It used to be that as a world traveler, no matter how cheap the flight, how inexpensive the lodging, how tasty and trivial the fee for nutritious far was, they'd get you at the airport. The redeye into Los Angeles was a giveaway, but the taxi fare from LAX to the part of town where anyone other than travelers were was more expensive. The same for New York, Boston, and the major hubs. Even toting a copy of the trusty Lonely Planet, it was hard to get a straight answer on how to get out from under the planes for cheap. It could be found. It did exist. But nobody knew about it, and no one was telling anyone, and no one knew where to ask or get answers. Pressing, there was always a way, even from LAX. But the limousine bus, hotels, and taxi companies all conspired to keep it secret. It used to be that to get out of LAX, one had to find a free bus out of the octopus of busy streets and to a station. From there, one could cheaply (for pennies) get to downtown and from there anywhere else. It was never necessary to get a ride to the airport to fly out or to get picked up when coming in. It was a nice luxury, however imposing it was on the relationship (revealing who was a dependable friend or family member). But now it's easy. Starting today it is clear to anyone, and Uber and Lyft must be nonplussed. How did the Yellow Cab Company keep the scheme going for so long? Now there's a new station and a clear and easy way to get out of and back to LAX, Los Angeles International. Let this be a message to all shoestring travelers with big backpacks on their way to Asia or Europe: there is always a way out of the airport and into town without getting rolled by a taxi or tuktuk driver/company. See Lonely Planet | Travel Guides & Travel Information or wait at the airport until morning and ask the concierge. It's as if someone has told them not to tell anyone, but they will if pressed. There's always a way out, even if it means walking out of the airport to another battalion on independent taxis who do not want to pay and pass on airport fees.
Travel, who needs it?
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
—Maya Angelou
“Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.
—Euripides
“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
—Jawaharlal Nehru
“It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America – in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
“A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.”
“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”
—William Least Heat Moon
“We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us.”
—Anonymous
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, dies(AFP)
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Jonathan Davis of Korn famously noted that there are "dead bodies everywhere, dead bodies everywhere." And Chris Barnes of Cannibal Corpse infamously delighted that "They're all dead, they're all dead, they're all dead." Death is all around. We ignore it. Then someone writes a book, and suddenly it's in our face. The lesson? It's better to travel than arrive.Zen says, Be where you are, or as Ram Dass phrased it, "Be here now."
HEADLINE: Robert Pirsig, author of the iconic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, dies AFP via PRI.org
“The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself," Robert Pirsig wrote in his 1974 novel.
Robert Pirsig, author of the iconic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has died at the age of 88, U.S. media is reporting today.
Despite its title, the book published in 1974 to rave reviews and explosive popularity is more a reflection on metaphysics and existential philosophy than a book on how to fix a motorbike.
It has sold around five million copies around the world. Pirsig died at his home in Maine on Monday, news reports said.
(BBC) Interview with and about Pirsig on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Over 5 million copies sold, paperback
The book is a first person narrative [a kind of meditation or contemplation rather than the deeper Buddhist sense of absorption (jhana) and insight-practice (vipassana)] that draws on a 17-day motorcycle trip that Pirsig took across the US in 1968 with his 11-year-old son Chris.
In the book Pirsig speaks under the name Phaedrus, one of the characters in Plato's Dialogues. He reflects among other things on what should be essential to people as they go about living their lives.
Pirsig's son died in 1979 after being stabbed outside a Zen center that he frequented in San Francisco.
Pirsig, a biochemist by training, published in 1991 another novel that was less successful: Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. Source
Zen Buddhist Pirsig interviewed on NPR, 1974
"What is the road less traveled?" asked American poet Robert Frost. Pirsig answered.
(NPR) Pirsig interview, July 12, 1974 -- the year the book came out. Written by former English teacher while working writing boring computer manuals. It took four years to write, and it was rejected by more than 100 publishers.
"Travel, my son, giveth experience, and experience wisdom, and wisdom every good thing: the sword cannot gleam in the field of victory till it leaves the scabbard, nor the pen discourse of eloquence and poetry, till it is taken from the kullumdan"
The Buddha enjoined male and female recluses to be wanderers. Not only was it a frugal and environmental way to live, many spiritual benefits come to the practitioner. Samanas ("wandering ascetics") were going against the grain, in the opposite direction of settled, temple-bound brahmin priests.
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Bhikkhus ("monks") and bhikkhunis ("nuns") live dependent on discarded cloth sown together and recycled as robes and alms gathered the way "a bee gathers nectar -- without harm to flowers in the collection process," that is, without begging or insinuating. The benefits of the mendicant path were never limited to monastics, as this environmentally-conscious American couple are proving.
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