You've carved yourself a part in the world as a voyeur... a hermit, a lover when you feel like it.

I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran -- an informed one, an experienced one, even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading someone else's holy book.

And it excites me now to meet people who are hikers, chefs, code writers, taxi drivers, people I never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on.

And one of my biggest surprises as a traveler has been to find that often it's exactly the people who have most enabled us to get anywhere who are intent on going nowhere.

I'll always be a traveler -- my livelihood depends on it -- but one of the beauties of travel is that it allows you to bring stillness into the motion and the commotion of the world.

Tanzan politely offers his help, carrying the traveler on his back across the street, and placing her down without a word.

“How could you carry that woman?” Tanzan smiled, “I left the traveler there. Are you still carrying her?” Like all kōans, this story has numerous interpretations.

But one popular reading suggests that despite never having physically carried the traveler, Ekido broke monastic law by mentally "clinging to" the woman.

The unseen traveler forever passing, carrying life, moving, awning of earth felt and heard, strong and stirring, blowing.