel for the sheer wild joy of it.
Travel is a celebration of creation.
At its heart, travel is the pursuit of the sublime,
Travel is pure blues. Travel is bliss.

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 joyous 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. Often, at its best, travel leaves us satisfied and tickled, too. Like sex at its best.

At its best, travel is sublime. Travel is pure blues. Travel is bliss. If bliss is the marriage of supreme joy and deepest sorrow. And tell me, O Muse, who doesn’t love the blues?

– PART II: STORIES –

“It has been said that next to hunger and thirst, our most basic human need is for storytelling.”

KHALIL GIBRAN

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.

The Land West of Long Mountain is a project
born of the marriage of travelling and storytelling.

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.

“Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in
storytelling, and our story shall be the education
of our heroes.”

Plato, The Republic.

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 adventures 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.

The project aspires to invoke respect,
empathy and a natural sense of wonder in
readers for the peoples and lands of Asia.

In short: the project hopes to be a home for quality writing and for 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.

The project hopes to portray the inherent
dignity of its subjects and to capture
character, charisma and charm.

Portraits of Asia:
A Collection of Photographs from Western China,
Central & Southeast Asia and the Greater Himalaya
(2009-2019)

– I –

– II –

– III –

Dynamic Cross-Cultural Exchange

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.

“Traveling: it leaves you speechless,
then turns you into a storyteller.”

The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Above all, the project aspires to invoke respect, empathy 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.

The project seeks to reckon with the civilized and the savage,
the beautiful and the barbaric in our human ways.

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 the marriage of travelling and storytelling. Through these twin pursuits, it seeks dynamic cross-cultural exchange.

– PART III: ABOUT THE AUTHOR –

It’s an old story that’s still good.
It’s about an odyssey, it’s about a
pilgrimage. It’s about a journey through
the earth and a passage into the heart.
It’s the tale of your travels, and it’s the
story of mine.

When I first came to the Land West of Long Mountain in the long-ago, yellow sun-lit and brilliant blue-sky summer of 2009, I never dreamed that the inexplicably beautiful land of Gansu would become my second home. To this day, the humble fact remains a marvel and a mystery, a joyful wonder, to me.

The broad and brilliant blue skies. The green terraced hills and the long yellow land, warm and bright with sunlight overhead, soft and powdery with loess and dust underfoot. Peaches, apricots and sunflowers in the summer. Apples, clay-brick-oven-baked sweet potatoes and dazzling, fiery foliage in the fall. Long, fresh and absolutely delicious, hand-pulled and home-made noodles all year long. “Niúròu Lāmiàn!” The warmth, humor and friendliness of the people. Their big-hearted, robust laughs, their bright ruddy cheeks, worn rough and red by a lifetime of work and wind, their love of life and their gentle grace.

What can I say? My heart is in Gansu, and Gansu is in my heart. My heart is in the Land West of Long Mountain. Through and through, I’ve got the Gansu blues. The golden Gansu Blues. And over the past decade of my life, Gansu has changed and grown from inexplicably to inexpressibly beautiful to me, as my love for Gansu and the lands west of Long Mountain have deepened and matured.

About Me

I’m a 2016 graduate of the MFA Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. I grew up in Boston and went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where I trained as a cadet and Army officer-candidate for a year, before transferring to UMass Amherst and completing my education in English, Journalism and Philosophy. During college, I studied literature and writing abroad in England at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and at Trinity College, Oxford and backpacked through Europe and the Mediterranean, traveling overland from Ireland to Ithaca to Istanbul, and from Ben Nevis to the Alps to the Greek Islands. It was my first trip overseas.

After college, I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in Gansu, China’s arid and historic northwestern frontier, and first backpacked across the high deserts of Tibet and Central Asia, to the foothills of the snow mountains of India, Nepal and the Himalaya, and down through the highlands of Vietnam, Burma and Southeast Asia to Borneo, Bali and the Java Sea. After thirty-one months in Asia, I returned home to America to pursue my graduate studies. During these three years back in the states, I traveled through California and the American West. I also made two return trips to Tibet and China.

Education

I’ve studied fiction at Grub Street Writing Center in Boston and attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop in California. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Journalism with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Commonwealth College and a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from the University of California at Irvine’s MFA Programs in Writing. While at UC Irvine, I also taught undergraduate English, Creative Writing and Literary Journalism.

