The Journey Itself Is Home: Sunday Zen with Guest Host Jon Joseph

The months and days are like travelers of a hundred generations; the passing years are also like travelers. For those who spend their lives on a boat drifting offshore or grow old leading a horse by the mouth, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Thus opens Matsuo Basho’s great travel journal, a collection of prose and short verse detailing his 1,500-mile journey through the wild north of 18th century Japan. Considered a dangerous route at the time, this journey became for him his richest of experiences.

On that route Basho met the whole of life: He heard peasants singing rice-planting songs in spring, was mired in muddy tracks in May, sobbed at the thick summer grasses growing over an ancient battlefield, and was plagued by the fleas and lice sleeping with him in a horse-stall. At the end he stood on the dark seashore as ocean waves crashed under a full autumn moon.

Basho’s travels to the interior are not different from our own journey inward. We begin this path thinking it narrow and perhaps even perilous. But with time, with practice together, our hearts and minds begin to open and widen and we feel more generous. We realize that the spring is green and wet, the summer smoky and hot—all as they should be. August tomatoes arrive on time, welcoming us to this grand adventure. It is a good path, this one. One worthy of our lives.

—Jon Joseph