My study of literature, my military and Peace Corps service, my early life up at the quarries outside Boston and in the woods of New England, and my experiences living and traveling in foreign countries inform the subject matter of much of my work and have shaped my concerns as a writer.

About My Work

Landscapes, warscapes, travel, religion, mythology and the natural world. The experiences of war and the inheritance of violence, the legacy of American history, at home and abroad, rage and racism, beauty and brutality, faith and ferocity, the mystical and the mythic, love and terror, praise, and the search for dignity. These are some of the subjects and themes that my work often engages and explores. Rooted in landscape, my writing ranges far and wide across time and terrain. What unites my stories is their strong sense of place and the struggles, aspirations and yearnings of the narrators and characters as they experience the sublime and the unspeakable and strive to earn wholeness of heart and to unearth grace on earth.

The stories of those who suffer the sorrows of war and the injustices of society, from common soldiers who fight their ignoble wars with noble hearts to ordinary civilians striving to survive the terror of war, from ruined but resilient families to solitary outcasts and outsiders, and from peasants to refugees, noodle-pullers to grocery-store workers and street-sweepers, is where my empathies and my allegiances lie as a writer. The meeting and the muddling of the human world and the natural world in both its splendor and its mess is a terrain that I return to in my writing, alongside the vast and neighboring country of the muddled human heart and its eternal yearning for grace.

Publications

My fiction has appeared in The Literary Review, Forge Journal, Orange Coast Review, The Good Men Project, and Juked. My story about plebe life at West Point, “Out of the Long Gray and Into the Deep Blue,” received an Honorable Mention for Fiction from Columbia Journal in their 2017 Veterans Day Issue, edited by Brian Castner. 

I’ve completed a novel, Saigon: A Song of Rage and Praise and Coming Rain, and a story collection, Full of Grace, Pray for us Sinners, for which I’m actively seeking representation from literary agents.

– PART IV: ABOUT THE PROJECT –

The Land West of Long Mountain Project
aspires to tell the story of a changing
country and a changing earth.
A story of our time, of a time to come,
and of a time long ago.

Currently, I’m living again in Gansu with my wife, a college teacher. With fall and winter, I write. Through these cold and dark, purgatorial seasons, I work on my writing and pursue my goal of becoming an author. With spring and summer, I travel. During these warm and bright, celestial seasons, I pursue my second love of backpacking and continue to explore the many fiercely beautiful desert lands and mountain terrains of Western China, Central Asia and the Greater Himalaya.

Chinese New Year trips often bring us to Southeast Asia and the verdant climes and lush seascapes there for a brief break and respite from work and the northwestern winter. But with the annual tilting of the earth’s rotational axis and northern pole back toward the sun and the coming of spring and summer, it is always toward the lands west of Gansu and Long Mountain that I turn my gaze and set my travel shoes.

Dear Reader:
A Quick Side Note

If you haven’t caught it already, a sense of both the grandiose and the humorous are often essential to the writer and the traveler alike. Well, hey, at least to some of us me they are. Like traveling, writing in the end should be fun. Right?

And when traveling, as when traveling—I mean, and when writing, as when traveling—(“Boy, this poor guy’s really starting to get lost in his own repetitions, huh?”), and in general living life (?), we mustn’t take ourselves too seriously, and we shouldn’t be afraid to laugh at ourselves and break character from time to time.

So, which is to say, this quick side note that’s turned out to be a rather long and rambling and probably half-incoherent one has been one writer-traveler’s humble but hardy and hearty attempt at some wholesome humor, and a bit of alliteration and a tad of language-play and a tidbit, or two, of highfalutin grandiosity, for good measure, of course, to boot.

Whoo! Breathe, breathe, breathe. In, out. Exhale, inhale. Now you can wipe the sweat from your brow. Boy-oh-boy, I’m sure glad that’s over. Note to self: let’s not try that one again for awhile. Ever? Ah-hem. Moving on…

The Roots of the Land West of Long Mountain Project

My Travels in China & Asia:
Peace Corps Days (2009-2013)

Ten Years in Gansu

Over the past decade, I have traveled to over forty-five countries in Eurasia and over twenty-five provinces in China. I’ve made multiple trips to Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Yunnan, Western Sichuan, Central and Southeast Asia, Northern India and the Greater Himalaya. I’ve spent much of my travel time in the regions of Greater Tibet: Kham, Amdo, Gannan, Sikkim and Ladakh. My present goal as a traveler is to make it to each of the fourteen countries that border China and the many others that lie just beyond China’s borderlands. Russia, Bhutan and Afghanistan remain.

It is in these borderlands and regions that we traditionally call “frontiers,” where different countries, cultures, philosophies and peoples meet, that I am most interested in traveling as a backpacker and a writer.

The Radiance of Landscapes,
the Vibrancy of People

It is the rugged and remote, physical beauty of these lands that draws me to them, as well as the humble but big-hearted hospitality and humor of the people who live in them, and the pleasure of hearing their stories, sharing in their joys and their sorrows, their delights and their hardships, and learning about their faiths, daily lives, wisdom teachings and holy places. Or simply, breaking bread and sharing a fragrant cup of hot tea with new friends.

The beauty of Asia, like the beauty of Gansu, lies for me in the radiance of its lands and the vibrancy of its peoples.

Travelling & Storytelling,
the twin ecstatic pursuits

It is out of the marriage of these two loves,
writing and traveling, that I’ve created
the Land West of Long Mountain Project.

And it is out of the marriage of these two loves, traveling and storytelling, the two ecstatic pursuits wed by a deep reverence for the earth and a sacred regard for place, bonded with an abiding empathy for the so-called “Other,” that I have created the Land West of Long Mountain Project.

In short: it is the stories of these peoples and these lands of Asia that I hope to continue to learn, then to tell and to share. I am committed to making writing my life and my career, and I aspire to create enduring works of literature that explore the fraught lives and moral dilemmas of my characters and subjects as they struggle to unearth grace and earn redemption and wholeness of heart in a muddled-up world of paradoxes, hypocrisies and often savage injustices.

The Mythical & the Lyrical,
those other rhapsodic pursuits

Works that speak to the elemental and precarious beauty of the earth and to the heart of man and the heart of the human experience. Works that convey both emotional insight and spiritual truth, that speak to the mind and to the heart, that resonate and that endure. Forceful language tethered to the lyrical is what I love. A fierce lyricism and dynamic prose that pulsates between high and low registers, between the sacred and the profane, the beautiful and the brutal, the savage and the sublime, and poetry is what I ultimately aspire to in my pages.

Stories that read like myths are what I want to write because stories that ring like myths and that break into the mythical and aspire to the lyrical are what I most love to read. Stories that sing.

Travels in Western China,
Central and Southeast Asia
& the Greater Himalaya
(2015-2019)

The Land West of Long Mountain is a project born of and inspired by my decade of living and traveling in Gansu and the far west of China.

The Land West of Long Mountain is a project born of and inspired by my ten years now of living and traveling in western 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.

– PART V: ASPIRATIONS –
& WELCOME

“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.”

BLACK ELK SPEAKS

Welcome again to the Land West of Long Mountain Project. Thank you for visiting the project’s site and for reading this first dispatch. 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 and peoples.

“There is no other.”

Paul Salopek, Out of Eden Walk.

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.

Our Work:
To Transform the Story, to Rewrite the Narrative.
To Craft a Bold and Brave, New Myth for our Modern Times.

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.

“The heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.”

“The Testing Tree,” Stanley Kunitz.

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.

Radical Empathy, Fierce and
Uncompromising Compassion,
Colossal Courage of Heart, Complete and
Unconditional Love

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.

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known.
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.”

Joseph Campbell, “The Hero With A Thousand Faces.”

It is not through war and violence but through radical empathy, fierce and uncompromising compassion, colossal courage of heart, complete and unconditional love and genuine 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.

With Hope and Humility in Our Hearts
and Action in Our Hands, We Will Work
to Build the Better World We Yearn For.

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.”

Thanks and Stay Tuned

Please stay tuned. Work on the project will begin in 2020. Feel free to come back then for Dispatches from Gansu and Travel Stories out of Asia. Photographs, Trip Reports, Travel Guides, Peace Essays and Resources for Backpackers will be shared, too.

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 matters of war and peace will find a home here, too.

Thank you for reading and for visiting The Land West of Long Mountain Project. Have a great summer. Good travels, and much wholeness to all. See you on the road.